Stephen Scullion: 'The better I get at life, the better I get at running'

Scullion had never been an alcoholic, but the few times each year when he broke from his monastic lifestyle, moderation was nowhere to be found. The drinking, he could handle. The depths to which his thoughts sunk after? Not so much

Irish international athlete Stephen Scullion is encouraging runners to sign up to the 2021 KBC Virtual Dublin Marathon and Race Series with distances of 4 Mile, 10km, 10 Mile and Half marathon available. Entries are now open on kbcdublinmarathon.ie #RunYourTown. Runners who have secured a place for the 2021 KBC Dublin Marathon on Sunday 24th of October will receive confirmation by Friday 25th of June on whether the event can go ahead. Picture: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile 

The morning he decided he’d had enough, Stephen Scullion woke up in a pool of his own vomit. It was December 2020, a week before Christmas, and while the Belfast native would like to say it was related to the arrival of Olympic year, the truth is it wasn’t about that.

Scullion had never been an alcoholic, but the few times each year when he broke from his monastic lifestyle, moderation was nowhere to be found. The drinking itself, he could handle. The depths to which his thoughts sunk after? Not so much.

“You normally live up a mountain like a saint, and here you are hammering 10 or 12 pints and shots and then my body just rejects it,” he says. “I’d be (hitting) incredibly low lows. I ended up booking a flight back to England the next day so I didn’t even stay home for Christmas because I didn’t trust myself to stay and not drink again.”

He hasn’t touched a drop since, and it’s not so much because alcohol is a potent threat to peak performance – though it sure doesn’t help – it’s more that Scullion is trying his best to navigate a path to secure mental health.

“I tried to think of one time in my life where alcohol has actually done something good for my life, and I couldn’t think of one thing. I do all this work to try improve my mental health, try to be happy, and then to go ruin it, just by being greedy with alcohol. I just decided I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The event he’s in, with the way of life it invokes, does little to instil balance.

“If you want to be competitive, your life might not always be in balance,” he says.

The 32-year-old is the second-fastest Irish marathoner of all time, having clocked 2:09:49 at the London Marathon last October, but just weeks before that performance his mind was in disarray. He reached out to the Sports Institute for Northern Ireland, telling them he needed help, and they put him in touch with a London-based sports psychiatrist.

He spent the next three months talking to that psychiatrist and started a course of anti-depressant medication, but Scullion knew that was only one small tool in the mental health armoury.

“If you take a hay fever tablet and run off into a field where there’s grass, you’re still probably going to have hay fever, and anti-depressant medication tablet cannot fix everything – it can help,” he says. “I honestly don’t know yet everything that makes me happy, but I’m starting to find little things that really add to my day.”

Maybe it’s visiting his parents and helping his mother dig in her allotment, maybe it’s meeting friends for a catch-up or singing along to loud music in his car – these days Scullion makes conscious choices to add happiness to his days.

“It’s been tough and it’s always been an ongoing process, I had to fix a lot of things in my life that gave me a chance to be happier. I’ve been like a wrecking ball since I was 18. But the better I get at life, the better I get at running.” 

With a little over three months until the Olympic marathon, Scullion says he’s in the best shape of his life and he’s ticking every box to make sure he’s ready for the big day. The race will be held in Sapporo, 830km north of Tokyo, where conditions should be slightly less oppressive than in the host city. To prepare Scullion has been training in a heat chamber at 32 degrees Celsius and 60-70% humidity and also doing 30-minute stints in a sauna.

Earlier this year he underwent an operation to correct a breathing issue, exercise-induced laryngeal obstruction, which often caused him to wheeze as he inhaled, the issue rearing its head 12 miles into last year’s London Marathon.

“The condition means your vocal cords are working against you, as you breathe, closing your airways,” he says. “I’ve gone 10, 15 years of my life (when) breathing was the biggest thing that set me back, so to be almost set free is really cool.”

Running might long have been the sun around which his whole life orbits, but Scullion is slowly learning it doesn’t always have to be that way.

“You do the sport because you love it and you’re passionate and want to see how good you can be,” he says. “I ran 12 miles over a mountain this morning because I enjoy it, and I’d do that whether the Olympics are happening or not.”

- Stephen Scullion was speaking at the launch of the 2021 KBC Virtual Dublin Marathon and Race Series with distances of 4 Mile, 10km, 10 Mile and Half marathon available. Entries are now open on kbcdublinmarathon.ie. Runners who have secured a place for the KBC Dublin Marathon race event on Sunday October 24, will receive confirmation by Friday, June 25 on whether the event can go ahead.