Canavan goes the extra mile

WHO can say how many miles Peter Canavan has run in his life? Sixteen years of service to the Tyrone seniors were merely the tip of an iceberg that incorporated service to his club Errigal Ciarán, the many sides he represented at underage and schools levels and his country too.

A qualified mathematician would find it a chore to untangle the plethora of stats that proliferate professional soccer these days but one of the more accessible facts to emerge from the Prozone culture is that an average player will run between nine and 10 miles per game. Unless his name is Dimitar Berbatov, of course.

Taking that as a rough estimate for Gaelic football (okay, the game is 20 minutes shorter but the pitch is considerably larger), Canavan has run close to 500 miles in the All-Ireland Championship alone. Add in the endless training sessions and the mind boggles as to the overall total.

His inter-county days came to an end after Tyrone’s defeat of Kerry in the 2005 final while his club days ended on a less memorable note last season with a county championship quarter-final exit courtesy of Donaghmore.

But Canavan is still running and the hardest 26 miles and 385 yards are looming large today when he will join 10,000 others in the vicinity of Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Square for the start of the city’s 29th marathon.

The irony of the task won’t be lost on him when the hooter goes for the men’s race at 9am. If there was one aspect he hated about being a footballer it was the endless laps of the pitch in vogue in years gone by.

“I’ve never done a marathon before and it was always one aspect of training that I didn’t enjoy when I was playing, the endurance side of things and long runs,” says Canavan. “My ex-teammates will have had a few laughs when they found out about me running the marathon.

“I find distance running difficult. It is a completely different exercise to what I would have been used to. The long runs are monotonous but it is something I have had to get used to.”

When he was approached by the race sponsors, like all celebrity participants, Canavan was asked to nominate a charity of his choice and the Errigal Ciarán man’s choice comes as no surprise.

“I would be friendly with the McGirr family up here in Tyrone. There’s a charity called the Spirit of Paul McGirr. Paul is a young fella who played for Tyrone minors. It is 10 years ago now that he was involved in a collision in a match and he was dead a few hours later.”

Canavan made mention of McGirr in his victory speech after the breakthrough 2003 All-Ireland final victory and the charity named in the man’s honour was established last year, on the 10th anniversary of his passing.

The group aims to raise funds and volunteers to support communities in Lusaka, Zambia where training programmes are run to help the younger generations gain skills in areas such as bricklaying, baking, horticulture and farming.

His support for the charity is steadfast but Canavan has found it harder to be true to his training regime. With a young family, a full-time job and media commitments all jostling for his attentions, the pavements haven’t been pounded quite as much as they might.

Motivation isn’t as plentiful in supply as in his playing days either. The carrot that is a white leather football cannot be underestimated as Dublin’s Paul Brogan found out during the summer when he ran the preparatory 5-mile race in the Phoenix Park.

The St Oliver Plunkett’s defender was on the road to recovery from a cruciate knee injury when he was persuaded to sign on the same line as Canavan and his feelings about long-distance events match the Ulster man’s. ‘Give me football any day’, was Brogan’s immediate post-race reaction.

Canavan said: “It’s one thing going out to training with 25 other boys keeping you going and having the craic. It’s another going out on your own a lot of the time or maybe with one or two other fellas. You do have to be very single-minded”

“I would say I have only been out maybe twice a week for the last 10 weeks. I’ve been able to do runs of 45 minutes to an hour but it’s been harder getting in the two or three hours. It gives you a better appreciation of the effort long-distance runners put in.”

Canavan’s longest run to date has been a 15-miler. Experts would say runners need a handful of efforts in the low 20s under their belts before attempting the big one.

Canavan accepts the notion that the marathon offers a timely reintroduction to a more structured and athletic lifestyle.

“I was always training with one team or the other and it was great to get a break for a while with no training at all. You find yourself becoming lazy then, though.

“I had no idea it was going to be this tough. When you play a football match you fully expect to finish the thing. With this, you are questioning that. That would be an achievement in itself. Times won’t come into it for me.”