Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
I made it to Down before the support boat sank
AL AN’S EPIC JOURNEY IN HONOUR OF HIS DAD
SHORT distances were Alan Corcoran’s thing.
Anything over one lap of the track? Forget about it.
He tried various sprint events after joining Ferrybank athletics club in Waterford as a kid and eventually settled on the 400m hurdles.
Corcoran won national titles, and wore the Irish vest. He also took a significant scalp when he beat his clubmate in a race.
Fame
“That’s my claim to fame, beating Thomas Barr. In fairness, he was a bit younger than me and wasn’t anything like the athlete he became,’’ he said.
“I remember later on when I was in second year in college and going back home. I went for a hill session and Thomas was just getting further and further away. I was thinking ‘Jeez, he’s on the rise’.”
Soccer was a passion, too, and it was in his blood.
Corcoran’s father, Milo, played for Bolton in his youth and was later prominent in Tramore Athletic. He rose through the ranks in administration, eventually becoming president of the FAI.
One of his son’s happiest memories is of following Ireland’s Euro 2016 adventure, and spending valuable time with his father in France.
“I got a motorbike and travelled around to all the games. Met up with dad in Bordeaux, Paris and Lyon. It was a great experience.”
Two months later, though, Milo passed away from cancer at 65.
He’d had a stroke five years earlier and those two health issues prompted his son to raise money for stroke and cancer charities.
Corcoran wanted to do something different and he had a brainwave. No one had ever completed a lap of Ireland by running around the coast — and he did it by breaking it into marathons.
Corcoran would run the marathon distance of 26 miles and 385 yards day after day, 35 in total. No break — 35 marathons in 35 days, not bad for a sprint hurdler.
“There was a bit of naivety in taking it on. I’d closed the door on sprint hurdles — I wasn’t going to make the grade as a senior athlete,’’ he said.
Idea
“I actually got the idea from Eddie Izzard! There was a documentary he did for Sports Relief which followed him as he did 43 marathons in 51 days.
“Before that, I’d never even heard of doing marathons on successive days. It inspired me and interested me, and the idea started
to grow and grow in my head. There was only one way to find out if I could do it.
“It was very regimented and very routine. I never slept better! I’d get up at 7am and be on the road by 8.30am and finished by lunchtime. After that, it was food, physio, more food, ice baths and recovery. Just locked into a routine for 35 days.”
Corcoran details the experience in Marathon Man, a riveting account of resilience, courage and the enduring bonds that tie families together.
After he’d completed his run, he craved another challenge, and wanted to honour Milo’s memory, too. So, in 2017, he set out to swim around Ireland.
“I managed 210km, getting as far as Newcastle in Down, but the support boat sank, so I had to stop,’’ he said.
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“Thomas Barr had actually helped with sponsorship for the support boat. A string of sponsors pulled out, and Thomas was one of those who stepped in.
“I was high and dry getting close to the start date. Bought the first boat we could get, but it wasn’t reliable. That was the end of that. You need a support vessel when you’re in the Irish
Sea for five or six hours a day.”
Two years later, Corcoran was ready for another go at it. This time, he’d complete the full circuit.
There were challenges along the way, inevitably.
“The logistics of the whole thing was difficult — (there’s) a lot of stuff that you need to spend time and energy on to make it work,’’ he said.
“The swimming and the running bit is something I actually enjoy — that’s why I sign up for these things.
“But it’s a o ne-man show between training, raising money for charity, trying to find a boat, organising first aid and so on.
“From a swimming aspect, the cold was hard to take. Even though I was wearing a wetsuit, it was a real shock to the system. I’m not good with the cold. I was working as a town planner in London and doing most of my training in a pool — this was very different.”
Maybe the hardest part of the circuit of Ireland came in what many might think would be relatively calm waters — Dublin Bay.
“The waters are busy there with boats coming in and out. The Port Authority would come over and go, ‘Stop there, lads’. And a ferry would fly in.
Scary
“I’d get the nod to swim again and then they’d come back a while later with the same message — to stop to let a ship through. So that was a bit hard, and a bit scary.
“My girlfriend, Karolina, had a hairy moment, too. She was in a support kayak and was knocked off it into the water, so we had to get her on to the boat.”
Corcoran is working on a documentary about his swim with the Waterford production company Emagine. It will be called The Unsinkable and the plan is to do a tour of film festivals with a television release after that. He’s also working on a book of the same name.
So what’s next for Corcoran? Has he got the endurance sport bug for the long-term now?
“Nothing on the radar. I did try and paddleboard around Ireland last summer — but, knowing my luck, we crashed into a rock after seven hours on the first day,’’ he said.
“So we had to do the old ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday’ signal to get pulled out of the rock. It was an RNLI fundraiser, and the RNLI had to rescue us.”
* Marathon Man by Alan Corcoran is available on Amazon, Audible and through independent bookshops and local libraries.
‘It was food, physio, more food, ice baths and recovery. Just locked into a routine for 35 days’