DURING a short and otherwise undistinguished athletics career, I once won a 3,000-metres race at Morton Stadium, writes Frank McNally
It was a humble graded meeting and my winning time would hardly have threatened the national record for 4,000 metres. Even so, I felt like a hero for several hours. Tragically, the event happened 20 years ago and is therefore not recorded on YouTube, or anywhere else, except for some grainy highlights footage that is still occasionally replayed in my head.
I was briefly seduced into track-running by the road races that were all the rage then. But the shock of the track for a novice is how appallingly long a 400-metre lap can be when you're running flat out - which, sooner than you like, you always will be.
In a 10k road race or even a marathon, most people just compete against themselves. You choose a discomfort setting that suits. Nobody notices if you drop a few places. In a track race, by contrast, competitors conspire to torture each other by setting a higher pace than any of them wants to run. And however reluctant a hero you are, you get sucked into the contest, partly because you know you're being watched, if only by a few club-mates.
There is nowhere to hide on a track. I still remember the awful sinking feeling of being half-way through a 1500-metres race, already in difficulty but facing two more laps of pain, and knowing there is no way out unless you tear a hamstring - by then always an attractive option.
I was a very reluctant hero. On my night of triumph, I missed my original target, the 1500, and the only race left was the 3,000, a horrible prospect. So I made a deal with myself that, whatever happened, I would not get involved in a race. I would run at my level and ignore the pace-setters, no matter how embarrassingly distant they became.
But of course one thing led to another, and I reneged. The race began very slowly, so my confidence burgeoned and soon I was "covering" other people's moves, the way real athletes did. I remember there was a bunch of lads from the same Meath club running together tactically - like Kenyans, but with a flatter accent. And with a lap and a half to go, one of them sprinted into the lead.
Ignoring the inner voices that were screaming "No!", I followed him. But it had been only a ruse to flush to me out. Just after the bell, the traitor dropped anchor, forcing me to pass. Now I was leading with a whole lap to go, and with a cacophony of Meath voices behind me - never a happy situation - shouting mutual encouragement.
I made another pact. Lead to the end of the back straight, I told myself; then you can give up shamelessly. At the end of the straight, sure enough, my main rival loomed alongside. Whereupon, discovering hidden reserves of pure badness, I kicked again, forcing him to run the long way round the bend.
Having made my opponent suffer, I was quite happy to lose now. Unfortunately, two of my Metropolitan Harriers club-mates had positioned themselves at the start of the run-in and were urging me to go again. If I dishonoured the singlet, they implied, I would be shot at dawn for cowardice. So I kicked again, like a dying horse, and breasted the tape first, by the width of my club badge. Moments later, I celebrated by retching.
What brought these memories back was the realisation that, 50 years ago today, the same stadium in Santry hosted an occasion in whose footsteps I was thoroughly unworthy to follow.
On August 6th, 1958, during probably the greatest athletics event ever held on this island, Australia's Herb Elliott smashed the world mile record by almost three seconds. Behind him, another Australian also beat the old mark.
Ireland's Olympic gold medallist Ronnie Delaney finished third. And the first five all ran sub-four-minute miles.
Not the least remarkable feature of the night was the huge attendance. In the glamour-starved 1950s, the new stadium at Santry was a window to the world. Thousands queued in O'Connell Street for the hundreds of buses laid on. But so bad was the traffic that many abandoned their transport and walked the last miles to the track.
The event, like the stadium, was the creation of Billy Morton, a Dublin optician whose real genius was sports promotion. During the second World War, according to Ulick O'Connor, one of Morton's tactics for attracting foreign athletes here was to attend meetings in London with a bag full of eggs, bacon, butter and other commodities unavailable in ration-starved Britain.
After achieving his ambition of building Ireland's first, world-class cinder track, his tactics grew more sophisticated. He coaxed overseas athletes with the claim that his was the fastest venue in Europe, thanks to the unusually high oxygen levels caused by all the trees nearby.
Unfortunately, the stadium had lost much of its glamour even by the time of Morton's bizarre and premature death.
In 1969, walking home one night at Cross Guns Bridge, Phibsborough, he fell into a six-foot-deep hole dug by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. It is thought he suffered a fatal heart attack.
The stadium - by then named after John F. Kennedy - was later renamed in his honour and still hosts the Morton Mile every July. But, sad to say, world records and capacity attendances are only a faded memory now.