Rosemount's Declan Slevin is back on the road again after lockdown restrctions

Paracyclist Declan Slevin from Rosemount is back on the road now and making up for lost time after being affected by lockdown.

Slevin along with Roscommon's Richael Timothy, a former AIT student and Ronan Grimes, from Dublin, all shared their experiences of a strange few months with all three having very different experiences.

Watch the full interview with the three athletes as part of the #waitforthegreats campaign here:

Speaking about adapting to new technologies during lockdown Declan Slevin, a farmer, said ‘I had an interesting session with Paul, the physio on Zoom there one day. We were working on different things and I just had a niggle on my shoulder there and he was showing me different things about how to get rid of that and how to work on it myself on a Zoom call, it’s amazing what they can teach you and what you can learn from just a phone call.’

Ronan Grimes spoke about being able to take advantage of the lockdown period to get some extra physical work done ‘For me it’s really been about getting that really big period of base training in that you wouldn’t have had that base period of training that in previous years you really wouldn’t have gotten in as, during the Winter at least you would have been away at competition.’

Richael Timothy, who works with Roscommon Sports Partnership spoke about the huge changes in her working life ‘When lockdown happened it would have been our peak time for going round to schools in March, April and May; the fine months, you can get the kids out in the yard. So when that happened what we had to do was change everything into online and dong YouTube videos like skills challenges all that sort of stuff so now we just wait and give the schools a month to see how they are working with everything and whether they want us in doing stuff.’

Ronan Grimes, who works with the Health Products Regulatory Authority has a greater understanding of the Corona Virus than most and may play a role in the testing of future vaccines ‘Our department will be looking at the safety side of things so before it is authorised we’ll be looking at risk management planning so we’re trying to see what the risks might be associated with a vaccine and then once it’s released onto the market we’ll be looking at the safety side so we’ll be making sure that there aren’t any unknown side effects or how we’ll deal with any unknown side effects so it will be quite a busy time once these vaccines start coming through but exciting also.’