God knows what Inch Strand would end up like if this fleetingly glorious weather lasted all summer. On Wednesday evening the low tide and gentle surf created the perfect running surface, and illuminated in brilliant sunshine, only a fool could resist.
The three miles to the end and back felt like a beautiful eternity, Dingle Bay and Slea Head suspended on one side and Rossbeigh and the brooding Reeks on the other.
That it was nakedly empty too made for the sort of experience that Roger Bannister always comes back to, barefoot on the firm dry sand by the sea, the earth seeming almost to move with me, a new unity with nature.
From intense moments like this, love of running can grow, and never fail to regenerate. Everything is about the here and now, everything else lost in the there and then.
The only danger is the latent meditation on what might have been, the old familiar teetering between success and failure, and that unknowable point when one wins out over the other.
Musicians, actors, painters – anyone who is heavily reliant on the intangible assets of their own talent – can relate to this, as, naturally, can all athletes.
There is nothing more common in sport than wasted talent, or at least the realisation that neither talent, nor indeed hard work, will always win out: things get in the way, sometimes the simply accidental, and other times the plainly absurd.
It’s that same old familiar feeling that comes around this time very year, when the Irish Schools Track and Field Championships roll into Tullamore for the day, and after nine hours of non-stop running, jumping and throwing, across the 106 events, everything seems perfectly divided by talent and hard work.
Only sooner or later comes the point when success is heatedly unresolved, failure the cold reality, and life sweeps away the dreams that we have planned.
Full of potential
Such is the randomness of it all, whether you believe in destiny, or fate, or indeed God's will. This is the same sense that pervades the schools championships, such is the great uncertainty that follows athletes so young and so full of potential, before the circumstances of life get in the way.
Part of the fun is wishing or hoping for what might be: she could be the next Sonia O’Sullivan; he’s better than John Treacy was at that age. So much so that sometimes we forget that athletes in their youth should be taken for what they are, not what they might become, off somewhere in the where and when.
It struck me lightly this week, talking to Marcus Lawlor, Ireland’s fastest schoolboy: the 10.38 seconds Lawlor ran in the 100 metres at the Leinster Schools last month broke, at last, the national junior record which had stood to Derek O’Connor for 30 years. When he told me he’s coached by his mother Patricia Amond (herself once Ireland’s fastest schoolgirl), off her very same schedules, that he’s never lifted any weights in his life, his potential seemed without limits.
Lawlor will almost certainly win a sprint double this afternoon, and also hopes to anchor his school, Carlow CBS, to the senior sprint relay title: unless he does a Usain Bolt and slows up dramatically, his 100m time will likely eclipse the 10.70 seconds schools record, which has stood to Tony Flannery from Terenure College since 1970 – the oldest record in the schools' books (and which, like Olympic, records can only be broken in that competition itself).
Daunting challenge
After that there is the slightly more daunting challenge of sitting his Leaving Cert, and for all his wonderfully innocent aspirations to run much faster, there is no guarantee that Lawlor will ever again enjoy the sense of sporting superlative of this afternoon. This is his time as much as anything or everything he might achieve in the future is.
Of course he’s not alone: Síofra Cléirigh Buttner of Coláiste Iosagáin has already established herself as a schoolgirl distance running phenomenon, and the last thing she needs is any more expectation. Some people wondered if she’d even make it this far in her schools’ career, yet she keeps improving, running an astonishing 2:06.67 for 800m in the Leinster Schools last month – knocking three seconds off that record, and better still leading from gun to tape.
Another athlete I’m very excited to see running this afternoon is Seán Tobin, a great talent being carefully nurtured by his team of mentors and training partners in Clonmel. Tobin broke two records in the Munster Schools – his 1:50.23 for 800m bettering the 12-year record of Liam Reale, and his 3:50.54 breaking Mark Carroll’s record, which went all the way back to my own days in the Irish Schools, as precious now as this fleetingly glorious sunshine.
It struck me strangely too when hearing two of our perhaps finest schools’ talents, distance runners Shane Fitzsimons from Mullingar and Ruairí Finnegan from Letterkenny, won’t be in Tullamore this afternoon. Instead, they’ve decided to chase qualifying times for a World Youth Championships.
The hope is they will get it, and the hope is they won’t regret it. It is easily forgotten in the moment but the only thing that matters about being young and athletic and talented is being able to enjoy it in the here and now.
