Bloodied, bruised but unbowed

His was arguably the story of last year’s An Post Rás, when his battered body and twisted wreck of a bike was posted on message boards and chat forums with headlines ranging from ‘This ain’t football’ to ‘No blood-subs here’.

Britain’s biggest-selling cycling magazine, Cycling Weekly, featured his blood-spattered face on the front of their June edition and before he knew it, Donal Harrington’s crash after 40 kilometres of Ireland’s showpiece cycling race had become the stuff of legend.

“I didn’t know what I was at when it happened,” Harrington recalls. “I got up straight away and tried straightening the bike. I got back on but some officials tried stopping me. I didn’t know why. I didn’t realise I was bleeding. I threw away the glasses because I couldn’t see where I was going and then the ambulance wanted to stop me. But I knew I couldn’t stop because I wouldn’t have finished inside the time limit. The girl (in the ambulance) demanded I stop but I said I’d only stop if she had a bandage ready when I did. She didn’t, so she threw a bit of water on me and off I went again.”

He rode on, and finished inside the time limit by 50 seconds. But there was more drama to come following that opening stage crash.

“The race doctor said that if he’d seen me during the race, he would’ve pulled me out,” recalls the Castletownbere man. “I got 10 stitches over my eye. My shoulder and neck were in pain. I was bruised badly on my right side and my leg was at me because I landed heavily on it and I couldn’t lie on that side at night. Then my jaw was locked up so I couldn’t chew properly for a few days.”

The catalogue of complaints did little to deter his ambitions and he finished in Skerries seven days later, albeit a shell of a man.

So why is he taking a place on tomorrow’s start line?

“I swore after last year that I’d never again do it but it’s just one of those things,” he contests. “Midway through stages, you start to think, ‘why the hell am I doing this’ but then when you start doing the miles in October and are enjoying it again, you train and see yourself getting a bit better. Then you see a result coming, then you start saying I want to do the Rás and do better than last year, then you want to get up in a stage,” he adds.

But here’s the thing; Harrington (38) is a full-time truck driver and could rack up as many hours behind the wheel as some of the guys he’ll race next week rack up in the saddle. Like all county riders, he knows it’s an extreme challenge; that’s why they prepare in the most extreme ways. And Harrington, who will again ride for the Mayo Centra Team, must be as extreme as anyone. Before his debut last year he trained by riding every stage of the Tour de France the previous year by himself. This year, it’s a little more specific, but no less crazy. He trains around his work schedule, but unlike many others, his ‘office’ is often the only place he can train — the back of his trailer.

“It’s quite a sight,” he laughs. “If it’s a fine day, I’d pull out the turbo, mount the bike up on it and train hard for an hour or two by the side of the road and then after I’d do my core work and other things like stretching while watching the cars go past. Sometimes then if I had a full load in the trailer I’d park the bike outside on the lay-by or maybe in the cabin inside in the ferry if I was going to the UK and do my training that way.”

The diet then is another story and if he arrives into a town at 10 at night and only has the option of chipper food, he’ll punish himself by having no breakfast and an hour hard on the turbo.

“It is hard,” he admits. “It’s fine if you know you’re away tonight and home tomorrow, that’s no problem because you know you’ll be home at seven or eight o’clock and you know the dinner will be there but if you’re doing three days away, you don’t know where or what time you’re going to eat so if it’s chips tonight, there’s no breakfast tomorrow and a hard turbo session. I was up in Dulleek there during the week and there wasn’t much to do at 10 o’clock at night there so I went training in the trailer with the curtains pulled and it was grand. I slept soundly after that.”

The Rás is the ultimate test for any Irish amateur, with only a handful having won stages in the last 10 years. Harrington knows it’s unlikely he’ll add his name to that list, but it’s his appetite for competition that motivates him and the rest of his Mayo team, made up of a postman, a fish-farmer and two college graduates.

“I’m extremely competitive and even though I’ll win nothing, I hate fellas being better than me and it keeps me motivated. I’m never going to match the likes of Timmy Barry or Damian Shaw but they’re always the target. You have to keep saying to yourself that if I keep going, someday I’ll get in a break with the bug guns and maybe hold out for a top 10. You have to keep going for that,” he reasons.

The race starts tomorrow in Dunboyne, Co. Meath and continues for eight days, finishing tomorrow week in Skerries, Co. Dublin.