Creech blooming through the thorns 

Ryan Creech, Leevale winner of the men's half marathon at the Cork City Marathon on Sunday. Pic: Eddie O'Hare 

His left foot is in “constant” discomfort. His turn of pace these days is “absolutely s**te”. He’s had both hips resurfaced, his calf sliced open, his foot surgically repaired – twice – and more cortisone shots than he’d like to remember. 

But Ryan Creech is still running, and as fit as he’s ever been.

The 31-year-old Leevale athlete is the fastest Irish marathoner this year, clocking 2:13:03 on his debut in Seville back in February. At tomorrow’s Irish Life Dublin Marathon, he hopes to contend for the national title, a feat that would crown the most unlikely of comebacks. “I’m looking forward to a good old scrap,” he says.

These days, there are many things Creech can do: 95-mile weeks, 10-mile tempo runs in 50 minutes. But there are many things he can't do, like knocking out kilometre reps on the track, for fear of stressing the wrong bone, inflaming the wrong tendon. 

By now, he’s had the chair pulled from under him so many times, felt his world come crashing down, that caution is a constant companion.

As Creech navigated the rocky road back to health, and to Dublin, he asked himself more than once just what he was at, chasing this distant dream. He thinks back to 2019, and how he dreaded telling his parents that after three years out of the sport with injury, he was about to undergo double hip surgeries.

“I said to myself: ‘Am I sick? When will it stop? Am I going to be in a wheelchair when I’m 40?’” 

Still, he can’t stop, won’t stop. Not when there’s still a chance. And look, he knows it’s not the healthiest thing in the world to wrap his identity up in something so fickle, so prone to permanent deletion, but as much as the sport has hurt him, he can’t resist its allure.

“My partner, Chloe, I’ve been with her nearly 15 years and if she put the foot down and said, ‘Stop this, it’s ruining everything,’ which it was, it really was...but she was like, ‘If this is what you need to do to get yourself right and see if you can come back, then let’s do it.’ She gave me the kick up the hole to keep going after it.” 

Truth be told, Creech has been in a war against injuries for over a decade: train hard, break down, build back up – the vicious cycle that’s fiendishly difficult to break. He was an undoubted talent in his teenage years, winning an Irish schools title over 5000m, which brought scholarship offers from the US. He chose Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, setting off in 2011. “If I could go back to my 18-year-old self, I wouldn’t have gone,” he says. 

What he got out of the US adventure were great friends who he’s still close to, but athletically, it was a backwards step. Creech had five different coaches in five years, with one having the hair-brained philosophy of putting four sessions back to back on consecutive days, ignoring the laws of recovery.

“For a fella like me, made of glass, you can imagine how that went down,” says Creech. “It broke me in terms of injuries. You’ve got to know the coaching philosophy (before going), where the programme is going. I didn’t give a shit about that; I just wanted to get over there.” 

He returned home in 2016 and didn’t race for three years. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. During his final months in the US, Creech was told time and again there was nothing wrong with his foot, despite his daily pain, as the issue wasn’t showing up on MRI scans. During a session in Cork a few months after returning, he felt a pop in his left foot. “I was like, ‘f**k, that’s not good.’” 

He’d ruptured his posterior tibialis tendon. It was a horrid injury, and for the next couple of years the bulk of his training was done on an elliptical machine at the Mardyke in Cork. Creech would haul his ass into that gym after work every evening, churning away as he looked out at his Leevale clubmates on the track below – wishing he could be with them.

“It was horrific,” he says. “I did not think I’d get back to any level.” He ran the full gamut of healthcare practitioners as he searched for a cure and had “some great doctors and some really shit doctors.” 

Joe Conway was the best. Based in Belfield, he brought the human touch and expert hand Creech needed in the darkest days, charting his path back, which began with seeing orthopaedic surgeon Johnny McKenna in Santry. The first operation was in March 2017 but it left some lingering issues and so, a year later, McKenna went in again, also doing calf surgery for compartment syndrome.

In 2019, he made it back for the National Cross Country Championships before breaking down – again. Creech could run fast without much pain, but the slow, steady grind of daily mileage left him with chronic discomfort in his hips due to bone spurs and labral tears. 

He had both resurfaced by Pat Carton in Waterford on either side of Christmas 2019. Two months later, he was back running.

Through lockdown after lockdown, he inched himself back to fitness, his experiences instilling a wisdom that more wasn’t, in fact, better.

“As an 18-year-old, if you told me drinking a litre of petrol a week made me run five seconds quicker over 10K, I’d have gone out and bought petrol,” he says. “But I know what works for me now in terms of sessions, volume, recovery.” 

In 2021, he reintroduced himself to those in Irish athletics who’d forgotten his name, clocking a 63-minute half marathon before finishing seventh at the National Cross Country. Earlier that year, he’d clocked 30:14 for 10,000m on the track but that one race in spikes left him unable to run for a month. “That was the catalyst (to decide): my days on the track are done.” 

Ever since, he’s been a road specialist. History has shown him that going over 100 miles a week is his danger zone and Creech, being “superstitious as hell”, now sets a strict limit of 99. 

He still works full-time, squeezing his training around a job in human resources at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Creech is coached by Donie Walsh, an Olympic marathoner in 1972 who has steered the careers of many Irish greats via his common-sense, wisdom-based approach.

“He’s another father figure. He’s a legend, mad as a hatter and we’ll argue about a good few things. But he’s black and white; he’ll tell you how he feels.” 

In recent weeks, Walsh advised Creech to hit the track for some faster reps ahead of the Dublin Marathon, but Creech knew his body well enough to put his foot down and continue training on the same 1.5-mile loop he loves on Monahan Road. “I do everything there, a 10-mile tempo or a 16-mile effort,” he says. “It’s boring, but it trains you to get into the rhythm.” 

His left foot will never quite work as it did and it needs constant care to keep it functioning. “Every day it’s sore, but some days it’s way worse than others,” he says. “It’s held together by anchors and bits of screws.” 

On his marathon debut in Seville earlier this year, Creech ran alone for the last 15 miles which was “an absolute pain in the hole,” but his time of 2:13:03 signalled his vast potential. It puts him four minutes ahead of the next fastest Irishman this year, though some of the heavy hitters of the marathon scene have yet to clock in. Creech will face many of them tomorrow, and his family will make the trip to Dublin to watch, knowing how much it means to see him back on the start line, offer whatever support they can to help him to the finish.

“I’m hoping to be there or thereabouts at 20 miles,” he says. “My goal is to run around 2:12 if the weather is good.” 

Regardless, his presence on the start line means he’s already won a major battle, one fought far from the bright lights of the big city, but out there on the Monahan road, in the Mardyke gym.

Douglas Wakiihuri, the 1988 Olympic silver medallist from Kenya, once described the marathon as like a rose: “At the top you have a very beautiful flower,” he said. “This is the race and it can be a very wonderful sight. Yet along the way to the top, there are very many thorns. Have you noticed: the more thorns, the more beautiful the rose?”

Given what he’s gone through, Creech knows better than most the truth of that. For so long, his talent was shackled as he navigated the thorniest of paths. But it again looks ready to bloom.

“I didn’t live my 20s because of all these injuries and I’ll never get that back, but I hope however long this goes on for, I’ll just f**king enjoy it,” he says. “When it’s taken away, you realise how special it is.”