By Liam Turner

From oversized basketball jerseys, to being the perennial second fiddle, the lonely existence of running cross-country in Ireland. 

Some days you’d win and take home a medal. Those days, the matted clumps of mud on yourlegs were war scars. The pain in your chest was worth it and the stitch in your stomach was something you victoriously overcame. On the way home, you’d blast Iron Maiden’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and hit every note of the line ‘Determination makes you run, never stop / Gotta win, gotta run ‘til you drop’. It had been in your head the minute the official fired the starting pistol.  

Other days you’d lose and take home the remnants of a course you’d ploughed up. Those were the days you let the mud settle and harden as you sat on your bed, staring at the floor instead of showering. Those were the days you’d blame your pain on the tiniest things -you didn’t warm up enough- you ate too much before the race -you didn’t drink enough water - the sky was blue. You name it! We’ll blame it! 

Those were the days you considered throwing in the towel and calling it a day. Those were the days you came 4 th –  commonly known as first loser. Those were the days you’d sit in a silent car for two hours as your father looked for the right thing to say.  Those were the days you didn’t want to remember. 

But that’s the nature of Cross Country. It’s as cruel as it is rewarding. For every loss, there’s a win. Arguably, some athletes have more losses than wins but if you try hard enough you’re bound to win something – even if it's a participation trophy. This can be said for all sports. However, it’s something that always comes with the aspect of risk and reward but for some sports, the risk is sometimes bigger. 

Don’t get me wrong, other sports pose a more physical threat to its players than cross country ever would. If you asked me whether I’d prefer to run around a course for twenty minutes or get battered in a field by fifteen men wielding curvy sticks, I’d choose the course every time. Yet, after five years of running amateur cross country competitively I’d argue that cross country, while not as cruel, is definitely tougher than a lot of sports – especially team events, like Gaelic Football and Hurling. 

Now before you come at me, brandishing hurls, soccer boots and anything else relatively pointy you can throw at me, I feel it is necessary to mention that I am in no way an expert in any sport. I know of soccer players like Messi and Wayne Rooney but that’s only down to FIFA on the PS3. I know very little of the GAA aside from the fact it was worshipped in my old secondary school and decided whether you were popular or not. The only thing I know about competitive swimming is Michael Phelps and when the Tour De France is mentioned I think of pissing into a bottle and the Armstrong that doesn’t play jazz. Even with athletics I’m not fully in the know as aside from Usain Bolt and Mo Farah, I wouldn’t be able to point out a professional athlete from a police lineup of professional athletes. The one thing I do know however is what it is like to strap on a pair of leggings on a cold, wet, rainy Wednesday evening and go running for fifty minutes on your own. 

There is no surprise that the media has long-focused on the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Given the sheer number of miles required to run while training for races, it means that there will not always be the guarantee of having someone to run 10km with you every second day. Most, if not all, of the training I did in Sixth year was on my own and while there is help constantly along the way from the likes of coaches, they can only bring you so far. You may run with people in training, you may be representing a team in competitions but when it comes down to it – it is only you that determines whether you win or lose.

“All by myself”

In sports like hurling or soccer where you have a team of either fifteen or eleven, if you yourself have a bad day, at least there’ll be other people there to pick up the slack. If at fifty minutes through the match you notice that it’s not going your way, there is the option of a substitute coming in and helping out. If you find yourself struggling half way through a race, you’re on your own. You either grin and bear it to the finish line or admit defeat and bail.

Although reliance on teammates can be a frustrating aspect of team sports, the reassurance that there will always be someone there to help is somewhat of a safety cushion. Even with sports like boxing and swimming, where you are on your own during a competition there is still an audience shouting out your name and spurring you on. In Cross Country if you are running down a particularly secluded trail during a race, it is not guaranteed that there help and support would be there. If you fell on a rough piece of ground due to a slip, which would frequently happen, there was not always someone there to tell you to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. You had to do that yourself. 

Since everything is on you, a sport like Cross Country is therefore appealing as it means your win is very much so your own and is truly deserved. However, it can also be as equally gut- wrenching as it means that the responsibility of the outcome is solely on you. If you lose in a team sport there will always be someone to commiserate with. There will always be someone to share the embarrassment of losing with. There will always be someone to blame. In cross country and the majority of solitary sports, there’s rarely anything like that.  If you have lost, it is because of you. 

The bleak reality of your own limits aside, another aspect that makes cross country in Ireland tougher than team sports is the general feeling of indifference that comes with it. I don’t think it would be that outrageous to say that the GAA has and always will have a grip over sport and the general attraction to it in Ireland. It is something that is actively encouraged in schools, is a large and integral part of our history as a nation and is a significant part of the culture. Competitions held at both minor and senior level are constantly televised be it on RTE or TG4 and I don’t remember a time when I was younger when my father was not listening to the results of a match on the radio. 

