Maybe it’s just the colour of the low October sun cut flat at whatever cross-country course you’re standing at, but nothing heralds the dawn of another distance-running season with such warm familiarity.
Sunday’s Autumn International Cross-Country at the Sport Ireland Campus at Abbotstown will be no exception – it’s forecast to be sunny and warm – and for many Irish athletes this is the first dip into a new season fresh with possibilities and renewed hope. And new medal targets too, possibly beginning with the European Cross-Country Championships in Atalya, Turkey, in December.
Other Irish athletes have different decisions to make. It’s almost a year now since Ciara Mageean sat in front of me for an interview to reflect on the many highs and few lows of her 2023 season, which included a fourth-place finish in the World Championship 1,500 metres in Budapest, before again lowering her Irish record to 3:55.87, finishing second at the Brussels Diamond League.
At some point towards the end of our conversation Mageean rolled up her right sleeve to reveal the Olympic rings discreetly tattooed down her lower arm, a reminder not just of what was meant to come in Paris this summer, but what she’s already been through.
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“Of course the Olympics are special, because of what it means to athletes, to everyone else watching in,” she said. “I’m looking at them now more objectively, that it’s the same as another World Championships, not to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of it.
“And my approach is different now. I have some unfinished business in that I just want to go and perform at the best of my ability. I’ll do everything I can to do that, give myself every fighting chance, same as I did for the World Championships this year.”
Paris was meant to be Mageean’s third Olympics. A calf-muscle injury crushed her hopes of progressing beyond the heats in Tokyo; and she was typically hard on herself after running short of her best in the semi-finals in Rio.
All of which must have made her decision to withdraw on the eve of her 1,500m heat in Paris even harder, with Mageean eventually surrendering to an Achilles tendon injury which had repeatedly upset her preparations since winning the European 1,500m gold medal in Rome just eight weeks before.
Few if any Irish athletes have endured more setbacks and displayed more powers of resilience than Mageean. A year after Tokyo she won silver at the European Championships and Commonwealth Games, then broke O’Sullivan’s Irish 1,500m record which had stood since 1995.
It’s also 16 years now since she won her first Irish indoor senior title, in early 2008, at the age of 15, over 1,500m, knocking two seconds off the Irish junior record. Since then she’s had to live with a few labels as well (whisper “the next Sonia”), but she always carved her own pathway.
Growing up in Portaferry, at the tip of the Ards Peninsula, she’d begin her school days with an 8.15 ferry trip across Strangford Lough to catch the bus to Assumption Grammar, Ballynahinch. There were tough lessons early on too; in October 2008 she travelled to Pune, India, for her first major international event, the Commonwealth Youth Games. Fancied to medal in the 800m, Mageean ended up fifth, the entire field stunned by the South African winner named Caster Semenya.
Typical of Mageean she came out two days later and won bronze in the 1,500m.
Later, when she bounced back again to finish a close fourth in the 1,500m at the European Championships in Berlin in 2018, she told us. “I can’t really say how that feels, but it’s something which rhymes with ‘uck’...”
If anything she can and always will take considerable heart from her former coach Jerry Kiernan, who died suddenly in January 2021, and who more than anyone else nurtured her through that difficult transition out of the junior ranks when a troublesome bone spur in her ankle at times left her wondering might she ever make it back.
In 2023 Mageean penned a first-person article entitled Breakthrough for the World Athletics Spikes magazine, referencing that first crippling setback in the summer of 2012.
“I can remember sitting in the cafe in Dublin, in tears, looking across at my old coach Jerry Kiernan. I was 20 at the time, and facing surgery on a bone spur in my ankle that had plagued me for the previous year. I’d been told there was an 80-85 per cent chance it would make the pain go away. That meant there was a 15-20 per cent chance it wouldn’t. The latter was a terrifying prospect. What am I going to be if I’m not The Runner?
“But Jerry was a wise old soul, an Olympic marathoner himself, and he taught me that I was so much more. I was special on my own, as a person, not just The Runner. He also taught me something else. Yes, my under-23 career was wiped out with injury, but as he sat opposite me in that cafe he told me something I needed to hear. ‘This injury will come good’, he said. ‘And it’ll give you longer in the sport.’”
There is talk Mageean may move back to Ireland, make a complete change from her coaching set-up in Manchester in recent years, and Kiernan’s wise old advice about having longer in the sport still rings true.
Mageean turns 33 next March, far from over the hill or past her prime in distance-running, although she will be 36 by the time the LA Olympics roll around in 2028. If Paris came on like a high-speed train in the three years since Tokyo, right now LA does feel a very long way down the tracks.
Which in running terms for Mageean might look like a particularly long and lonesome road, but it is also one she’s been down many times before, and surely enough times to realise she’s still a long way from the finish.
