The big interview with John Travers: 'Everything Jerry Kiernan said was what you needed to hear'
John Travers prior to his heat of the Men’s 3000m at the European Indoor Athletics Championships in Torun, Poland. in March. ‘When the boot was put down, it was like someone just took the key out of the car on me. I went to absolute zero.’ Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
He started out running it for Jerry but it turned out he was running with Covid.
Probably the last time, if ever, you’ve heard of John Travers was when you most recently tuned in to the athletics: for the European Indoor Championships in the aptly-titled Polish city of Torun in early March when Ireland sent our biggest team ever to it.
He was coming off running the fastest 3k ever run indoors in this country to win his ninth national title and was looking to at least reach the final, even possibly medal, something he and his coach Jerry Kiernan had been plotting since he came seventh at the same games in 2015.
With 600m to go in his heat, their plan was on course. Travers was in touching distance of third, and with his explosive kick, was biding his time to make his move with about 300 or 400 to go and secure a final place.
“Then,” he says, “when the boot was put down, it was like someone just took the key out of the car on me. I went to absolute zero.” From running to a standstill.
The last 400m of that heat was run by the winner in 56 seconds, a second slower than Travers had run that distance in the Micro Meet in Blanchardstown that Athletics Ireland had put on a fortnight earlier for its athletes to qualify for the Europeans — but 12 seconds quicker than Travers was able to run in Torun.
As was obvious in his immediate post-race interview with David Gillick for RTÉ, he was devastated. And perplexed.
“I was going, ‘What the f*** is after happening here?’ But then that night I thought, ‘Right, everything is after catching up on me. It’s mental.’”
It was a plausible theory. Back in 2015, ahead of the World University Games in South Korea, his father Stephen suffered a brain tumour. John hadn’t wanted to travel, knowing his dad hadn’t much time left, but Stephen overruled him. Travers duly went and breezed through the heats of the 1500m only to learn the night before the final that his father had died. He opted to race on but felt completely numb during it and finished ninth. He’d hit a wall and now in Torun he thought something similar had happened with it being so soon after the passing of Jerry.
The next morning he woke up feeling particularly weak and sore. “I even said to [Athletics Ireland performance director] Paul McNamara, ‘God, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make the final because I don’t think I’d be able to get around.’”
Even the morning of his heat he’d woken up with a dry throat and a slight headache. But those symptoms had always been normal for him whenever he’d stay in hotel rooms with their air conditioning. Besides, he’d been regularly tested the previous week and nothing had shown up. From the moment he closed the door of that hotel room to opening the front door of his home in Sligo 17 hours later to go straight into self-quarantine, he still didn’t suspect anything untoward.
A further 36 hours on though he was ringing his partner Eimear, who was isolating from him with their two children over in her mother’s house. His temperature had gone from perfectly normal to 39 degrees. She told him to immediately go to the hospital, and so, though by this stage he was feeling dizzy, he got into the car. Sure enough, they found that he had Covid.
I got it rough enough now. For five days I couldn’t lie down, I couldn’t sleep. I had a headache for 10 days.
It transpired he’d got the virus before he’d ever left for Torun; though he’d kept away from Eimear and the two kids upon his return, they’d ended up getting it as well. One-year-old Ella had a particularly bad fever and dose of diarrhoea, meaning Travers and his family spent his 30th birthday together, staying away from the rest of the world.
So that’s what had pulled the key out of his ignition in Torun. Covid. Not Jerry.
Though if you knew how close they were, you’d understand why that’s what he first thought.
***
‘TWO STUBBORN SHITES’
FRANKIE: Stop, stop, stop! Goddamn it, stop! [Halts the speed bag Maggie has been hitting]. What the hell are you doing?! Okay, if I’m going to take you on…
MAGGIE: You’ll never regret it.
FRANKIE: Look, just listen to me…
MAGGIE: I promise I’ll work so hard!
FRANKIE: God, this is a mistake already.
Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood (2004)
There has often been something serendipitous about John Travers’ relationship with running. For most of his school-going years he was oblivious to athletics and his potential — “Any race in school were all sprints” — but then when he was 17 he and a few classmates in Our Lady of Mercy in Drimnagh entered the President’s Gaisce Awards.
“Part of it was you’d to try out a musical instrument for six months you’d never played before, so I took up the drums. And when it came to trying out a new sport, I randomly selected athletics.”
He was dreadful at the drums. The running he took to straight away. His first race, a one-miler in Raheny, he won.
“I thought, ‘I like this.’ I was naturally fit from all the Gaelic and soccer I played, and I liked how you weren’t relying on the team. In those sports you could have a good game and get hammered, or your team won but you’d feel like shite because you did nothing.”
