ATHLETICS/Running for charity/Johnny Donnelly:The rough marathon guide: Ian O'Riordan talks to a man about to run 60 marathons and finds he is not alone the full shilling but also a likely money machine in an excellent cause
It is a difficult birth, and he isn't exactly your normal child. He then displays a special talent and is soon mixing with the rich and famous. Later he buys a well-known company that sets him up for life.
But from the beginning, all Johnny Donnelly wants to do is run - all around the world, with a group of people running alongside him. So that's what he sets out to do. With three words in his head: "Run, Johnny, run." If the story sounds familiar you're probably thinking Tom Hanks has got there first, as Forrest Gump.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't make a film about Johnny Donnelly, complete with a Hollywood ending.
Just as with Forrest Gump, the 1994 film that won six Academy Awards, this narrative is provided solely by the central character. I ask him where it all began and when my 90-minute tape runs out, Donnelly is still rattling away, each part of his life story as unexpected as the next.
"I was born on St Valentine's Day, 1972, in Mount Carmel hospital in Dublin. Two months premature, and weighing a little over three pounds. My mother was in hospital for the entire duration of the pregnancy, and was told her child mightn't survive. And if he did, he mightn't be the full shilling. And then out I popped." I interrupt to say I was born in the same hospital just a few weeks earlier.
"There you go. Sure we could have met for a cup of tea."
There were the early years: growing up in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon - happy, just not quite fitting in, finding solace in playing the drums.
At age 16 fate comes knocking and he joins the folk-rock band The Saw Doctors, which for 13 years takes him around the world and back again; then he goes "solo" and plays a variety of stages from the Special Olympics to the Ryder Cup; and now comes the running part.
Starting tomorrow, Donnelly will run one marathon a month for the next four years. Some months, he'll run more than one, so that by December 2011 he'll have run 60 marathons in total, on all seven continents, in often extreme climates. Some of those marathons are also the ridiculous type, such as the Antarctica 100km, and the Himalayan 100-miler.
As he explains this, I wonder if Donnelly actually is the full shilling.
He's just turned 36 and lives with his wife and four children in a thatched cottage in the old famine village of Toorard, on the verge of Connemara.
This time last year he bought the Macteo group, which had split from its former subsidiary, Macnas, and renamed it Arcana. It's one of Ireland's most successful entertainment companies.
So why is he making this massive commitment to running, which will surely wreak havoc with his family and business life? Because this time he's running to save lives, running to help end extreme poverty.
"Drumming was my first love," he says. "I know I was an odd child, wasn't into toys or anything like that.
"At three years old I got an old tin drum, and a James Last record, for Christmas. I'd sit behind the sofa and drum along to James Last.
"Around that age I also started running, most days, three or four miles around Ballaghaderreen. I used to love what went on in my head. It was all a rhythmical thing. Whether it was my heartbeat, my feet, or just the rhythm of the countryside. My mind was just geared towards that.
"And it's never stopped. I never get fed up with it. I'm not interested in winning. I'm just interested in the art of running, what it does to my head, and how it makes me feel. Even now, in the depths of winter, eight o'clock at night, and it's lashing rain outside, and we're all sitting around the fire, I'll still jump up and go for that run."
At age five Donnelly wrote a poem, with the lines, "Running is a lovely sport, I hope you all agree; if you feel fit and well, please come and run with me".
He was running half marathons at age 10, and at age 13 finished his first Dublin marathon, which he then ran for nine years in a row. At the same time he had a recurring dream where he was running alongside a group of people, but he'd always been too busy to figure it out, partly caught up in the rock 'n' roll lifestyle of The Saw Doctors.
For 13 years he sat on stage and played the drums with ferocious energy and enthusiasm, then slipped back to his own little world of running, and solitude. In 13 years of touring he never once touched a drink. The truth is he never wanted to join the band in the first place.
"I was already playing three nights a week, say at the Baggot Inn, with Dublin bands, age 13, or 14. Or with the Guinness jazz band, for three weeks. I worked in the chipper in Roscommon town, and would get the train up and down, and stay with my aunt on the Howth Road.
