A race apart – An Irishman’s Diary about runners who never retire

Earlier this summer, in what may have been the least solemn commemoration of the year of centenaries, I took part in an event the slogan for which was “Dublin Remembers 1916”. There was no wreath-laying involved, nor was there much pausing for reflection, despite the historic locations.

The event took place at the Garden of Remembrance, the GPO, Liberty Hall, the Four Courts, and several other sites, in quick succession. That’s because it was a five-kilometre road race.

So nobody could stop until the finish line, in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

There, however, I fell into conversation with Ann Woodlock, a woman I have had the honour to know since joining the Donore Harriers Athletic Club a few years ago as part of my mid-life-crisis management programme.

And in passing, I joked that she should have worn her “medal” for the race, by which I meant the gold medal she had recently won in a European 1,500 metres championship.

Medal

Whereupon, not joking, she told me she had considered running with a medallion, albeit a different one. Were it not for the risk of losing it, she said, she would have sported her father’s medal from 1916.

For a moment, I thought I’d misheard. “Your father fought in 1916?” I asked, doing the arithmetic. Yes, she said. He was only 14, but joined the garrison in the South Dublin Union, and lived to tell the tale, as well as to have a daughter who, a century later, would run the commemorative five-kilometre race.

Ann will be 78 soon, although you wouldn’t know to look at her. I only mention it for two reasons. One is that her 1,500-metre title was for the Women’s Over-75 section of the European Masters (Indoor), where she easily saw off the competition from Britain, Norway, and Italy.

The other is that she features in an inspiring new book just published by Liffey Press. It's called A Golden Era. And as a subtitle explains, it's a collection of profiles of the more storied old soldiers of Irish athletics who, like Ann, don't understand the word quit.

There are so many of these, it turns out, that editor Michael Gygax has had to spread them over two volumes.

The first only covers those born between 1924 and 1955. Youngsters aged 60 or under will have to wait for part II.

Much of the first book’s charm comes from the life stories that preceded the athletic feats. Woodlock, after all, only started running in her 40s, by which time she was a mother of five.

Winning ways

As for her winning gold things, that had started early. At primary school with the Goldenbridge nuns, she topped the class in an entrance exam for secondary. The prize was a “gold-bound bible”. But family finances dictated she had to go to technical college instead. She never got her bible, either.

The book’s other heroes include Willie Dunne, born in 1933, one of 10 brothers who, along with a solitary sister, were somehow raised in an Iveagh Trust flat on Dublin’s Kevin Street.

Willie grew up in a world where athletics was still a middle-class affair, with universities dominant. Even in the mid-1940s, Trinity College’s annual race day attracted crowds of 10,000.

But on one such day, in 1949, aged 15, he happened to be passing on the way home from his boxing club and, hearing there was a “half crown” prize on offer in a 440-yard race for all-comers, duly won.

The event launched a career that took him to five national marathon titles and the Rome Olympics (where he befriended a barefoot Abebe Bikila), among countless other achievements. And he too never stopped. Now 83, he told his profiler: “I can run better than I can walk”.

Complexities

Getting back to Ann Woodlock, she is – among other things – a one-woman education in the complexities of 20th-century Irish history.

In fact, the terminus of the 1916 race – the Royal Hospital Kilmainham – was doubly apt in her case. Located just across the road from that republican shrine, Kilmainham Gaol, the RHK represents the other side of history, having been home from 1684 until the 1920s to wounded British army veterans.

But Woodlock’s ancestors also straddled the divide, and her rebel father contributed unwittingly to the early redundancy of one of her grandfathers. The latter was a professional cricketer who made a career from coaching army officers. “When the British left Ireland,” Ann says, “he lost his job.”