‘I am determined to make the most of my days... do what I can, while I still can’
Former track star Frank O’Mara won’t allow illness dictate how he lives his life
SOME days are worse than others for Frank O’Mara, some are better. He had one of those good days a few months ago when he and his close friend – and one-time rival on the track – Marcus O’Sullivan was part of an expedition to Antarctica. One morning, they woke to the sight of Elephant Island, the ice-covered stack of molten lava made famous in the story of Ernest Shackleton and Endurance.
From the time that he was a young boy sipping Club Orange in a corner of Tom Crean’s pub in South Kerry, O’Mara had been obsessed with Elephant Island. One of the most poignant vignettes of his recently-released autobiography, Bend don’t Break, is when flying back to Arkansas, where he has called home for more than 40 years, with his wife and children from a visit to Ireland and having just come to terms with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, the thought occurs to him that he will now never see Elephant Island.
However, O’Mara’s career, on and off the track, has been marked by resilience. And it is the same way that he has battled the degenerative disease that has beset him for the past 15 years. So, in the past couple of years, not only has he finally seen Elephant Island and traced the footsteps of Crean and Shackleton in the ice of Antarctica, he’s also been to the Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu and Patagonia.
‘I am determined to do as much as I can while I can,’ the Limerick native says softly. ‘I am determined to make the most of my days. That’s my attitude, strike while the iron is hot and do what I can while I can.’
The 19th edition of the world indoor athletics championships come to a conclusion in Glasgow this evening and the event instantly recalls one of the greatest nights that O’Mara had as a top-class athlete. At the inaugural championships in Indianapolis in 1987, O’Mara and O’Sullivan claimed gold in the 3,000m and 1500m within a few hours of each other, cheered on by the thousands watching on television, across the Atlantic.
O’Mara was world champion twice, also claiming gold in the 1991 indoors championships in Seville, an achievement he ranks even higher. He ran for Ireland at three Olympic Games – Los Angeles, Seoul and Barcelona – while along with O’Sullivan, Ray Flynn and Eamonn Coghlan, was part of the mile relay team that set a world record in 1985 that still stands. By any measure, it was a remarkable sporting career. But he charts little of his successes on the track in the story he tells. He is more interested in how the setbacks in his career – and there were a few – have conditioned him in his daily battle with Parkinson’s.
‘Everybody wants to be an Olympic champion or a world champion. But only one person can
do that every time. Most people are disappointed in sport, and there are more defeats than victories, so you need to learn to lose gracefully and that is how I am approaching this,’ he says, occasionally stopping to catch his breath before sentences. Even though it takes an effort to talk, O’Mara is an easy and obliging interviewee and is even willing to talk about some of the moments in his career that he skirts over in the book.
‘I have spent very little time feeling sorry for myself. There are some days when I get down, of course, but my background in dealing with adversity as an athlete, and the things I had to come through, I don’t think it was in my nature to wonder why this was happening, why this happened to me. I am not interested in the why, just accept and deal with it.’ O’Mara wrote the book at his home in Little Rock, where Limerick’s 2018 All-Ireland
winning team look down on him from a living room wall – a present from his friend, Limerick GAA secretary Mike O’Riordan. He says that the process of writing the autobiography – an arduous process because Parkinson’s has made his handwriting illegible and he can only type with one finger – has helped him come to terms with the ‘life sentence’ he has been given. For a long time, he was in denial and fixated for a number of years on the fact that he may have been misdiagnosed when a chance conversation at his mother’s funeral floated the idea that it may be Lyme’s disease.
He halted his neurological treatment and pursued the Lyme’s disease diagnosis, going as far to have a port implanted in his chest to have antibiotics pumped directly into his bloodstream.
‘I have had Parkinson’s for 15 years but for a lot of time, maybe 11 or 12 years, I was in denial, I chased this Lyme’s disease thing for more than two years, having a port put into my chest so the antibiotics were going straight into my heart. And I went downhill fast, I couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk. I was in really bad shape.’
Eventually, he returned to the neurologist and accepted his diagnosis. His battle with Parkinson’s consumed him and he sought out every treatment option. Watching the 2012 Olympic road race, he heard the NBC commentator talk of American cyclist Taylor Phinney’s father, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the age of 40 and underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS).