"So one night at home this band call around, said they were looking for a drummer, and gave me their tape. I brought it into the kitchen with me while I was making the tea, and thought it was the greatest pile of shite I'd ever heard. I said to my mother we'd give them the tea, and let them go. Eventually they went, and I never wanted to see them again.
"They called up the next day, to say Mike Scott of The Waterboys invited them up to play the Olympia. And would I come up and drum? I'd never played the Olympia and liked The Waterboys, so off I went.
"The next day Mike Scott said he was going to Windmill Lane the following day, to record N17 as the first single. I thought I'd never been there either, and I'd give it a go.
"It just took off from there. Six weeks later I Useta Lover was number one."
The song stayed there for nine weeks, and remains one of Ireland's best-selling singles of all time.
Donnelly still prefers the Bon Jovi single they beat to number one: "I was only a fan of 50 per cent of their music. I told them from the word go. But look, the lads were brilliant. To this day I think Leo Moran and Davy Carton are two of the most underrated songwriters in the country. Straight away people pigeonhole them for that 'diddle-eye-how's-your-father stuff'. But they've written some classic tunes.
"I just didn't like life on the road. It was like 13 years, less than a year playing drums, and over 12 years doing nothing else.
"So a typical night for me was do the show, get back on the tour bus straight away, and have a herbal tea with the bus driver. Then I'd go to bed, and get up most mornings for a run or a cycle, just as the rest of the band were coming in.
"If I were a drinker, I'd be out until six in the morning as well, but there's no way I would have survived. It wasn't like the band were heavy drinkers by any account, but some people drink for enjoyment. Running was my enjoyment. It grounded me. It numbed my head.
"I could have done that through drink or drugs, but it would have killed me. Because of my tendency to push myself, I know I would have gone over the edge.
"Still I stayed right through to early 2002. Then my wife told me she was expecting, and 24 hours later I left the band. When I realised I was having a family, I didn't want to be an absentee father. It took that moment for me to leave.
"I was nine years wanting to leave, but didn't have the balls to do so. I was 16 and got caught up in this snowball, a safety bubble, and it was hard to get out of."
Ah, but what larks! Supporting the likes Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Playing some of the world's biggest music festivals, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Michael Stipe to George Michael.
"I remember we were playing the Roskilde festival in Denmark, and Slash (from Guns 'n' Roses) actually comes into our dressingroom, says his grandfather was from Tuam, and wants to know all about it. We ended up getting pally, and I realised then these guys are only human."
Once freed from the obligations of the band, Donnelly redirected more of his energy towards running.
He'd pick out a marathon and then a charity, and off he'd go. In 2004 he was running the 35-mile Two Oceans marathon in Cape Town when suddenly his recurring dream made sense.
"I was wearing this vest with 'Ireland' written across the front, and people started shouting, thanking me for building their houses, for saving their lives. It felt like an incredible humanitarian moment. I didn't realise I was running past the Niall Mellon township (the Irish charity which builds houses in South Africa), and because I was Irish, they made this connection.
"After that I decided I'd do something for the Niall Mellon trust, and did the 'Hot and Cold challenge' - which is the Sahara desert 100km marathon, and then the North Pole marathon, five days later.
"What I realised after that was you can't simply knock on poverty's door and leave again. When you're standing in a shack in South Africa you realise you're not money to these people, you are hope.
"To me an extreme problem needed something extreme to help. And the most extreme thing I came up with was to dedicate the next four years of my life, and run 60 marathons."
At the same time he discovered the perfect cause: Sea Change, a new fundraising initiative set up by a group of friends who did well out of the Celtic Tiger and wanted to give something back.
Sea Change engages in micro-finance, the process of giving small loans to those in extreme poverty, to help them work their own way out of it.
