Marathon man to run distance from Cavan to Dublin for charity
A Leitrim ultra marathon competitor will this week run 119km to raise several thousand euro for two local causes, including supporting frontline workers at Cavan General Hospital.
Alan Wynne from Drumshanbo hopes to complete the extraordinary feat within a time of 24 hours this Friday, May 1. Once Alan finishes, he will have covered a greater distance than from Cavan Town centre to the Spire in Dublin City centre. The route, a loop around Loughtown Lough, comprises nineteen 6.22km loops - clockwise and anti-clockwise - starting from his front gate. It is a distance 30km longer than Alan has ever ran before.
It’s not all flat either. By the end, he will have climbed between 1400-1500 metres.
“Its a nice distance alright,” muses Alan.
“I’m looking forward to it,” adds the married dad-of-two who has already managed to raise almost €9,000 on Go Fund Me to be divided between Meals on Wheels in Drumsna and frontline staff at Cavan General Hospital. His original target had been the apt figure of €1,119, and Alan intends on doing a raffle also, donating €119 to a charity-of-choice for the person who can predict most closely his exact finish time.
Alan’s inspiration is his wife Margaret (nee McGovern), a native of Glangevlin, a Community Intervention Team nurse based in Dublin, and her two sisters, who both work at Cavan General.
They are, he corrects, from the parochially known ‘P Fildy’ branch of McGoverns - though Alan admits he still hasn’t yet fully grasped how the West Cavan naming system works.
The money allocated to the local hospital will go towards ensuring that nurses, doctors and other staff continue to be fed.
‘This is a very tough time for nurses. They are putting themselves at risk everyday and their lives have changed so much. Some of them are not seeing their families and the ones that do have to keep their distance from them. They can’t hug or kiss their loved ones until this virus slows down and that is very hard,’ said Alan on his Go Fund Me page, with a photo titled ‘Families’.
He adds: ‘My wife and mother to our children is a superhero like all nurses in the country.’
Speaking last week, Alan outlined to The Anglo-Celt how he has been preparing for Friday by doing combined runs of 100 or 110 kilometres per week. From Sunday last, April 26, his intention then was to “chill” by jogging only “short little sharpeners” of 10 or 12km “every other day”.
“Keep it easy like,” adds Alan, who’d otherwise run anywhere between 60 to 80 kilometres on a weekly basis even when not training for an event.
In gearing up for the challenge, Alan and his youngest brother Brian had been running Cuilcagh on a regular basis, starting out on the Glangevlin side before scaling over to the base of the boardwalk in Fermanagh and back again.
“That’s about 25 kilometres, and it’s over 1,000 metres of climbing,” explains Alan, who only last year found it hard to train after putting a disc out in his back. “But I’m probably better prepared for this than I have been for a lot of races I do. The furthest I’ve run before this was around 90 [kilometres], so this’ll be a PB for me too.”
Alan had another reason for getting involved in ultra marathon running.
Alan and Rikki’s other brother, Brian, who lives in Norway, is also into ultra marathon running and their shared enthusiasm for competing over extreme distances has become a novel way of bringing the siblings together over the years.
“We always help each other out, and we’d pick a race wherever, be it Italy, England, France. We just meet up, have a week there, do a race, but it brings us together. If anything doing [ultra marathons] its brought us closer together. It’s a nice thing.”