Warriors run from strand to hill to meet the queen

HE MAY not have been spinning in her grave but Queen Maeve must at the very least have been dizzy on Saturday afternoon, when hundreds of hardy souls slip-slid around her mythical final resting on the top of Knocknarea mountain in Co Sligo.

The annual 15km Warriors’ Run, a road and mountain race from the beach front in Strandhill to the mountain top, captured the public imagination from its inception in 1985. But the organisers were taken aback this year when they had to stop accepting registrations three weeks early, because 800 runners had signed up, making safety an issue.

“We had to change the route this year and make it one-way,” explained Strandhill man Turlough Conway who was the first local home in 2008 (when 478 runners took part).

“Every year people going up and down meet on the narrow tourist trail, but that would have been dangerous with so many taking part, especially when conditions are so slippery.”

As a light drizzle dampened the already sodden mountain on Saturday afternoon, not falling was a preoccupation for most of the runners, many of them veterans of the race.

Indeed, Kenyan-born Josphat Boit, first past the finishing line with a time of 53 minutes, four seconds on his first visit to Sligo, did fall. But he still powered past the rest of the field and was basking in the rapturous applause of thousands of spectators when a giant screen at the beach front showed other runners just circling the massive cairn where Maeve is reputed to have been buried, standing upright and facing Ulster.

Boit, who has been running with Dublin club Clonliffe Harriers for two years, was distracted by the mountain top views. “It is beautiful. I want to go back up again, walking, just to see it,” he said.

Strandhill is synonymous with surfing but locals have embraced this annual run over a mystical landscape. Legend has it that the inspiration for it was a conversation in Sonny Bree’s pub in Strandhill in 1979, when a few customers gazed out the window at the mountain and started to debate the fastest route to the top. A German teenager darted out the door, climbed over the back wall, and, according to local folklore, made the summit in 19 minutes.

Sligo man Tony Fox was doing his 19th Warriors’ Run at the weekend. “It’s a personal endurance test for most of us,” he said. “We don’t even see the view when we are up there, we are so focused on getting back down. It’s great just to be able to finish it.”

Gerry Higgins, another local, was on his sixth run and reckoned it was the toughest yet. “It gets harder every year but when you are on the last lap and someone you know shouts your name, everyone seems to shout it and encourage you over the line, and that makes the previous hour’s hardship worth it all,” he said.

Miriam Gray from Strandhill was doing the event for the 13th time and, before the off, the fitness instructor led a warm-up routine for the runners. “Come on, knees up. This will help you over the ditches, and around the potholes and badgers,” she coaxed the giddy participants.

Kerry sheep farmer John Lenihan is a legend in Strandhill, having won the event for the first five years and again in 2005, picking up a world title and a skipful of other trophies along the way. Struggling with a groin injury on Saturday, he was quite happy with his performance. “I think I was fifth or sixth. It was very tough – I will be 50 on my next birthday – but I love the atmosphere here. You don’t get that anywhere else,” said the long-haired athlete, who got a hero’s welcome in the seaside town.