Ray D'Arcy: Exercise helped to keep me sane

Broadcaster Ray D’Arcy says being active has always supported his mental wellbeing. He tells Gemma Fullam that finding a sport you enjoy is key and explains why September is the ideal time of year to kickstart a fitness routine

Ray D’Arcy at the cliff walk in Dunmore East, Co Waterford. Pictures: Mary Browne

Ray D’Arcy turned 62 on Tuesday, September 1. It’s a perfect month to start something new, fitness-wise, he says, rather than struggling to incorporate a fresh habit in January, when “the weather is crap. You don’t feel great”.

September, with its still-bright mornings, longish evenings, and return to routine, makes more sense for a reset. But there is no one-size-fits-all prescription, the broadcaster says, and finding an activity “that suits” is key.

Running might not be a bad choice, and if D’Arcy can manage 100 meters in 18.1 seconds, as he so memorably documented on his eponymous podcast back in May, who knows — you might surprise yourself at what you can achieve.

D’Arcy has a knack for making exercise seem fun, rather than a chore, and finds inspiration everywhere. He lives near ‘Heartbreak Hill’, the brutal 2km incline that runners hit around 7km from the Dublin Marathon finish line. It’s become an annual tradition that he and his family head to the sidelines to shout words of encouragement.

“There was a time we would’ve brought numerous boxes of Jaffa Cakes,” he says, “but nobody wants Jaffa Cakes anymore, so we stopped doing that.”

Some years ago, they were in situ earlier than usual and caught the leading pack coming through. D’Arcy remembers being taken aback by just how fast they were running. “I thought, ‘Could I even keep up with them for 100 yards?’.”

In April this year, that thought resurfaced in D’Arcy’s mind when Kenyan Sabastian Sawe made athletics history at the London Marathon by becoming the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. One quick calculation later, and D’Arcy had hatched a plan to match Sawe’s 100m average 17-second pace.

Naturally, he shared this ambition with his Ray D’Arcy Daily podcast audience, and sought advice from Olympians Derval O’Rourke and Sonia O’Sullivan (who themselves gave it a blast, clocking in at 15 and 18.1 seconds respectively). While the elite athletes didn’t hold out much hope of D’Arcy running the distance in under 25 seconds, let alone equalling Sawe’s time, they were generous with their tips (“get tall and lean forward a little bit”).

Undaunted, the Kildare man gave it a shot, bringing his work wife (and actual wife), Jenny Kelly, along to UCD’s running track to film his attempt at a Sawe-speed 100-metre pace for his audience. “So I didn’t get the 17 seconds, it took me 18.41,” says D’Arcy, playing down his impressive result. “But it was good exercise, a good challenge, and a bit of a laugh.”

And his listeners loved it.

Hard yards 

No one should be surprised by D’Arcy’s remarkable time because he puts in the hard yards consistently. Not only is his name synonymous with running in Ireland, he has also made the activity accessible to thousands of people down the years, and in the process raised huge sums for charity (during the pandemic, Ray’s Marathon Challenge raised more than €1m for LauraLynn’s children’s hospice).

Somewhat surprisingly, he came to running late in life. “I was never a fan of running up until I was 40. In fact, I would slag it off,” he admits, adding that he “mainly played team sports up until I was 29, and in my 30s, I mainly cycled”.

His grá for running came about by accident. In 2003, despite having never learned to swim properly, he set himself the ambitious target of completing a triathlon before his 40th birthday.

After intensive training, in which he realised “you have to leave your dignity at the door when you’re learning”, he successfully completed the mile sea-swim of the triathlon, then the cycle leg, finishing with a 10km run, which, he recalls “was the easiest part of it for me. That got me into running. I kept running after that.”

Not only did he keep running, he became “evangelistic” about it, and in 2010, on his Today FM radio show, he came up with Run with Ray as a way of introducing people to a regular running practice, and then, in later years with RTÉ, joined forces with parkrun.

