'When I was in intensive care with Alfie I was getting pulled into this blackness'
Irish International athlete Ann-Marie McGlynn at the launch of the Irish Life Dublin Marathon and Race Series, Runners' Support Squad. The Irish Life Dublin Marathon on Sunday 30th October is sold out. Photo by Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
Four seconds. That’s all it was. Four frustrating, infuriating seconds. After two and a half hours of running, it’s a margin that would sicken the strongest of stomachs – even among a subset of the population so used to suffering.
At the Cheshire Elite Marathon in England last year, Ann-Marie McGlynn turned in the best performance of her career, the Offaly native clocking a three-minute PB of 2:29:34. The Tokyo Olympic qualifying standard? 2:29:30.
There’s not much you can say to an athlete in that situation, but those close to McGlynn did what they could, flooding her phone with messages. The most potent antidote of all, though, was arriving home in Strabane the next day to meet her children, Alfie and Lexie.
“They hugged me and kissed me,” she says. “They were delighted for me, regardless of not making it.”
With a month to go until the qualification deadline, she knew she had to try again – and so she did. But on a horrid, rainy day in Austria last May, the wheels came off and McGlynn was unable to finish the marathon. She was not going to Tokyo and, at the age of 41, she knew then it might have been her last chance.
“I suppose I just had to put it behind me, there is no point in dwelling on it,” she says now. “As my Daddy said: maybe I wasn’t meant to be there. And maybe I wasn’t.” A sense of perspective is a useful thing in sport, and McGlynn has long carried that. She knows, after all, what a truly traumatic experience feels like. In 2012 she nearly lost her son, Alfie, just a few weeks after his birth. He contracted bronchiolitis which led to a collapsed lung, and while in intensive care at the Royal Victoria in Belfast, doctors told McGlynn and her husband Trevor that it wasn’t looking good.
McGlynn had been an international-level distance runner in her youth, but at the age of 26 she lost the fire for it and walked away. It was the stress of her son’s illness that led her back to it at the age of 32.
“When I was in intensive care with Alfie I was getting pulled into this blackness and I remember saying to Trevor that I need to get out. I went for a walk/jog and I kept that up for the three or four weeks he was in. I got fitter, and Alfie got stronger. Once we got Alfie home from intensive care, I decided I would keep up my running because I started to love it again.”
She entered her first race in several years in 2013, the national indoors, which fell on the same day as Alfie’s first birthday. McGlynn won silver over 3000m and, as she puts it, “the rest is history.”
She has represented Ireland several times since, but never at the marathon, though will get that chance at the European Championships in Munich in August, lining up alongside Fionnuala McCormack and Aoife Cooke.
In preparation she will compete over 10,000m in Highgate this weekend and McGlynn – who also holds a British passport – also hopes to represent Northern Ireland over 10,000m at the Commonwealth Games in August.
These days, training is juggled with her work as a sports therapist and fitness coach, though her life revolves around her kids. “They come first and running comes second,” she says. Alfie made a full recovery from his illness and McGlynn’s evenings are now spent “running after him to football, soccer, and he does a little bit of athletics too.”
She has no plans to step away from the sport again, and McGlynn is currently logging about 90 miles a week under the careful guidance of coach Emmet Dunleavy. The Paris Olympics remain a distinct possibility.
“I am fit and healthy, I am still running and I am getting my first senior vest for a marathon in the summer,” she says. “Look, 2024 is not that far away. We will try and stay in until that and see if I can get it right.”
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