My Background

 So where to start. Well I had always been sporty growing up and played plenty of sports in my younger days including soccer, tennis but mostly cricket & golf. I was also never the smallest regarding weight but never too bad (or so I thought). As I grew older the only sport I played then was Golf and won a couple of Leinster medals at team level. I would have thought I was reasonably fit for Golf with all of the walking etc but I guess it is all relative.

2008 was a difficult year for me personally when I lost my mother after a long battle to Cancer at the end of October. At the beginning of 2009 I resolved to try to get myself fitter and lose weight and to basically do something meaningful in memory of my mother.

The below picture highlights the sort of shape I was in back in March 2009 and this was after losing a good bit of weight in the previous couple of months. Basically I was well over 18st when I started my journey.


Portugal Golf Trip March 2009










For the rest of 2009 I continued to lose some weight and set myself a target at the start of 2010 to run the Great Ireland run which is a 10K around April time. Up until this I had only been walking but got into a bit of jogging and managed to run the whole course in just under an hour. From then I had the running bug and entered a couple more shorter races after that. To cut a long story short I ended up doing the marathon that year for the Irish Cancer Society but with a lot less training than would be recommended, I did manage to finish in just under 5 hours. I guess at this point I was also around 5 stone lighter.

I continued to get great enjoyment from running and the buzz and challenge it provided. I kept it up and ran more races and quicker times in 2011. Below is a picture I found from around October 2011. Quite a bit of a difference from the earlier photo.

Donadea 10K October 2011



My main target for the year was to do the marathon again but to try and do it properly this time. Although being much better trained this time things did not work out as I expected on the day and I limped home in around 4:16. Thats the joy of the marathon it is such a tough event to master.

Fast forward to 2012 when I joined a running club locally to me called Star of the Sea. A nicer bunch of people you couldn't ask to meet. The camaraderie and encouragement is great without being too serious. Dublin was the challenge again and I broke through the sub 4 barrier running 3:46.

So thats about it for the moment. All of that is in the past. Who knows what the future holds.