Ray D'Arcy has a knack for making exercise seem fun. Picture: Mary Browne

D’Arcy, who chats to me over Zoom from his holiday base in Co Waterford, has had a “fantastic” summer. “Unbelievable,” he says, while admitting his enjoyment of the glorious weather has been “tinged with the thoughts of climate change. That’s the only problem for me, but that’s not to say I didn’t get out and enjoy it.”

When he’s in Dublin, he runs 5km in UCD, near his home, and “a lot of it is through woods, so it’s very pleasant, and in the shade, so that made it easier”.

In Waterford, he and Jenny have enjoyed yoga “outside, looking out at the sea” and sea swimming.

Before starting his daily podcast last year, he was an early morning runner, but his new schedule means he works for four or five hours from a 7.30am start, takes an extended lunch break into which he squeezes his run, then returns to his desk to do “a pre-record or an edit” afterwards.

Blindsided

D’Arcy was, he says, blindsided by the state broadcaster’s abrupt ending of his contract in October last year, but he’s looking forward, not back, as he builds a new listenership.

“I have to keep reminding myself that it’s a start-up,” he says of Ray D’Arcy Daily, which features former colleagues Kelly and Mairead Ronan, along with comedian Bernard O’Shea and child psychotherapist Colman Noctor. He’s very aware they’re “starting from zero” in what is a crowded space.

“What we’re trying to do is create something that’s new … [that’s] a little bit more personality-led than other ones.” It’s a challenge, but one he’s up for, and the graft is paying off, albeit slowly. “You can sense that there are more people there, and the figures are healthy and on the right trajectory.”

D’Arcy has been a familiar face in Irish broadcasting since 1988, when the then 23-year-old began his career presenting RTÉ’s teen lifestyle show, Jo Maxi. In 1998, he shifted gear into radio, helming the hugely successful Ray D’Arcy Show on Today FM, before returning to the national broadcaster in 2015.

He describes himself as “hardwired to worry”. As a child, he’d “get physically sick before Christmas thinking that Santa wouldn’t bring me anything” but he’s taken that negative and turned it into a positive by learning to control the controllables, which in broadcasting terms has meant learning about every aspect of the job and being able to anticipate problems before they happen.

“I’ve always been involved at every level. I was never happy to just walk in and take the brief.”

Exercise, he says, “is definitely not a chore” and has “always been” the thing that helps him with headspace. He recalls one particularly full-on period when a crazy schedule meant he was doing a radio show by day and TV at the weekend.

“I started cycling to work,” he says, noting that it ultimately “kept me sane”.

“I don’t think it needs explaining, really,” he adds of exercise in general. “As human beings, we’re built to move and to be outside. When you don’t do that, then it’s bound to affect you negatively.”

His weekly routine consists of a 5km run Sunday to Friday, with Saturday off, and a 20-minute gym routine of yoga poses, weights, press-ups and balance exercises four or five times a week. He walks too, and “if I’m doing something and I don’t need the car, I’d always cycle”.

He’s not an exercise or running obsessive, however. “I’m not relaxed about a lot of things, but when it comes to running, I am pretty relaxed about it” — and has long ago ditched the fitness tracker, and any pressure to achieve PBs, preferring instead to listen to his body and, of late, the niggles that inevitably accompany ageing.

“What my body said to me was, ‘If you want to run, continue running. Maybe marathons aren’t for you’.”

He now sticks to mainly 5km runs, with “a couple of half-marathons a year” and that works for him.

He’s particularly looking forward to LauraLynn’s 5k and 10k event in Leopardstown in October, not least because he’s been involved in fundraising for the charity for years, having seen a TV interview in which founders Jane and Brendan McKenna told their daughters’ story.

“Of course, that if the state were doing its job, we wouldn’t need to do all these events,” D’Arcy says, noting that LauraLynn finally began to receive government funding in 2021.

A huge part of D’Arcy’s appeal is his everyman quality. In him, we see ourselves.

He gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, maybe I could….’.

“I went from not running at all for most of my life to becoming known for it, which is a bit embarrassing in a way, because people say, ‘Oh, you run’.

“Yeah, I do, but I’m not a runner,” D’Arcy says.

“I think people see that in me, so they think ‘if he can do it, anybody can do it’.”

And they’d be right.