Over the coming weeks there will be an awful lot of guides written as to how your average couch potato can reinvent themselves through running. Few, though, would be foolish enough to promise readers they might one day emulate Eamonn Dargan. His story is bound to inspire many but others . . . well, they just might run a mile.
Dargan featured in these pages a little more than seven years ago as he prepared to run his first marathon. He had started running only earlier that year, 2007, after having become a little frustrated by his weight around Christmas.
The Dubliner was 17 and a half stone but tall enough to carry it off, to some degree. Eventually, though, he decided it was time to do something and he took to the streets with the aim of walking a bit of it off. Within 10 months he’d run his first marathon.
More remarkably, a few weeks back he ran his 100th. “I’m going to put my feet up for a little while now,” he says with a laugh, citing the Donadea 50k race in February as a likely next outing.
In truth, Dargan never dreamed of joining the somewhat select band of Irish runners who have run 100 marathons or more when he started out in 2007 although a guy he saw wearing a T-shirt that suggested he had achieved the feat did get him “wondering” a year or two later.
“Really,” he says, “I just got into walking, it was going well and I was enjoying it but I got to the stage where some of the walks were taking three hours. So I started thinking about running simply as a way of doing the distance more quickly.”
At that point, the aim was to get home a little faster but as he hit his stride, so to speak, he realised that he wasn’t actually in that much of a hurry to get back to his couch.
“What it came down to was that I was spending less time watching TV, less time in front of the computer, none of which I really missed, while I was doing stuff that I felt I should be doing.”
His marathon debut went well but secretly, he admits, he was disappointed not to break the four-hour mark and so, encouraged by his parents, he signed up for a second. It ended up taking a few attempts to hit the time target, by which stage his lifestyle had undergone a substantial overhaul. That continued when he started running longer distances including the Dingle Ultra marathon, a 50-mile race which he finished with a flourish.
“Yeah, I was surprised at how fresh I was as I came up to the line so I gave a little jump. It’s sort of become my trademark since, people joke about me doing the Dargan, and there’s always somebody there to capture the moment.”
Athens
His most recent Dargan was in the spiritual home of marathon running itself, Athens, where he and a couple of friends went to mark the special occasion of his 100th race over the distance. It entitled him to join Ireland’s 100 marathon club and he was thrilled by the sense of occasion around the event which was a far cry from the majority of the races he has taken part in.
“Most of them are very low key,” he says. “The East of Ireland marathon club, for instance,organises a lot of races for people who are looking to clock up the numbers. You could be walking down the street and see a few people running but never guess that it was part of a marathon.”
He has also done quite a few as a pacemaker, helping less-experienced runners to achieve their goals, and has, along the way, become a well-known member of the country’s distance running community.
“You get to know everybody after a while,” he says. “It started with signing up on running forums for ‘meet and run’ groups for people who were looking to cover particularly long distances and between things like that and the races themselves, you get to make an awful lot of new friends.”
Belfast
Opportunities to catch up with them sometimes come in the strangest of circumstances, like the Belfast 24-hour race a couple of years ago where participants do as many laps of a track as they can over the course of one full day and the one who does the most is the winner.
“It was great because everybody’s on the track so there’s always a bit of company and it ends up that you can have a bit of a chat with someone if they’re passing you out or you’re passing them.
“I ran just over 90 miles. For the last seven or eight hours, though, I sort of fell apart and I was disappointed not to do the 100 but it got so that I was able to walk faster than I could run, it’s hard to explain.”
That, he says,was a bit of a shock to the system and took too long to get over at a time when he was still packing in the marathons with the aim of hitting his century. But now, with the pressure off, he says, he would like to get back to the ultra running. “I miss the extra long runs. I wasn’t great at them but I enjoyed them. They’re a chance to get away from everything.”
Further away, one suspects, than most people would ever dream.
