I’LL KEEP GOING UNTIL I CAN’T
At 82, Carol Ormon will take part in her 40th mini-marathon this year and she says that the race is empowering for women, has kept her sane – and smells better than any men’s running event!
CAROL Ormon didn’t expect to be still running. Indeed, there have been many times over the last four decades she’d thought she’d hung up her well-worn trainers for good. ‘At the end of a race I’d often say, “That’s it for me, I’m such and such an age,”’ she says. ‘But I’m so glad I didn’t, and I don’t think I’ll stop now, I’ll keep going unless I can’t.’
You can see how she’s persuaded so many friends and acquaintances to join her over the years — she’s positively evangelical about the benefits of pulling on a pair of trainers, sticking on some comfortable clothes and heading out the front door.
At one point she even tries to talk me into taking part in the upcoming VHI Women’s MiniMarathon, her favourite race of the year and one she’s been doing since it was first launched back in 1983. She has never missed it, and this June bank holiday she will celebrate her 40th anniversary of taking part.
‘Oh it’s always been my favourite of all the races,’ she says firmly. ‘If there were men, we didn’t take to it too much. Women running on their own has always been much better. For a start, it always smelled better! Maybe it’s not so bad now, men have become so much more manscaped.
‘But there was a time when you’d be pushed into this big crowd of smelly people, everyone pushed up against each other. The women would be wafting beautifully, but not the men.’
If ever there was a convincing advertisement for taking up regular exercise, then this mother-offour is it.
After a little persuasion, she finally agrees to share her age.
‘Well look, I was 42 when I started running in 1983,’ she says. ‘So I suppose you can do the math. It’s not that I’m not proud of my age, it’s just that people immediately readjust their view of you once they know how old you are. You can see it in their eyes.
‘Things have changed for the better,’ she adds. ‘I thought I was old at 42. Whenever I was changing jobs, I’d always think, oh God, they’ll think I’m past it. I didn’t think I was too old to run, but I did think I’d missed my chance at being any good.’
Dressed in a pair of leggings and sports top, Carol is a picture of glowing good health. Trim and straight, with fantastic skin and bright, twinkly eyes, it really is no exaggeration to say she looks at least a decade or so younger than her 81 years.
There have been many injuries over the years — once she almost missed a mini-marathon thanks to a busted ankle — but overall, running has meant that her body still moves with relative ease, although she’s not quite as fast as she once was.
‘I think my best time in the minimarathon was about 56 minutes,’ she sighs of the 10km race. ‘Now it takes me about an hour and a half.’
Her daughter Catherine, who has called in for a cup of coffee, rolls her eyes.
‘There are still thousands of women who come in after her,’ she says. ‘And a lot of them are a lot younger. She’s still doing OK.’
Originally from the US, Carol moved to Ireland when she was a university student. She had started college in France, but realised her French wasn’t good enough to study for a degree there.
‘My mother wanted me to come home to America, but I really didn’t want to and asked if I could go to England instead to study,’ she explains. ‘But there’d been an article in Time Magazine, describing London as “swinging”.
‘Well, there was no way my mother was going to allow her youngest daughter to go off to some “swinging” place so we compromised on Ireland and I’ve been here ever since.’
Carol studied Mental and Moral Sciences at Trinity College, the then route into becoming a psychologist. A huge fan of traditional Irish music, she met her husband on the Dublin music circuit.
‘Oh I met all the big stars, Seamus Ennis used to sing to me,’ she smiles.
Her marriage was ‘not successful, but I stuck it out and we had four beautiful children, all girls’.
‘I realised I needed to get back into the workforce,’ she continues. ‘I never thought that would happen, I was very much a girl of my time, I thought I’d get married and that would be it.
‘But I went back to college, did a diploma that qualified me to work as a psychologist and I took every job that was going.
‘I worked in a school dealing with kids who had issues, I taught night classes and worked as a locum for different hospitals.’
Eventually, she got a position as a psychologist in Crumlin Hospital, which she adored. Then in between working full-time and raising four children, she found running.
‘I was always sporty but never very good at anything,’ she says. ‘I tried running several times, but never managed to keep it up.
‘I had a brother who ran a lot, and he was a vet and would always be telling me about the medical benefits of it, which I found very convincing.
‘So I’d start but as
‘People can readjust their view when they know your age’
soon as the cold weather came along, I’d fade away. But when the mini-marathon started in 1983, for some reason I took to it like a duck to water.’ She read about it in the Evening Press, the newspaper that first sponsored the event, and after signing up, she started training. ‘Back then you never saw a woman out running, never, especially on a road or anything,’ she says. ‘At first I went by myself, then I tried to get the girls to come with me and they’d be huffing and puffing. They’d take off and run like mad, but then run out of steam very quickly. It was the training in Marley Park that really helped get me stuck in.’
For a number of years throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were training sessions held for women runners at the park on Dublin’s southside.
‘Twice a week at 7.30pm and every Sunday morning, they had these structured runs and this very pretty woman with a gorgeous
hunk of a husband would lead us in warm-up exercises,’ says Carol. ‘There were about 80 of us who would meet up and I remember people from the Evening Press came out to run with us and encourage us.
‘It was essentially a running club and we learned a lot about how to run effectively.’
Photos from those early years show Carol wearing shorts and vests in her favourite colour, bright green.
