Marathon man Jarlath completes his century of runs

THE year 2009 may be now consigned to the annals of the past but for marathon specialist Jarlath Fitzgerald it will be a year that will live long in the memory.

For in 2009, Fitzgerald – a nephew of former Ireland captain and coach Ciaran Fitzgerald – completed a major personal milestone when running his 100th marathon – a feat which he had been working towards for well over a decade.

A native of Loughrea, Fitzgerald started running in the late 80s; it was after he had watched the Dublin City Marathon on television. “So, that was when it started,” says the 43-year-old. “I then did my first one in 1990 and that was it. I ran it in 3 hours and 27 minutes that day and I think that was why I liked it – because I had done so well. If that had gone badly, I may not have stayed with it.”

In the run-up to that event, Fitzgerald had been doing approximately 50 miles a week for a month or so beforehand, which, to many other athletes, would be insufficient road-time for such a demanding ordeal. He insists, though: “I felt strong going into it.

“I suppose, I had done a small bit of running at school, running the 100 metres, or what have you, but that was it. Other than that, I actually never played that much sport. I played a bit of rugby, but I was never any good at it, and I tried a bit of the boxing and I was no good at that either.

“So, I started running. When you are training, you want to have something to aim for and that is when I thought of the marathon. That was when it all started. The way I look at it, most people try different sports before they actually find the one they like, and it was the same for me. I will have got 20 years out of the sport in 2010.”

Following his first marathon in 1990, Fitzgerald took a break of a year, before taking on the London event in the spring of ‘92. “I didn’t want to do my first two so close together,” he explains. “I didn’t want to jump straight back into it. It was the same in ‘94 and ‘95; I did two half marathons. So, if I did a spring marathon I wouldn’t do an autumn marathon in the early years. They were too close together and the body needed time to recover afterwards.”

However, a decade later, Fitzgerald had run 50 marathons. These included the Dublin City Marathon on four occasions – he has run one more since then – and similar distances in England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Holland, Czech Republic, France, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Iceland, New Zealand and China … the list is endless.

“At the time, I just looked at year to year. I never thought about hitting a target,” explains the experienced marathon runner. “Also, at the time, it was a way to see different countries. I started travelling with a guy called Martin Joyce, in Sports Tourism Ireland, and he had so many different tours. When I started doing them with him, it was about where he offered the tour. These were to places like Beijing (China), which was the first big overseas marathon I went to in 2001.

For more, read page 46 of this week's Connacht Tribune.