"What is great about micro-finance is these companies are on the ground, and 100 per cent of the money gets directly to those who need it. They're essentially grant loans, from, say, €5 up to €100, and the money is constantly recycled, so a family can buy a goat or a chicken and also get to understand profit.
"For years I questioned what I was doing, if I was making a difference. But everybody makes a difference. And I believe in the tipping point. If enough people get involved in some charity, it will tip."
Donnelly is not simply looking for sponsorship or a donation. He wants people to run alongside him in any one of the 60 marathons. All race details and entry will be organised through the website (www.runjohnnyrun.ie). Those signing up are required to raise a given amount.
He'd been toying with this idea for much of the past two years, before the decisive moment came last July, when his newborn son Harry came back from near death while being transferred from hospital in Galway to Dublin.
"Harry had breathing difficulties from birth, was in and out of hospital, and coming up the M50 to Dublin the nurse said, 'Stop the car.' Harry was lifeless in the back seat. The nurse was screaming and my wife, Aishling, was screaming, and nothing was happening.
"My wife gave Harry life-to-life on the verge of the M50. A gust of wind blew my hair across my face, and when I wiped it away, Harry had opened his eyes. I put the hazard lights on, and booted it to hospital. By the time we got there he was smiling."
It's still an entirely undiagnosed problem, despite a series of tests.
"Between 25,000 and 30,000 people die every day from entirely preventable diseases. I just see Harry's face that day in the back of the car on all these kids, and think something can be done to help them.
"I don't know what was helping Harry that day, but that was the deciding point, that in my head I was doing it for poverty, but in my heart I would do it for Harry."
It's a hugely ambitious target that could easily fall short, although Donnelly won't contemplate failure.
"My main concern now is to stay vertical for the next four years. But if I have to crawl one of these marathons then I'll crawl. It's an extreme problem, so I had to make it an extreme problem for myself.
"Someone quoted a Saw Doctors song to me the other day, saying, Johnny, what you're about to do is try buy shares in the afterlife.
"For me, it's not about that at all, and I didn't even want to call it Run Johnny Run. I just want to get people involved, and join me on a race, wherever. I was going to do this on my own anyway. It's just better if I ask people to come and do it with me."
2008
February Seville, Spain; March Two Oceans 35-miler, South Africa; April Turin, Italy; May Prague, Czech Republic; June Midnight Sun, Norway; July Namib Desert 100-miler, Namibia; August Helsinki, Finland; September Brussels, Belgium; October Amsterdam, Netherlands; Dublin, Ireland; November New York, USA; December Lisbon, Portugal.
2009
January Dubai, Dubai; February Pasig River, Philippines; March Five Towers, Denmark; April Two Oceans 35-miler, South Africa, London, England; May Inca Trail 27.5-miler, Peru; June Edinburgh, Scotland; July Alpine 78.8k, Switzerland; August Reykjavik, Iceland; September Budapest, Hungary; October Dublin, Ireland; November Athens, Greece; New York, USA; December Antarctica 100k, Antarctica.
2010
January Lahore, Pakistan; February Luxor, Egypt; March Kenya, Africa; April Two Oceans 35-miler, South Africa; London, England; May Vienna, Austria; June Comrades 56-miler, South Africa; July Gold Coast, Australia; August Victoria, Zimbabwe; September Toronto Waterfront, Canada; October Venice, Italy; Dublin, Ireland; November Himalayan 100-miler, India; New York, USA; December Monterrey, Mexico.
2011
January Tiberias, Israel; February Tokyo, Japan; March Marseille, France; April Two Oceans 35-miler, South Africa; London, England; Marathon des Sables 151-miler, Sahara; May Great Wall, China; June Stockholm, Sweden; July Tallinn, Estonia; August Rio, Brazil; September Moscow, Russia; October Poznan, Poland; Dublin, Ireland; November Bangkok, Thailand; New York, USA; December Reggae, Jamaica.
l Donnelly has lately added several more marathons, including Connemara, the Gobi Ultra and Berlin. His final itinerary of 60 races will be announced soon (www.runjohnnyrun.ie).
