ANOTHER SIDE OF THE TRACK
The remarkable story of an Irish running legend who’s still on his marks
RUNNING has coursed through the life of Frank Greally as true as blood. It has powered him from a childhood in the west of Ireland to an Irish record in Santry, a scholarship to Tennessee in the 1970s through nearly four decades editing Ireland’s most renowned running magazine.
The latest bend on the track brings him to the Daily Mile, an initiative simple and brilliant enough to improve the lives of primary schoolchildren all over Ireland.
Running and Frank Greally is a relationship with some distance left in it yet.
‘I’ve had very big challenges in my life,’ he says.
‘I’ve had the challenges of depression and alcoholism.’
He talks, fittingly, in the Phoenix Park, a place sacred to Dublin’s runners and that continues to nurture thousands of them on every day of the year.
The sky has turned, after weeks of flawless azure, a more familiar, phlegmy grey. There is the faintest feel of rain on the wind as Greally tries to put running in its proper place.
‘The Irish Runner was the way I expressed myself. When I came back from America, I should have picked up my running. I could still have made a serious impression.
‘I didn’t; I got immersed in the magazine and the magazine sustained me.
‘There have been a lot of times in my life when running sustained me, because there is a spiritual element to it.’
He retired last month after 37 years editing the Irish Runner, the magazine he founded in 1981 in a spirit of enthusiasm rather than coolheaded commercial nous.
‘I remember one fella coming up to me and telling me, “This is not feasible to do, you’re mad”.
‘I said, “Sure I knew that anyway”,’ he laughs.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was living in Dublin after returning from four years at East Tennessee University. He went there in 1972, at the age of 21, on a scholarship after competing for Ireland at the International Cross Country Championships.
His prowess as a runner was well established by then, most powerfully on August 18, 1970, when he broke the Irish junior record for the 10,000m in a time of 30 minutes 17 seconds. The record still stands. His time in Tennessee was extraordinary. Greally wrote his autobiography in 2015 and in ‘Running Full Circle’ (below) he relates some of his adventures: threatened by a local redneck who wanted to throw him off a scaffold 100 feet off the ground; having his drink spiked with LSD and thinking he might run through trucks on the highway (he never got that far); drinking with James Dickey, the author of Deliverance.
Athletically, his time there was a disappointment and he was cut from his scholarship after three years. By then, drink and depression had him in their grasp, but he tried to barrel on. It would be another two decades before he tamed those problems.
He returned to Ireland and his native Ballyhaunis after his time in Tennessee, then moving to Dublin where he worked selling ads in the Sunday Tribune before deciding Ireland was ready for a dedicated running magazine.
Journalism appealed to Greally because he had always loved writing, and it was a trip to Limerick Racecourse in 1979 for the World Cross Country championships that settled his decision.
There, he not only saw John Treacy successfully defend his title, but he also met Con Houlihan for the first time. ‘Most people would have said it was the maddest thing you could do,’ he laughs now. ‘But I’ll tell you the things that kept me going: it was running around the Phoenix Park and handing out leaflets to people, and the goodwill of the runners on the ground who subscribed in the early days.’ The magazine survived, its future secured in 2007 when Athletics Ireland took over and Greally stayed on as editor.
Retiring now was a wrench, but eased by his involvement in the Daily Mile. It was an idea given life by a Scottish schoolteacher in 2012, when she asked children in her class to go for a run and discovered most of them were too unfit to do so.
The Daily Mile began, where children spend 15 minutes a day running. The idea is that simple – and, potentially, transformative.
It arrived in Ireland in April, with pilots in schools in Castleknock in Dublin and Blennerville outside Tralee. Over 170 schools are now involved, with Greally anticipating a sharp rise in pick-up ahead of the schools returning in September.
Athletics Ireland, through him, co-ordinate the programme, with the help of local sports partnerships around the country.
‘When I see kids attracted so much to running around for 15 minutes and hear the feedback from teachers, and see it with my own grandkids, there is such a huge need to give this form of expression to kids,’ he says. He understands from the role running has played throughout his own life that it allows people to express themselves when more conventional means of communication may not. ‘There is a social dimension to it, because when you go out and see the kids running, they’ll be in little clusters afterwards talking about it.’ It is not a talent identification system. Rather, it values exercise in a society whose problems with sedentary lifestyles are tirelessly repeated. Children are given a few moments in each day that have the power to make their lives better. ‘There was one young lad in a
class who was a good bit bigger than the rest of the class,’ he recalls of a visit he made to one school.
‘He ran the mile slowly, but I was talking to his teacher and they talked about the change in him.
‘He had lost weight, he was communicating better. The Daily Mile within three months had transformed him. Even if it’s only one, it makes a huge difference.’
Greally understands the power of running as an agent of change in a life, but also as a means of commemoration. The other project that consumes him is the Remembrance Run, held on the second Sunday of November in the Phoenix Park since 2012. It started as a tribute to Houlihan. ‘It’s really Con’s run,’ he explains. ‘I went in to see him before I left for the Olympics in 2012 (Houlihan died in Dublin during the London Games, at the age of 86).
‘We didn’t have to say a lot. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him again, and he knew that, too. He was special in so many ways. ‘My vision for the run was that it would help people with grief and loss, that it would give a form of expression to that. ‘We all want to be remembered, that’s a primal thing. We don’t want to fade away. And there is that need to express loss as well.’ Houlihan came in to Greally’s mind on a recent brilliant evening in the Park, while he was overseeing his last photoshoot as editor of the Irish Runner. Tomás, the eldest of his five children, was taking the photos. Father and son became emotional when they realised this was the last time they would work together on the magazine.
‘So I told him about Con, and a lovely piece he wrote about the last day he spent working with his father,’ says Greally. Houlihan wrote a famous, heartbreaking piece about the final day spent on the bog in Kerry with his father, before the son was leaving to go and work in Dublin.
‘He wrote that “the last time” are the hardest three words in the English language,’ recalls Greally. For him, that time isn’t now. There is some distance to go yet, in a race that began in Ballyhaunis and wended its way through Dublin, the hills of Tennessee and home again.
I REMEMBER BEING TOLD “THIS IS NOT FEASIBLE TO DO, YOU’RE MAD”