GAA players in certain circles are treated as if they are demi-Gods (despite the fact that they will never be professionally paid like athletes) and in certain environments like secondary school, having interest in the GAA largely decided how your time in the institution would go. If you were not a devotee of competitions like the Diamond League and an avid fan, the only time an average Irish person would actively go out of their way to watch a televised race would be during the Euros, Worlds and the Olympics. If I was a betting man, I’d feel quite confident in saying that it would be impossible to find an Irish person that hasn’t seen a GAAmatch at least once in their lives. 

An Iron Fist

If you need any more proof that the GAA is looked on more favourably than other sports, one just has to look at the way in which the €85 million Covid-19 Relief Fund received by Sport Ireland was distributed. €31 million went to the GAA, with €15 million being allocated to intercounty championships. €9 million to the GAA itself, €5 million to clubs, €1 million to the Ladies Gaelic Football Associations and €795,000 to the Camogie Association. Of that €85 million, only €805,000 went to the entirety of Athletics Ireland. While I am not at all suggesting that the €31 million go instead to Athletics Ireland, the way in which this fund was issued is incredibly telling.

During my time in my athletics club, it took two years to organise enough money to be able to buy lights on the track so that we could run in the dark. It took an additional three to collect enough money to afford the much-needed track renovation. While I am assured that most clubs encounter difficulties like these, I do wonder what kind of message it sends out to children who are questioning which sport to devote more time into. One sport has recently received more funding for a shinier clubhouse while another sport can’t even afford to keep the lights on.

Additionally, a large segment of that indifference carries over to the way in which sport is handled in schools. The secondary school I attended was unashamedly obsessed with the GAA which largely meant that interest in athletics from both the students and the institution was pathetically low. Although we did have an athletics team which participated in interschool’s competitions, it was largely made out of lads that wanted to use it as cardio training for other sports or lads that wanted days off, with myself largely being one of the only students that took it seriously. 

This point of being the only one that took it seriously was further enhanced by the fact that the only coach we ever had that knew how to run cross country lasted one year – the rest being former GAA players or general P.E teachers. Unlike other schools which would come to the competitions with 3 to 4 teams of strong runners for all age groups kitted out in appropriate athletic gear, we at times struggled to make a single team of competent runners in any age groups and until my final year, wore left over singlets from the basketball teams that were too big for us.

In 2017, I remember feeling incredibly bemused when my school managed to reach the All Ireland Final in Gaelic Football. This wasn’t because I felt it was undeserved (I know how much hard work goes into achieving something like that) but rather because of how overemphasised it all was. When the team won the semi-final, the school acted as if we had won a war. When we were all gathered in a large room to practice our chants for the final in Croke Park, I almost felt like we were preparing for battle. The team unfortunately lost the final but not before being decked out from head to toe in polo shirts, half-zips, full playing kit and tracksuits all carried in crested gear bags and dining in hotels thanks to the largesse of the Past Pupils Union.

In my six years at the school, I never experienced anything like the pomp and circumstance created by this one success. A giant poster of the ‘almost-winning’ panel was blown up in the centre of the school so that we could share in the teams reflected glory. Conversely, to many non GAA sports people, it smacked of a public ‘up yours’ by the school community... a school community that last tasted All Ireland GAA success forty-eight years ago. To many who had represented the school in all Ireland competitions and all sports from local to elite level, had won individual and team medals for the school and who had consistently tried to make the school proud, the only acknowledgement might be a muted ‘how’d you get on lads?’ from one of the nicer teachers. No parades, no banners, no posters and no social media acknowledgments which rather contradicts the stated ethos of ‘helping students reach their full potential by participating in a person-centred education’. 

A cursory glance at my alma-maters Wikipedia page under the sub-heading sport sees five out of six sentences devoted to the GAA, with the other sentence simply stating ‘The school has teams in basketball, handball and other sports’… not a mention of equestrian events, badminton, golf, or individual students who have excelled in marginalised sports. Yet as much as I would love to blame this over-emphasis of the GAA solely on schools like my own that proliferate the country, I know that it is a cultural thing. We live in a country where GAA will always take precedent. GAA will always be more important and GAA is at times all that seems to matter. Although most institutions do not intend to nor are even aware of how much they prioritise the GAA, the way in which Athletics and particularly Cross Country continues to be ignored only adds further to the well documented loneliness felt by the long-distance runner, an all too familiar sentiment, while I trained and competed in my oversized green and white basketball shirt.