‘The public saw us as odd – they’d throw stones at us’
Goodwill courses through the capital’s streets on marathon day, it didn’t always...
DICK HOOPER won the Dublin marathon three times, and is one of the most important figures in the story of Irish distance running. But he can recall a time when ‘running the roads of Dublin was a risky business, runners were considered oddities and would often be subjected to verbal abuse’.
He remembers those days in a foreword to Sean McGoldrick’s excellent new book, ‘The Dublin Marathon: Celebrating 40 Years’.
Today marks the 40th edition of the most famous road race in the country, and one whose renown has spread in recent years across the continent.
Combined with the enormous uptake in road running throughout Ireland, it explains a record entry for this year’s race of 22,500.
It was three years ago that the race was moved from its long-established fixture on the Monday of the October Bank Holiday to the Sunday, and the effect has been terrific.
The last year of the Monday running in 2015 saw a record number of participants at 15,216. The switch to
Sunday, though, has made the event much more attractive to domestic and overseas competitors.
This was reflected in the initial limit of 20,000 places selling out before mid-December last year.
An extra 2,500 places were made available during the summer and quickly snaffled.
Hooper will be among the tens of thousands who line the roads and streets of the marathon route this morning and afternoon. Few will be able to call upon his expertise in the discipline, but that is the beauty of a mass-participation marathon.
The great majority of runners will not be elite runners or even especially talented. They have spent months trooping on the roads of Ireland and beyond since early summer for many reasons: fitness, a competitive instinct that matters only to themselves; in support of a charity that has an intense personal meaning to them; and the odd wilful soul will compete on a whim or on a dare.
All will be cheered, from the elites streaming away at the head of the field, running so lightly, smoothly and powerfully that they give no indication of the effort they are expending and the pain screeching through them, to the fun-runners and those reduced to walking, but determined to cross the finish line in Merrion
Square in the centre of the city. In a world where cynicism and pessimism are too often the easy defaults, marathon day brings optimism and a sense of goodwill coursing through the capital.
Forty years ago, as Hooper recalled, running was treated more warily, while the notion of a marathon being run by anyone who wasn’t an Olympian or highclass athlete was considered exotic.
Pat Hooper, the older brother of Dick and who would run for Ireland in the marathon at the 1980 Moscow Games, recalls his boss at work treating Hooper’s request to run to and from work every day – 13 miles in total – very warily.
Hooper tells McGoldrick that ‘he was concerned about whether I’d be too tired to do my job’. When he did get approval, Hooper did his daily run but ‘I had rocks and sticks thrown at me’.
The limited extent of cultural diversity in 1970s Ireland has been recorded in other, sometimes far graver examples, but this remarkable reaction to seeing a man running on the street is illustrative of how odd the sport was seen.
The number registered to run in the inaugural marathon in 1980 was 1,993, 70 of whom were women.
That figure is small, but had as much to do with the attitude of athletics to women running marathons as it had to any particular Irish reason.
Women were only allowed to run in the Boston Marathon from 1972, and five years earlier, a race official ran on to the course and tried to drag Kathrine Switzer to the ground for competing in the race.
McGoldrick tells some wonderful stories in plotting the origins of the marathon to its current mighty strength. For instance, Conor Faughnan, well known now as the face of the Automobile Association in Ireland, ran the 1981 marathon when he was just 12 years of age.
His achievement must have horri
‘FORTY YEARS AGO, RUNNING WAS TREATED MUCH MORE WARILY’
fied the journalist who wrote in an Irish newspaper before the first edition of Dublin that running a marathon was a ‘dangerous, and perhaps for some even terminal lunacy’.
An early boon to the growth of the Dublin marathon was the wretched state of Ireland in the 1980s.
It has long been established that running booms coincide with economic gloom, a trend that goes back to the Great Depression and America’s attempts to recover in the 1930s.
The years thereafter saw running become popular. America’s second great running boom was in the 1970s, a time when the country was racked by Watergate and the horrors of Vietnam.
Ireland was worn down by more workaday problems in the 1980s, but in a country with little in the way of luxuries for most people, running started to appeal as a form of exercise but also as a distraction.
It is interesting, too, that over the past decade another enormous running surge has swept the country, this time in the aftermath of the enormous problems many encountered at the turn of the decade.
On a practical level, it is practically free, save for the purchase of a pair of runners. That had great appeal in an era of job losses, when expensive gym memberships were among the first extras cut from household budgets.
Once again, running has become a refuge.
And if it helps people through hard times, they stick with it in the good ones, too.
That is why Dublin will be brought to a standstill for most of today.
Some will grumble at this, but many, many more will line the streets and clap and offer sweets and drinks but mostly kind words.
At the head of the field, runners burning with ambitions of competing in Tokyo will scorch away.
Behind them, thousands more will trundle, everyone inspired by their own fierce, precious dream.