All Ireland National XC Championships 2023

A month ago I was bumbling along with the surfers in the temperate climate of Northern Spain, now I'm struggling to find my footing on a boggy farm, drizzle in the air and a fierce wind biting from the North. I've infiltrated a sub-culture of sado-masachists with gangly arms and brightly coloured singlets. I'm basically a modern day Ross Kemp, shedding light on the shady underworld of the Irish cross country runner. The scene is one of chaos as the gun sounds, and 350 of the island's fittest senior athletes jostle for position on a course that is technical, bordering on hilarious.

This is probably the most elite field I've raced alongside (or behind) in my running career to date. Mid-pack however, it didn't feel like an elite level race. Watching everyone wade through the churned up filth, it felt more like I was taking part in one of those eccentric amateur sports of olden times, like cheese rolling or bog snorkeling. At first the mud was quite exciting, but every patch that followed sapped the legs and drained morale to the point of complete exhaustion. There were no dry patches or rat runs, where the pack filtered down to single file. The mud spanned the entire width of the course, leaving runners to plot a different route on every lap, mostly to no avail. The best you could do, in my opinion, was mimic the footprints of the guy infront, in which the ground was slightly firmer and less prone to sucking your shoe clean off (plenty came across the line barefoot - I wonder if the organizers did a sweep of the course between races to dislodge the abandoned spikes, or whether they are now consigned to that farmer's field in Kilkenny forever more).

Cross-country races like this require a special kind of durability. Generally I think there are two types of toughness in this world. There's the David Goggins, 'they don't know me son' toughness where one persists in the face of physical or mental attrition - let's call it resilience. Then there's the shorter, sharper kind of toughness, whereby you keep your hand over the flame and cling on to the runner infront, when every gauge in your body is firmly in the red, telling you to stop. That's grit, and you'll need plenty of it to do well in cross-country. No amount of carefully calculated training or blood-lactate measuring will compensate for a short supply of grit. I thought I had a bit once, but who is a middle-class boy from Surrey to assume such a thing. No, some humans are just cut from a different cloth. As hard-as-nails Noel told me the other day: 'in races I think to myself, well I'm not going to die from this, so you can always make yourself hurt a little more'. It's an admirable sentiment, even if it does miss the point slightly. What Noel forgets is that most mere mortals can't even fathom those upper limits of perceived effort, let alone reconcile themselves with the risk of mortality from pushing too hard. I started out at a somewhat decent pace, but began to wane as the pack thinned out, the realisation that 9k is actually quite some distance for a shin-deep mud run setting in. The only thing that kept me heaving for oxygen till the end was the incredible support around the course. It's undoubtedly one of the best things about running for a team (this was my first race in a Waterford singlet), the feeling of being part of something, that sense that you are running for something bigger than your own short-lived glory. 'Come on Waterford, every place counts!' got hurled ferociously at me as a competitor sailed past on the last lap. 'For fuck sake, really? My 158th placing justifies this misery, does it?'. Looking back on the results however, having snuck in just enough points to contribute to the club competition, I was grateful for that final push.

The pre-race dread is always worth it in the end. It never gets easier, but the adrenaline fueled post-race analysis, which continues on club runs for weeks to come, always makes up for the nervy tummy. Ultimately, we do this to feel accomplished, to feel part of something. It's the same reason I find myself back in Ireland, on the cusp of another wet winter. I don't think any of my friends back home fully understand why I came back, but as I scrub at the mud that has dried on to my spikes*, I'm quietly content with my decision.

* My friend Conor was actually kind enough the clean my spikes for me, and would probably hound me if alleviated this fact, but it doesn't really aid with the imagery of this parting sentence.