‘I was more risqué than most,’ she laughs. ‘A lot of women didn’t show much of their legs, at first. The shorts gradually crept up.’
Although most of her training in those early years was done in the park, there were times Carol ventured out on to the roads close to her home in south Dublin.
‘You sometimes got a reaction you didn’t want,’ she admits. ‘People whistling and things like that, I remember one time getting a cup of coke thrown at me while I was out in Bray, I was horrified, but fortunately it didn’t hit me square on.’
There were other times, however, she could feel a little fearful while out running.
‘I was probably a bit more foolish than I should have been,’ she explains. ‘When the kids were all in bed I used to go out at night. What worried me were manhole covers that would move, and I’d think, oh God, if I break my leg out here, no one will know where I am.
‘But then one of my neighbours said to me one time, “you don’t know the weird people who live around here, if you did you would not be out running at night”. That gradually put me off running on my own.’
She found herself a regular running partner, her daughter Catherine.
‘I always said to Catherine that it was the best thing that ever happened to her,’ says Carol.
‘That’s right,’ laughs Catherine. ‘She thinks she saved me. I think she thought I was getting wayward.’
‘She was 13 and most girls at that age go through a period when they’re trying to throw off everything too soon,’ explains Carol. ‘So I got her to come with me and she was a great support. She kept me going every Sunday morning, we’d have great chats going over in the car.
‘The other women adored her, there’d be 40 of them coming up to say hi to her each week. She was the only young one there and that was our Sunday morning for years.’
‘Looking back it was probably a little odd,’ says Catherine. ‘The only teenager running with these middleaged women. Every now and again some other daughter would come along, but mostly it was just me.’
Catherine has also taken part in an impressive number of mini-marathons.
‘I’ve done about 35 out of the 40 of them,’ she says. ‘I missed the first because I was too young, you had to be 14, and then there were a couple I couldn’t do because of exams.’
For both women, training and taking part in the marathon has been a hugely valuable part of their lives.
‘I think it brought a lot of women out of themselves,’ says Carol. ‘When you’re running you feel stronger in yourself. It’s probably foolish, but it felt like you could outrun a lot of people, you feel kind of powerful.
‘I do believe the mini-marathon was one of the things that helped women to begin taking their place in society more.’
‘It expanded the concept of what womanhood was,’ Catherine agrees. ‘It’s such an accessible thing to do — a half decent pair of runners, whatever comfortable clothes you had lying around, and you were out the door.’
Catherine is clearly proud of her mother’s commitment and dedication to the annual event.
‘She is a trailblazer,’ she beams. ‘She’s always represented that to all of us, the four girls, her four granddaughters and one grandson. They all come out every year, drop everything, and come to Belfield to cheer her around that course.
‘It was something with credibility. You didn’t do it just to look good, you put in the work to achieve something, because it’s hard. I used to complain all the time, “I’m all sweaty, I hate being sweaty.” I nearly stopped. But you learned to tolerate sweat and pain, it’s all temporary. And you got to know your body, what it was capable of.
‘I know I have 10km in me, Carol knows she has 10km in her, any time of the year, you can manage your way around it.’
For Carol it helped her feel more powerful, and not just in the physical sense. ‘I was actually quite shy and easily intimidated,’ she says. ‘There was a time when going to things like parent/teacher meetings, I found it difficult to ask questions. Running brought me to the point where I became more assertive.’
Her running habit also came in handy during the pandemic.
‘I kept at it during the first lockdown, and all of the lockdowns,’ she grins. ‘That was great because I was so mad at them telling older people to stay at home. I damn well ran every day, just to do it.
‘I’d head up to the Southern Cross Road, it’s about 3km away, and then back again. It kept me sane while I was here on my own.’
She points out the patio doors into her stunningly lush back garden. ‘I
‘She’s a trailblazer, she’s always been that to us’
also built a garden,’ she says. ‘If I wasn’t out there digging, I was out running. I loved it.
‘There was a Garda checkpoint up there, and I always wore my mask, this woman guard would always salute me as I ran past.
‘It gave me a sense of great purpose. When older women told me they never went out during all that time, well it made me feel so sad, I couldn’t have imagined it.’
During the pandemic she ran the virtual mini-marathon around her neighbourhood in Bray, Co Wicklow, with Catherine’s daughter Shona, who is now 19 and the third generation to take it up.
‘I run twice a week now and play a bit of tennis,’ says Carol. ‘I love that the marathon has always given me a great structure to the year, if you didn’t have a deadline, you might put the training off. I do believe it’s the training, more than anything, that has kept me moving so well.’
She plans to run the 40th anniversary of the mini-marathon with two of her daughters.
‘My eldest daughter Grainne, who lives in Texas, is coming over, so the three of us will do it,’ she says. ‘Or at least we’ll start it together. Catherine is faster than me now, so I wouldn’t like to hold her back. And I wouldn’t let the other one hold me back!
‘When you think about it, logistically it’s simply amazing that we’ve been here every year to do it and we weren’t too sick or broken down to run. But I think the thing I’m proudest of is how many of my friends and other women I’ve met down through the years I’ve persuaded to do it too.
‘Passing on my love of the mini-marathon has been my good deed in life.’
FOR more information on the VHI Women’s Mini-Marathon, go to vhiwomensminimarathon.ie