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They will have five athletes competing at the Paris Olympics: Hodgkinson, Georgia Bell and Lewis Davey for Team GB, Ireland’s Sarah Healy and the Italian sprinter Gloria Hooper. Several others only narrowly missed out and, with juniors beneath their elite group, a production line awaits. “On the female side, I don’t think anyone can claim there is a stronger group in Europe, possibly the world,” says Meadows, herself a former World and European 800m medal winner.
Painter feels a paternal responsibility to his athletes – Meadows prefers the big sister comparison – and reasons that the biggest thing he can do for athletes in such a gruelling sport is make it fun. A former rugby league player whose post-match recovery was “a few beers talking about the game, but also life stuff”, he understands teams and knows the value of camaraderie.
Fostering a nurturing environment
And he thinks it can be a super power in what is traditionally the most individual of sports.
“It doesn’t matter the status of the athlete, we try to get a good relationship,” he says. “So you know if the granny is not well, if it’s a hectic time with exams, if the goldfish has drowned or whatever. Everyone looks after each other. You get a lot more out of the athlete when you have that environment.”
From practical jokes – never turn your back on the ice bucket – to a shared WhatsApp group where every performance from an Olympic medal to a schools race is celebrated, that environment is nurtured constantly.
After growing up on a farm, Painter got into athletics when he joined the Wigan & District Harriers to improve his rugby league. “I went to get faster – and then I realised no one was trying to take my head off,” he says.
Meadows, who was emerging as one of the leading women’s athletes in the country, was in the same club and says Painter was like “the Pied Piper” in how people followed. “After about a year, she said, ‘Well, you’re too old to train any more, so you should coach me’,” he says. “I was only 29. But, I thought, ‘Yeah, alright’.”
Painter duly made it his business to learn everything he could about middle-distance running. He particularly liked left-field coaches such as Percy Cerutty, an Australian who would study horses on the gallops so that he could watch how they touched the ground. Cerutty would have runners, which included the great Herb Elliott, sprint up sand dunes and there is a strip off the beach in Formby where Hodgkinson’s group now do brutal hill repetitions.
Left-field thinking and ‘dad’ jokes
“He thinks a little bit differently,” says Meadows. “When I was once injured, he phoned Manchester United up and we ended up at Carrington, used the underwater treadmill, went in a chamber to get extra oxygen to heal.”
Hodgkinson says that she “couldn’t be coached by a normal coach” but adds: “He knows when he is annoying me and I’m not in the mood for his dad jokes.”
Meadows says that Painter was cracking ‘dad’ jokes before they even had their three-year-old daughter Arabella. “Some days Keely just looks at him with such disappointment but, if she is in a good mood, she will laugh,” says Meadows.
Painter and Meadows gave their training group a name earlier this year – “people kept asking and we couldn’t keep calling it Trev and Jen’s” – and so the M11 Track Club was born; a reference to the postcode of their Sports City training base.
The worker bee logo, which was designed by Hodgkinson’s dad Dean, reflects an ethos of down-to-earth toil. Dean, who was also a rugby league player, has designed T-Shirts in support of his daughter in Paris, including one for Meadows that says ‘Coach Jen’, complete with a tornado logo.
‘It’s like watching someone with an orchestra’
Ask any of the athletes to tell you what makes the M11 group special and they invariably say one thing. “It’s like a family,” and, with Arabella sometimes roaming trackside, you can understand the point. “Arabella doesn’t know how good Auntie Keely is – and at the moment she thinks she is Georgia Bell,” says Meadows.
Painter thinks that Arabella’s occasional appearance helps everyone, saying: “she brings reality and humanity”. Hodgkinson adds: “You see this little life, walking around, doing whatever she wants – it brings you back down to earth.”
On any given training session, there are as many as seven variations on what different people are doing, depending on races, injuries and priorities. Painter’s ability to oversee everything while timing every single rep [all later uploaded to Excel] and even give real-time feedback with his ‘Coaches Eye’ app is the stuff of legend. “He has multiple watches going – it’s like watching someone with an orchestra,” says Meadows.
