Brian Gregan: 'I was jealous of others getting the chance to run. It made me resent the sport a bit'

After a horrific series of injuries, Brian Gregan is back in an Irish vest at the World Indoors in Belgrade this weekend

Brian Gregan (Clonliffe Harriers AC) competes in the 400m final at the Irish Life Health National Indoor Championships last month.

Brian Gregan thinks back to 2017: where he was, how he felt, where he thought he was going. Back then, the Tallaght sprinter was Ireland’s top performer on the track at the World Championships in London, finishing sixth in the men’s 400m semi-final in 45.42 seconds.

Weeks before, he’d hacked his personal best down to 45.26, behind only David Gillick on the Irish all-time list. 

“If I’d a crystal ball then,” he says, “I was thinking: 44 seconds, European medal, Olympic final.” 

Such beliefs were not misplaced. Gregan was an athlete of rare quality, generating astonishing power with a remarkable ability to sustain his speed. The only issue? He was also brittle, his voracious appetite for work often breaking his body long before he made the start line.

For much of the last five years he’s been injured: tendon and muscle tears, stress fractures, bouts of inflammation, a new problem popping up soon after he’d conquered the last, like some sadistic game of whack-a-mole.

“It’s been very, very dark,” he says.

Nothing gnawed away at him more than seeing others do the activity he loved at a time he was sidelined.

“I hated it, I absolutely hated it,” he says. “I was jealous of others getting the chance to run, watching athletes run times I knew I could beat. It kind of made me resent the sport a bit. I love athletics, but when you’ve five years of torment with injury, trying to watch it on TV is horrible. Going to races was miserable.” 

Gregan had been a teen prodigy, smashing the intermediate boys’ 400m record at the Irish Schools Championships in 2006, clocking 48.65 at just 16. But three days after that race, he tore his adductor off the bone during a track session.

“A career-ending injury right there,” he says, a judgement put to him by a specialist who, he says, told him he’d never get back sprinting.

That sounded like a challenge. Gregan underwent physiotherapy three times a week, rising before school to complete his rehab. Two years after the injury, he returned to the Irish Schools Championships, smashing the senior boys’ 400m record with 47.66.

Under the guidance of coach John Shields, he bettered his PB for five consecutive years while at DCU, winning European U23 silver in 2011. The long-running nightmare with his health can be traced back to 2017, when Gregan missed two months’ training with gastroenteritis. Consistency has been hard to find ever since.

In 2018, he sustained a stress fracture in his ankle, which for several months was misdiagnosed and eventually required surgery. A tiny injury to the sheath of his Achilles tendon early in 2019 cost him another three months. He got back training that summer, and was ready to race at the Morton Games before triggering a hamstring tendinopathy two days before the race. Back to the scrapheap.

“That was pretty grim,” he says.

On it went: a hamstring and calf injury to start 2020, a tear in his meniscus that summer. The 2021 indoor season was wiped out by a calf tear, the outdoor season by a hamstring tendon tear.

Something had to change. Over the past year, Gregan has conceded to Shields’ recommendation to move his training to a five-day cycle (instead of six), while in the gym, under the supervision of John Cleary, he’s backed off lifting huge weights through a small range of motion, the inverse approach making a “huge difference.” 

His girlfriend, Ciara McCallion, is a former 400m runner and physio who worked with the Irish Olympic team in Tokyo, her personal and professional support being pivotal to Gregan’s persistence. These days, he works 20 hours a week as a PE teacher at the Institute of Education in Dublin – a job that gives him the flexibility and financial backing to continue chasing the dream.

He’s no longer funded by Athletics Ireland, but highlights the support he received through the darkest of days, specifically from high-performance director Paul McNamara.

He hasn’t been without issues in recent months, but the niggles Gregan felt were flames he could extinguish before they got out of hand. In February, he finally got back on the start line, clocking 47.42 in Athlone. A bronze medal at the nationals saw him selected for the 4x400m at this weekend’s World Indoors in Belgrade, his first international since 2017.

“It’s not just for me, it’s for my coach, my family, for Ciara,” he says. “Everyone who put the time into me.” 

After expressing his delight about his selection on social media, Gregan received a flood of messages, the gist of them being that he was an inspiration for staying the course.

“That’s the biggest compliment, because so many give up,” he says. “It’s a long old road, but with a lot of hard, smart work, you can get there.”