By his own humble admission, Jason Foley may not be the fastest man on the Kerry football team. Not just now anyway, although there is ample evidence to suggest the money should be on him come a flat-out sprint.
However Foley wouldn’t have come this far without his grounding in athletics, in his case the sprint hurdles, Kerry’s All-Ireland-winning full back is equally forthright about that.
Now aged 26, his once rake-thin frame now suitably armed for Gaelic football, Foley’s early teenage years in the small North Kerry parish of Ballydonoghue were all about running fast.
With the local athletics club Lios Tuathail AC (Listowel), he won a series of provincial and national titles, and with that was selected to run for Ireland in 2013, and again the following year.
“And I took it very seriously, up until about 17,” he says. “It got to the stage I was being called into the Kerry minor set-up, was still running seriously enough, but it got to the point I probably wasn’t going to be able to keep up both, would get stuck in the middle somewhere.
“But when you get the call from the Kerry minor management, as a Kerry person, that’s an easiest decision to make. So athletics took a back seat after that, and eventually I had to park it.”
Speaking ahead of Kerry’s Munster final showdown with Clare this Sunday, at the five-year renewal of AIB’s championship sponsorship, Foley has no doubt those early years racing between the 100m flat and the 60m and 110m hurdles, served him well.
“It definitely has, without a shadow of doubt, helped me in my Gaelic football career. I was able to . . . not rely on my speed, but it definitely helped me in games along the way, earlier on, even when I was a minor, stuff like that, and under-20s.
“Even stuff like running mechanics was fashionable when I was coming on the scene, so maybe I was able to focus on other parts of my game, when I was a minor, because I knew I had the running mechanics anyway, could used my speed in different scenarios, so it definitely gave me a leg up.”
Currently working as a special needs teacher at a Ballylongford school, close to his home club Ballydonoghue in North Kerry, Foley was also awarded with an All Star for his championship displays with Kerry last year.
No wonder he doesn’t question his ultimate choice of sport.
“Do I have regrets? Well no, I was happy enough with my decision to go down the football route. I think it’s been worth it in the end, really. I knew if I put my mind to football, that I’d eventually make it to here.”
By his own admission too his weight-gain and physical maturity since his early sprinter days is “quite frightening”, although he’s lost little of that lightning pace.
So who is the fastest man on the Kerry football team?
“There’s a good few up there . . . and I’m probably not the fastest, at the moment. Which is probably a good sign. Maybe Gavin White, or Jack O’Shea, they quite quick as well.
“It depends on the session, or the time of the year, we might beat each other, on the GPS speed, stuff like that. But Gavin especially is a really, really quick player, another speedster.
“My event was the 100m flat, and mainly hurdles – 60m hurdles, 110m hurdles. I couldn’t think of what I ran now, to be honest, for 100m, maybe just over 11 seconds. It might be interesting to go back and have another crack at it.”
It certainly would.