‘The procedure sounds barbaric, it is basically brain surgery that you are awake for,’ O’Mara say. In 2019 at the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, he underwent the procedure with surgeons drilling into his skull and implanting electrodes into his brain, as he lay there, wide awake during more than five
hours. It took a couple of years to work effectively, but it has now given O’Mara a quality of life that he thought he would never have again. But there are still challenges every day.
‘Parkinson’s is the most odious of foes,’ he points out. ‘Just when you think that you have learned to cope with one line of attack, it attacks another crucial function. There is the shaking, which everyone knows about, but there are also issues swallowing and I had a few scares while eating. There’s drooling, which you don’t even notice until you realise that your shirt collar has become more damp. And Parkinson’s also affects the vocal chords, because you don’t have enough breath to speak.’
In the book, O’Mara reflects on the stage of denial after his
diagnosis and feels it was down to the odious nature of the condition. ‘Looking back on it, I’m inclined to forgive my stubborn unwillingness to accept what was happening to me. What I would learn about Parkinson’s over the next decade would have been too overwhelming for anyone to accept all at once. While a Parkinson’s diagnosis isn’t a death sentence, it is a life sentence with no chance for parole. Such is the all-consuming nature of this odious disease that it tries to define your life,’ he writes at one point.
He says that now, first and foremost, he is a Parkinson’s warrior. But his life has been much more than that. He has twice been a world champion, ran in three Olympics, left university in America with three degrees and became CEO of one of the biggest wireless communication companies in the United States in his late 30s.
When with a little reluctance, he’s asked to reflect on an athletics career that this journalist watched as a young boy, he pinpoints the mile relay world record he set with his three close friends in Belfield as one of his greatest memories. They all stayed in the sport – O’Sullivan as coach at Villanova, Flynn as an agent and Coghlan as himself – while O’Mara drifted away. But they will always have that day.
He does intersperse his story with tales of that time. One chapter chronicles how he and O’Sullivan were left high and dry in Stockholm by the BLE after going over to run in a meet. Having no flight back to Ireland, they cadge a lift to Oslo to compete in the Blisset Games. ‘That was the BLE, the way they were run, but they were all volunteers. It is a little different now.’
He also reflects on his relationship with Said Aouita, the great Moroccan middle-distance runner whose rivalry with Steve Cram defined much of the 1980s in athletics. Aouita wanted O’Mara to be his pace-maker for world record attempts but he refused, as he said becoming a pace-setter was a trap that athletes could fall into and never be able to climb out of.
O’Mara says during his career that he always believed he was fully committed to being the best he could be. However, it was only when his good friend Sonia O’Sullivan explained that a singleminded obsession bordering on
insanity was needed to get to the very top, the Limerick native knew that he didn’t possess that certain kind of madness.
‘I didn’t think I could work any harder at my running than I did, but what Sonia was talking about was a commitment to it that was total and overshadowed everything else. I took my running as seriously as anyone, but I was also thinking of the future. I was in college for 11 years while I was competing all over the world. I wanted to build for the future. My thinking was that there was a lot of living to be done after I stop competing.’
And there is still a lot of living to be done, despite his ‘life sentence without parole’. He knew that his good friend O’Sullivan was also fascinated by Shackleton and Crean – and was actually a relation of Corkman Tim McCarthy who was part of that expedition. So, he thought of no better person to share the experience of walking in their footsteps.
Towards the end of his book, he captures their journey together beautifully. ‘As kids growing up in Ireland, I never imagined this fierce competitor from a neighbouring county would one day take care of me in this manner. I am particularly proud that we didn’t allow racing to dull our friendship. It could easily have turned out differently. We are the same age and have raced each other since we were fifteen. We went to rival US colleges; we ran the same event, but somehow, we managed to leave it on the track. Now 30 years later, here we were stepping in the shoes of Shackleton, Crean and McCarthy, albeit with one of us highly dependent on the other,’ he writes.
Having seen Elephant Island, there is plenty of other living that Frank O’Mara wants to do in the future. Some days are better than others, but he is determined to make the most of them.
Most people are disappointed in sports, there are more defeats than victories