ATHLETICS: AUTUMN ALREADY! The flaunting sunshine lights only the surface. Dim crimsoned leaves fall from the trees. There's a soft-leather feel underfoot. The air is fragranced with sweet incense. A white cotton vest is on the line hanging dry. It must be the start of the cross country season.

Pardon the fancy prose, but that’s what happens every time I read any Nabokov. (Or should I say, read and weep.) Yet there is something about this time of year that brings on a gentle melancholy, as I found out while running in the Phoenix Park during the week.

The cross country season starts tomorrow and it would be hard to find a more inspirational setting than the Phoenix Park. The occasion, as it has been for the past 25 years, is the Gerry Farnan Memorial. The event started out as a tribute to the late Metro-St Brigid’s coach, who died suddenly in 1982, the year before his star pupil, Eamonn Coghlan, ran 3:49.78 to break the world indoor record for the mile.

It’s fitting then that tomorrow’s event takes place around the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park, and the trail that Farnan renamed “Munich Hill” as a way of planting the Olympic dream in young Coghlan’s mind. It used to be the cross country season was a drawn-out affair. There would be a couple of big races this side of Christmas, but it was all about peaking towards the middle of March, and the World Cross Country.

Things have changed. These days, at least on this part of the planet, it’s more about peaking towards the middle of December, and the European Cross Country. The World Cross Country, for better or for worse, has effectively become a Kenya-Ethiopia dual match, which helps explains why after 2010 the event will only be staged every two years.

The European Cross Country is where’s things are at now, for us anyway. The pressure will be on, too, given we’re staging the event, in just eight weeks, in the parkland behind the Morton Stadium in Santry. This has injected an added sense of excitement and urgency into the season, and for many Irish athletes tomorrow’s races in the Phoenix Park mark the first step towards making it to Santry on Sunday, December 13th.

It appears the majority of our top runners will be fit for the challenge. Martin Fagan is probably our only man capable of getting into the medals, and just when it seemed he was about to spend another winter sidelined with injury he won a half-marathon in Boston last Sunday, beating a couple of top Kenyans in the process. Fagan was leading the European Cross Country in Brussels last year when he tripped and fell and, understandably, faded to 24th. If he makes the start line in Santry 100 per cent fit he’ll be hard to beat.

The Irish highlight from Brussels was Mary Cullen finishing fourth. After a courageous display of front-running, Cullen ended up just two seconds short of a place on the podium, out-run firstly by Hilda Kibet – the Kenyan in Dutch disguise – and then the two Portuguese athletes, Jessica Augusto and Inês Monteiro. Fourth in Europe was still plenty to sing about, particularly as Cullen had spent that summer at her US base in Providence, Rhode Island, patiently working her way back to fitness after sustaining a bilateral stress fracture of the sacrum – one of the worst running injuries possible.

Her confidence restored, she tore into the indoor season with buckets of determination, soon lowering the Irish indoor 3,000 metres record to 8:43.74 – improving the 8:44.37 that had stood to Sonia O’Sullivan since 1997. By the time Cullen arrived at the European Indoors in Turin last March she was among the medal favourites.

Again, she hit the front early on, and although this wasn’t enough to burn off Almitu Bekele – the Ethiopian in a Turkish disguise – or Portugal’s Sara Moreira, who also got past in the last 100 metres, Cullen held on for the bronze. Now, it seemed, she could look forward to delivering on her potential outdoors, or more specifically at the World Championships in Berlin.

What happened next not only put her running career back in perspective, but nearly ended it. Cullen spent a few weeks at home in Sligo, enjoying her success in Turin before competing in the Great Ireland Run at the end of April – but was suddenly hit with a double-whammy, as she recounted to me in quite frightening detail this week.

“Leading up to the Great Ireland Run I felt some pain around the hip, but I just put it down to some tightness. I didn’t think too much about it. During the race I felt nothing at all, but straight after, when warming down, it was very, very painful. I knew then something was wrong, that it was definitely more than just tightness.

“At the same time, I had this small lump on the left side of my forehead. You can actually notice it if you look closely at pictures of me from Turin. My mother was a bit concerned, so I got a scan done in Sligo, the day I was supposed to fly back to America. The doctor was reluctant to send me back after that. The exact same day I also got the results of a scan on my hip, and was told I had another stress fracture.”

Cullen wasn’t sure what to be more annoyed about; her head, or her hip: “They did a few more tests on my head, an MRI scan. Still they didn’t really know what they were dealing it. There was some small growth on my forehead, but it had eroded my skull bone, and a little node of it was going in towards brain tissue. So they referred me to Beaumont for more scans. At the time I still hoped to make Berlin, and thought maybe they could put off the surgery until September. But they didn’t want to leave it any longer. Two weeks later I had surgery to have it removed.”

So, after spending another summer in Providence, patiently working her way back to full fitness, Cullen has been back in Sligo in recent weeks, and heads to the Phoenix Park tomorrow with the very spirit that Gerry Farnan once preached.

“For a while after Turin I was very down about the sport, wondering why these things kept happening to me. But once you realise how much you love running you just motor on. The big thing, really, was the European Cross Country in Dublin. That was huge motivation right through the summer.

“To have an event like this in your home country doesn’t come around very often. I think the chance to win a European medal on home ground is great. I’m not going to lie. I’m training with the mindset of coming to Santry trying to win a medal. It’s going to be very difficult, but hopefully if I’m fully fit I’ll give a good shot on the day.”