‘Getting to the top of senior distance running is like trying to ascend Everest’

It started on The Late Late Show. Ryan Tubridy isn’t shy when introducing the six young Irish runners who won team gold medals at the European cross-country just five days previous, before unabashedly asking them “what comes next?”.

Olympic Games? More gold medals? World domination? Cue nods and smiles and plenty of oh yeahs.

Only it doesn’t end that way; all six of those once young Irish runners have long since gone from the major international stage. Some are still running, at least for the sheer pleasure they got to begin with, their then promising careers eventually surrendering to injury, over-training, burn-out, bad luck, or the realisation of the opportunity costs that come with being a senior elite athlete in this country.

This being the Irish under-23 cross-country team of 2010, the first and previously the only Irish men to win gold medals in the European event, staged that December in Albufeira. By matching that feat at Abbotstown last Sunday, the under-23 team of 2021 find themselves in a similarly promising position, or perhaps a similarly precarious one.

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So, what comes next?

“Getting to the top of senior distance running is like trying to ascend Everest,” says Brendan O’Neill, a graduate of the gold medal class of 2010. “You’re on your way up your whole career, secondary school, club, college, NCAA, and when you get out of under-23, you’re going into the death zone. You need oxygen, a good Sherpa, probably a good group of people too, to help you the rest of the way. And if you don’t have oxygen, in this case your economic support, you’re a goner.”

O’Neill is telling me this as we walk along the seafront at Greystones on Thursday, not far from the house he bought a few years back, and shares with his wife Jackie and their one-year-old bundle of joy, Maddie. He’s ideally placed to provide a sort of chronology of the different challenges since his gold medal day, given he’s been through them all – including injury – and feels a sort of responsibility in passing on any lessons to the class of 2021.

Like last Sunday, their gold medal win in 2010 wasn’t widely predicted, David McCarthy leading the then four-scoring quartet home in 11th, followed by O’Neill in 13th, Michael Mulhare in 16th and David Rooney in 20th. Backing them up was John Coghlan (34th), then Ciarán Ó Lionáird (76th), the only one of the six to compete in the Olympics – in London 2012 – albeit trailing home last in his 1,500m heat, crippled by an Achilles injury.

All six did improve, Ó Lionáird recovering to win European indoor bronze over 3,000m in 2013, before injury finished him off. McCarthy, Mulhare, Rooney and Coghlan all made up ground at senior level too, just not as much as they’d hoped (Coghlan, like his father Eamonn, did many times, running a sub-four mile in 2012, and after joining the Garda a few years back, raced at last month’s European police cross-county in Denmark, finishing 46th).

For O’Neill, 22 has turned to 33, 2015 marking the year he knew it was time to quit, not because he wanted to – his best running days were possibly still ahead of him – but because he realised he was losing the race against time and opportunity costs. “It was very much a surprise when we won gold. We’d individual ambitions, but definitely gelled very well as a team. We were best of friends at the time, still are. At 22, we were all just two years away from the London Olympics. For 1,500m, 5,000m runners, it was bit early, you still need a few more years graft.

“We were all still in college too, or just finished, so there’s no pressure. I went to Florida State the following year, spent two years out there, broke my 5,000m best by 30 seconds – 14:10 to 13:41. I still needed another 15, 20 seconds to make Olympic standard. And that’s hard, where you really do need those few more years to develop. After finishing in Florida, I distinctly remember feeling as if it all came to an abrupt end. I have to run 80, 100 miles a week for the next three, four years? For me it was an economic question.”

Friendship

The point being that for now anyway, that’s not a question for the under-23 team who struck gold on Sunday. Darragh McElhinney, still young enough for under-23 next year, has been steadily improving year on year, his individual silver, after running brilliantly bold for gold, the latest evidence of that. With UCD training partner, Keelan Kilrehill, in sixth, close friend Micheal Power, 13th, they also have a similar friendship to the class of 2010; it’s now three to score, and backing them up were Donal Devane (40th), Jamie Battle (44th) and Thomas Devaney (67th), and there’s already a sense this team can win gold again next year.

Still O’Neill’s reference to the death zone after coming out of under-23 is no great exaggeration; the casualties after that age are many. He has always thought outside the athletics box as well, with a natural entrepreneurial streak which in 2014 earned him a spot as one of the youngest contestants on RTÉ’s Dragons’ Den, winning a €30,000 investment for his online T-shirt and sporting apparel business.

“In the back of my mind I knew I needed a career, that running was never going to pay my bills. If there had been a good offer to train full time, of course, I would have considered. There wasn’t. Athletics Ireland don’t have the answer either, because the whole carding system is a reward system, I stopped even thinking of that as a solution.

“A more sustainable framework for senior level international athletes is to create the ecosystem, like the Dublin Track Club. Feidhlim Kelly is doing incredible work, what’s happening at UCD, with Emmet Dunleavy. They’re creating a culture, not just looking after individual athletes. Even economically it makes sense.”

‘Enjoy it’

To the gold medal class of 2021, his first message is simple: “Enjoy it. It’s a lifetime achievement already. This talk of ‘I can’t wait to see them in the Olympics’, I don’t like that, it adds extra pressure, it’s going to be very hard. At the time, we thought we’d sail into it. With this team, they have the benefit of looking at us. Positivity is the main thing at this stage.

“The other thing about under-23, you’re transitioning to adulthood, it’s a human thing as much as an athletic thing. There is an opportunity cost at senior level, which you don’t have at college, under-23 level. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you need the base of your pyramid looked after, a roof over your head, food on the table, before you can start thinking about running 100 miles a week.

“Professionally, I’m happy with my choices. I’d have liked to have fulfilled my potential by training in a full-time world, until I was 30, maybe running 13:10, 13;20, but such is life. Being older now, you also look back on that under-23 gold medal and think ‘you know what, we did alright’.”