Riding through her own pain inspires Irish track sensation to back Barretstown

Lara Gillespie: I know people who have been very much helped by Barretstown and how valuable it is and how special and magical it is. Picture: Barretstown

Years battling severe pain from an undiagnosed illness is one of the reasons Olympic hopeful Lara Gillespie will be in this year’s Barretstown Cycle Challenge.

The experience has helped the track cycling sensation appreciate the suffering of the seriously ill children who stay at the famous residential camps run by the Kildare charity.

Another reason the Paris 2024 Olympic hopeful will be taking part in this year’s challenge is that she knows children who have benefited from staying there.

The cycle takes place from June 23 to 25, travelling from Cork City to Barretstown campus in Kildare and is an opportunity to support children living with serious illness.

The 22-year-old, who recently returned from cycling for Ireland in Canada before heading to Belgium for more races wearing the green jersey, said: “My first reasoning is it just has such a massive reputation. I know people who have been very much helped by Barretstown and how valuable it is and how special and magical it is.

“Also relating back to my own good few years of long term-ish illness, I was thinking how valuable something like this would be for someone who's younger."

Ms Gillespie suffered years of agony as a child and in later life due to a rare gynaecological and kidney condition called ohvira.

“It was never diagnosed,” she said. “It just caused a lot of pain as a teenager and no one ever knew what it was.

I just had to live in pain for many, many years and then in early 2021, I got surgery for it because an amazing surgeon finally figured out what it was.

“Then I was able to heal from that and I haven't had pain since then.” 

She was then hit by glandular fever and she had to take more time off from her cycling.

“I missed two full seasons, and I had missed a lot of school and stuff because of the pain,” she said. “There's just a lack of research in that whole area of gynaecology."

Ms Gillespie, from Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, has more than 20 national championship cycling titles to her name, including four elite titles.

Added to that, she also has silver in the 10km time trial at the European Youth Olympics Festival.

Landmarks in her career so far also include helping Ireland’s pursuit squad race to two new national records in recent months.

In September last year, she won in the first Kilkenny to Callan, 74k stage of Rás na mBan, Ireland’s five-day international women’s cycling race.

In doing so, she became the first Irish woman to win a stage of the event since 2014.

Barretstown is now the largest provider of therapeutic programmes in Ireland for children affected by serious illness.

To date, it has helped over 85,000 children and family members to rebuild the confidence that a serious illness can take away.

To learn more about the Barretstown Cycle Challenge go to barretstown.org.