Within three years of showing up at the Donore Harriers he was competing in the world junior championships in Canada and on Sport Ireland’s coveted carding scheme. But a further three years on, he was in a rut until Kiernan came along.
“Things had petered out with me and my old coach so I was in a place where I didn’t want to run anymore. But one day Dermot McDermott who was over all the sports in Athlone IT where I was on scholarship said, ‘Look, a few of us are going to Dublin. Come along and bring your gear in case you fancy a jog.’
“I didn’t know what the hell was going on but he landed us in Belfield in Jerry’s training group and Jerry said, ‘You’re going to do a session tonight.’ I said, ‘I am in my hole’ but Jerry was ‘Get out there and do six [one-mile] laps with the lads.’
“The training group included Mark Christie and Joe Sweeney who had finished in the top four in the European cross-country championships, so I was thinking, ‘How am I supposed to run with these lads?’ After about three laps I stopped, saying something about a sore calf. And Jerry turned to me and basically called me a lazy prick and told me not to come back and waste his time again.
I spent the whole drive home going, ‘Feck him anyway! I’m definitely going back next week!'
So he did, getting to four-and-a-half laps before dropping out and Kiernan again growling that he was wasting both of their time. But the following week Travers completed the six laps. From that moment he had a coach and Kiernan had a new athlete, though they never shook on it or even spoke about it.
“We just clicked. We got each other. I’m the type of person that if someone tries to push me into something, I’ll just go further away from it. I’m nearly like a child; tell me not to press the red button and I’ll press it. And I’d say before Dermot brought me to Belfield, he’d told Jerry, ‘Don’t go easy on this fella now, you need to piss him off a bit.’
“If Jerry had said to me when I dropped out that first night, ‘Ah yeah, that’s grand for the first night’, I wouldn’t have been arsed to show up again. But he’d scared the shit out of me. I was terrified of him, the guy with the hair from RTÉ. If he hadn’t said what he said that night, I don’t think I’d be running now.
“Everything Jerry said to you was what you needed to hear. He’d never lie to you. And that meant you came to trust him fully. When Eimear was pregnant with [three-year-old] Stevie, he was one of the first people I told because I knew it wouldn’t go any further. If I murdered someone, I’d have told Jerry. Now I’m sure he’d have talked me down and got me to hand myself into the cops but he wouldn’t have called anyone: ‘Hey, John Travers has killed someone…’”
They’d still growl at each other. With Kiernan being just as headstrong as Travers, it was inevitable. A few weeks after Travers won an IMC in Greystones, he went over to Belgium and underperformed, prompting Kiernan to pull out a go-to card of his: I heard you played golf on the Wednesday.
“He hated me playing golf, even though it didn’t do me any harm. So I let him rant away and then I said, ‘Jerry, remember the IMC?’ And he said, ‘Yes, John, that was brilliant! You need to replicate everything you did in the lead-up to that race!’ I said, ‘Jerry, I played a nine-hole competition the day before it.’
“No joke, he hung up the phone. We didn’t speak for a week and a half until Eimear decided to ring him. ‘Look, Jerry, he’s stubborn and you’re stubborn. Just call him and get on with it!’ So Jerry rang me. ‘John, what’s done is done! We’ll never speak of that again!’
It was so funny. The two of us were stubborn shites.
If anything that made the other more endearing to the other. Kiernan was infamous for his dislike for the deification of GAA players but Travers will protest that didn’t mean Kiernan disliked Gaelic Games, pointing out that his old mentor once won a Kerry county minor championship. Not that it stopped him poking some fun at Kiernan’s public persona.
“Sometimes I’d ring him up when Kerry were playing and say, ‘Jerry, I think I hear a match in the background!’”
They became a fixture in coffee shops, especially Kiernan’s beloved Er Buchetto in Ranelagh. For the first five minutes they might talk about a recent or upcoming session or race and then for the next hour they could talk about anything.
Kiernan’s love of all things Italian and his contempt for Donald Trump. Kiernan’s word power and love of reading and Travers’ lack of same.
“He was always trying to get me to read more. He got me an Italian dictionary once, just to learn off three words or phrases. But one day I had a phrase for him. I was at home watching Countdown and up came a word: zugzwang, which means to make a false move in chess. So the next time we were in the café I said I’ve one for you and when I told him, he said, ‘Ah don’t be making up words!’ I got great craic catching him out like that!”
Ask Travers who those conversations were between, just a coach looking to connect with his athlete, or two friends, and he’ll say it was all those things — and more.
