Mary picks up the Outsider Woman of the Year Award
ARKLOW athlete Mary Nolan Hickey has picked up yet another prestigious award to add to her collection.
Mary was named Outsider Women of the Year at the annual Outsider Magazine Awards which celebrate the best in outdoor adventuring.
With 16 categories in total, the Outsider Awards celebrate people and organisations who are doing amazing things outside mainstream sport on the Irish outdoor and adventure scene.
Mary’s award was presented by television and radio personality Anton Savage at a ceremony in The Sugar Club, Dublin.
She beat off stiff competition from some of the country’s most determined and successful athletes to pick up the award and was modest as ever in accepting her prize, saying that she chose to run a solo lap of Ireland as she knew she couldn’t get lost by keeping the sea to her right.
Many Arklow residents are familiar with Mary’s Lap of the Map challenge which raised over €70,000 for the RNLI and saw her cover 1,509 miles in 104 days in the worst winter the country had experienced in years.
Despite the dismal weather, Mary remained steadfastly positive.
‘I learned that I am tougher than I realised. I thought I was tough before because I had done a lot of mad stuff before, like the Marathon des Sables and 100km races. You do have some dark days, bad weather, huge blisters, injuries, exhaustion and down times, but in the midst of all of that, you have the most incredible moments,’ she said.