My Running Story

I haven’t always been a runner. I first started running in 2004. Before that like most people, I played team sports in school. But when I started college, all of this went and stayed by the way side when I started working in the corporate world.
I walked a lot and was fine with that until one day when I was 28 years old, I found myself walking up Howth Hill wheezing and out of breath. This gave me a huge fright. Having smoked for 10 years I knew it was because of the cigarettes.

On 1^st January 2004 I made my first life changing New Year’s Resolution by giving up smoking. A few months later, I thought that I should feel much more healthy and fitter now that I was a non-smoker. But other than no longer wheezing, I felt no different. I felt that I needed something more than this to keep me from starting to smoke again. So I thought right. What can I do now that I wasn’t able to do when I smoked? And it came to me. Running. I hadn’t been able to run (nor even tried to run) since I had left school 10 years earlier. So I did some running stretches then went for my first run.
I ran for a few minutes and was so happy to have done it and not keeled over. I gradually increased the length and distance of my runs so that after a few weeks I was running for about 30 minutes. For my walks I liked to walk for an hour so I decided that I wanted to be able to run for an hour. So in a few weeks I was running for one hour and this became my running norm. Back then and pretty much to this day, I run 3 times a week and always leave at least one day in between each run.

One of the huge benefits of running is that it gives you so much headspace and time to think as you aren’t distracted by phones, tablets, PC’s, TV, work, family etc. So when I first started running it reminded me that I used to do milk runs as a child, something that I hadn’t thought about in years. My dad used to do voluntary work for St. Vincent de Paul and they did these milk runs to raise money. I was probably about 8 years old at the time. I remembered when I did them that I swore that I would do the marathon some day when I grew up. This thought clearly went to the very back of my head as I had completely forgotten about it until I took up running.
Now that the idea was back in my head I decided. Right. I’m on a roll here with the New Year’s Resolutions so on 1 January 2005 I decided that I was going to run the Dublin Marathon. So aged 29, about 15 months after I started running, I ran the Dublin Marathon on 31^st October 2005 and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Eleven more marathons and three children later, I am still as passionate about running now as I was then, and I hope to pass on this passion for running to Coast Road Runners far and wide. July 2024 marks 20 years since I took my first running step. To mark the occasion we are offering €20 off 20 x September 0-5km running courses. Enter code 20YEARS at checkout.

Marathon History