Ever since he entered it, Kiernan had been instrumental in Travers’ life. It was through him that Travers first got to know Eimear O’Brien, an international athlete herself, from being in the same training group; in fact Kiernan helped bring them closer together when so concerned was he about Travers’ diet, he saw to it that every Tuesday he’d go over to Eimear’s and her flatmate’s place to eat something decent.
And although they still weren’t a couple when they each relocated to her native Sligo within months of the other after each losing their father, within a year out west they were. Now they even share the same classroom, Eimear as a teacher, and John as a special needs assistant, all of which delighted Kiernan.
“Jerry loved Sligo. At first he was a bit iffy about me going there but then he saw how I was more relaxed and running better from the move. One weekend he was chatting to Miriam [Eimear’s mother] and he opened up about what I was going to do as an athlete and how much he looked up to me. And then he said, ‘John doesn’t know this but when Stephen was ill he rang me to look after John and I have because it’s the right thing to do.’
“It hit me hard hearing about that because I only learned about it after Jerry had passed. And when I look back on it he did take on a father-like role without me realising it.
I’d like to have thanked him for what he did for me. I knew he was ill but we were chatting on a Wednesday night like everything was normal. The next day he was gone.
With Covid restrictions, only 10 people were allowed at the funeral last January but Kiernan’s family insisted that Travers be one of them. Because, really, he was family too.
“It was lovely, such an honour. We were all saying it didn’t feel right, that with his healthy lifestyle, he should be alive until he was 90. But it’s sunk in now.”
A while after the funeral he and Eimear brought little Stevie and Emma to Hazelwood, a woodland on the outskirts of Sligo that Kiernan loved. And there Travers went for a run, his little way of saluting and sending off Jerry.
Back in their house, they have what they call the remembrance wall of grandfathers. There’s a picture of Travers’ late dad, one of Eimear’s, and then another of the man little Stevie calls Granddad Jerry.
The weekend of Kiernan’s month’s mind, Travers found himself in tears by himself in a Dublin hotel room. It was the eve of the Micro Meet that Athletics Ireland had been able to put on and give an athlete like Travers a chance to qualify for the European indoors. It was all getting to him until he made a call to Alan McCormack, husband and coach to Fionnuala McCormack and the man who had been willing to step in and be his new coach.
“Jerry would often have conferred with Alan about my sessions. ‘I’m thinking of doing this with John.’ And Alan would have been able to say, ‘Yeah, that sounds good’, or ‘Remember when you did this last year and it worked well?’ And before the Micro Meet, he said to me exactly what Jerry would have said to me.
Mentally I was hurting but he told me, ‘Stop putting pressure on yourself. Just run it like it’s a championship race. Don’t look at the clock.
“At about three or four hundred to go, just take off. It’ll most likely be quick enough to qualify because all the rest of the lads are looking to qualify as well. And if you don’t, you’ll get over it.’”
He duly qualified, running 7:50, the fastest indoor 3000m the country has ever hosted, and now he’s over both Covid and Torun.
It’s all about the Olympics at this point, as in Tokyo, though he has an eye towards Paris too and moving up to the marathon. Preparations have been challenging, there is no loneliness quite like that of the uncarded Irish middle-distance runner, but you just have to find a way so he has.
He’s blessed to have Union Wood, a 4k forest loop, basically on his door; its gravelly, twisty, hilly terrain offering good, hard running. And with the 5k restriction lifted, he’s now able to avail of the track which Sligo IT kindly provide. Athletics Ireland cover his physio. Richard Shanahan offers him sport psychology support. RunPod, a sportswear store in Sligo, provide him with gear. A few local companies — Arrotek Medical, Ward Automation and Verus Metrology — are sponsoring him, allowing him to go Malaga for the next few weeks to help him acclimatise to the warmer conditions he’ll be racing in.
He has to run the 5000m in about 13:28 or less in a couple of races to secure qualification for Tokyo but that’s attainable.
“It’s funny, it’s only in recent years that I’ve fallen in love with athletics. I used to do it because I was good at it but I used to skip the odd runs here and there. I was never fully into it, especially before I met Jerry. Even up to three years ago, while my sessions were hard, my easy runs were too easy, to be honest.
“But now I’m in a full-time secure job and loving working with children, and we have the two kids of our own.
"Because I’m not fully engrossed in athletics I now love when I do it. I know it’s hard to get up in the morning but I enjoy it when I’m up and go for my run. I enjoy then going to work and then coming home and having some time with the kids and then going for another run. Because I’m not at it 100 percent of the time, I’m 100 percent at it when I am. And Covid times have shown me how much I love it, even the struggle and torture of it.”
No doubt to the pleasure of the grandads looking on from that wall.
Subscribe to access all of the Irish Examiner.
Try unlimited access from only €1.50 a week
Already a subscriber? Sign in
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
