Golden era beckons for female athletics in Offaly

IT is certainly a golden era for female athletics in Offaly. Four hugely promising runners from the county's biggest athletics club, Tullamore Harriers are currently on athletics scholarship, three in the USA with one staying at home in Dublin. Another Offaly native Ann Marie McGlynn was within seconds of qualifying for the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics while Pauline Curley continues to command the utmost of respect, even though she is now in the Winter of her glorious career.

Then you have two young athetes from the county who have excelled in field events, taking national senior medals. Ferbane Athletics Club member Laura Dolan has had great success, winning Irish junior and U-23 titles while she has won medals in the javelin and 28lbs weight for distance event at the National Senior Track and Field Championships.

Birr AC's Ebony Hogan has won national senior and U-23 gold in the 28lbs weight for distance and she is another example of a young athlete achieving great success through pure hard work and commitment.

A Tullamore Harriers runner, Rahan woman Emily Grennan took bronze in the 3,000 metres steeplechase at the 2020 National Senior Track and Field Championships.

It is a very exciting time for female running in Offaly and there are a number of outstanding prospects in the county. The cream of the bunch are four young Tullamore Harriers' athletes on scholarship. Tullamore woman, Nadine Donegan is at Iona College in New York, her younger sister Danielle has stayed at home in UCD; Emo protege, Ava O'Connor is at Adams State University in Colorado – alongside her Harriers club mate, Ballycommon man James Dunne – and Cappincur's Laura Mooney is in the famed Providence College, Rhode Island.

It is a tremendous opportunity for these young athletes. Most of them have represented Ireland at various levels while a couple may well go on to compete in some of the biggest events in the world.

Running has experienced a great boom in the past decade plus. There are now athletics clubs throughout Offaly as women and men of all generations take up running to improve their physical and mental health. This has been accompanied by a tremendous growth in road racing and running is one of the most popular recreational sports.

At the elite level, however, great strides forward are also being taking. The juvenile section at Tullamore Harriers has been especially successful and there are many more outstanding young athletes waiting in the wings to emerge.

Danielle Donegan and Laura Mooney ran in the European U-23 and U-20 Cross Country Championships in 2021 and further international recognition beckons for both in the coming years as they are both excellent runners on the track, road and fields.

It is a measure of the ability of these runners that long standing Tullamore Harriers' club records are now beginning to fall.

Many of these records have been held by Pauline Curley, the only Offaly woman to have ran at the Olympic Games and Curley's achievements and those of Ann Marie McGlynn have been a great inspiration to the younger generation. It is worth providing a brief profile of the careers of Curley and McGlynn as they have been the standard bearers for womens' athletics in Offaly – before them, Curley's sister Ann Carroll and Tullamore woman Mary Walsh also had fantastic successful careers.

Pauline Curley

Pauline Curley achieved every athletes' dream when she competed in the Olympic Games, racing in the marathon in Beijing in 2008.

Nee Gorman and a native of Newtown in Killeigh, Curley had earlier achieved fame when she was on the Irish team that won bronze team medals at the World Cross Country Chamoionships in 1997 – that great team included two of Ireland's greatest runners, Sonia O'Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan.

Curley has displayed remarkable longevity, continuing to churn out great times and winning races in her 40s. A chef by profession and mother of Emmet, she has won three national senior marathon titles – 2005, 2007 and the last in 2015 when she was 46 years of age.

She has been a remarkably versatile runner, racing everything from 800 metres to the marathon and posting some outstanding times across the distances. A tough, fierce competitor with a great will to win, she has several national medals.

Long distance running became her forte in the 2000s and the marathon was her race of choice. She qualified for Beijing when she posted a fabulous 2.39.05 in Rotterdam that April and in China, she was delighted to finish the race and savoured the whole experience as she ran 2.49.16 in very tough, warm conditions.

Since then, she has been a serial winner on the Irish marathon circuit, winning titles in Galway, Longford, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Derry.

Her husband Adrian is chairman of Tullamore Harriers and Curley continues to train and run regularly – she is always willing to advice and help younger runners, and recently she has accompanied the above mentioned Emily Grennan on training runs.

Ann Marie McGlynn

Ann Marie McGlynn's running journey is an extraordinary feel good one. The daughter of Carthage and Maureen Larkin from Mucklagh, she was a super juvenile runner with Tullamore Harriers in the 1990s.

A great, spirited runner, she won a host of national and provincial cross country and track medals in those years, having initially started with the local Clodiagh Valley Athletics Club, before switching to the Harriers.

McGlynn went on an athletics scholarship to UCD in 1998, having run in the European Youth Olympics in 1997 as well as winning gold in the senior and intermediate 3,000 metres at the All-Ireland Schools' Track and Field Championships.

The world was her oyster but then McGlynn fell out of love with athletics, drifting away slowly as she entered her 20s and stopping all toegther at 25 years of age.

She got married to Trevor McGlynn, an athlete from Strabane, they set up home in the Tyrone town and she became a mother to two young children, Lexie and Alfie.

Running was not on her roadmap but it all changed with Alfie became seriously ill in 2012 with a bronchiolitis virus and collapsed lung. He was in intensive care for a few weeks in Belfast and an understandably upset Ann Marie reached for her runners to help relieve the pressure.

She started running just to get out and it all helped but as Alfie returned home and made a full recovery, the competitive juices got flowing again. She initially joined Lifford Athletics Club, just across the border in Donegal, later switching to Letterkenny AC and she soon reached national standard, followed by international.

From 2012, her times plummeted across a variety of distances to the extent where she ran a super 73.47 in the Commonwealth half marathon in Cardiff in 2018, finishing 9th.

By 2014, she had earned her place on the Irish team for the European Cross Country Championships and a year later, she had a career highlight when she captained the Irish team to bronze medals at the championships, finishing 46th overall and fourth scorer.

She has continued to excel since then, winning national medals, setting Northern Ireland records and stunning all with her brilliance. It almost brought her to the Tokyo Olympics. In 2021, McGlynn was an agonising four seconds short of booking her place to Japan. She ran a sensational

Northern Ireland and Offaly record of 2.29.34 in the Wrexham Elite Marathon in 2021, almost within touching distance of the 2.29.30 that she needed to run to get there.

It was desperately hard luck on the Mucklagh woman and her time was almost ten minutes faster than the one that brought Pauline Curley to Beijing but even without that accolade, her legacy to athletics is a very rich one and her running story still has road to travel as she continues to compete and train at a high level.