Keelan Kilrehill happy to take the hard road to cross-country success

The Irish star is gearing up for a tough week at Gowran.

Sat, 18 Nov, 2023 - 07:05

Cathal Dennehy

The harder it is, the happier he’ll be. Wind, rain and mud? Happy days. A hard pace from the gun? Grandest. Keelan Kilrehill knows there’s no easy route to the European Cross Country Championships and so, when the gun fires at the nationals in Gowran tomorrow, he’ll be ready to hurt.

“It’s a hard week, a pressurised week,” he says. Finish in the top three and he’ll automatically secure his spot on the Irish senior team for the event in Brussels next month. Anything outside of that and he’ll be at the mercy of selectors. “I’ll have to put in as good a race as ever to get on that team.”

There are guys in the field with much quicker personal bests, but cross country is a different game – the down-and-dirty rallying to track’s Formula One. In this realm, the Sligo man has repeatedly picked off far more accomplished athletes, his best run of all coming at the 2021 Europeans in Dublin, when his sixth-place finish helped the Irish to team gold.

There are times, when he’s training on that same course in Abbotstown, that his mind flashes back to that Sunday morning. He’ll coast around a certain corner and remember the roar that greeted him, the adrenaline, the euphoria at the finish. It was a result that once seemed so improbable, given what Kilrehill had endured years before – an accident that very nearly brought his running career to an end.

In August 2015, at the age of 14, a bike accident left him with “three broken vertebrae in my back then a fracture in my C1 vertebra in my neck.” Surgeons inserted a long bar into his back, with six screws drilled into his spine to hold it in place. As bad as it was, Kilrehill knew he was lucky. “That bone in my neck that I fractured – if that was broken, I’d have been paralysed.”

But the following year his running got back on track. In 2019, Kilrehill enrolled at Dublin City University, studying economics, politics and law. His talent had been nurtured previously by Philip Finnerty at Moy Valley AC but after moving to Dublin he came under the guidance of fellow Sligo man Emmett Dunleavy. At the Euro Cross in 2021, the goal was a top-15 finish but the night before, Finnerty told Kilrehill’s parents a top-10 finish was doable.

“He knows me better than I know myself.”

The pressure of a home championships can build athletes up or break them down, and Kilrehill felt it on the way to the course, the Garda escort winding its way through several thousand fans. He played a patient game for the first few laps but, with one lap to go, he hoisted himself up to fifth.

“I let the hype get to me. With a lap to go I allowed myself to say, ‘you’re going to get a medal.’ It’s the only mistake I made.” Kilrehill went a little too hard, too early, and faded slightly over the closing kilometre, but still held on well to finish sixth. With Darragh McElhinney winning individual silver and Micheál Power 13th, it handed Ireland team gold ahead of Britain and France.

At last year’s Europeans in Italy, he finished ninth in the U-23 race, the Irish winning team bronze. “We were all on the podium with sour faces, it felt weird for an Irish team to be like that. A few years before I’d have taken your hand off for that (result), but I left not knowing how to feel. We’ve set a bar now so there’s no going back from that.”

This is Kilrehill’s first year in the senior category, and he knows just how big a jump is required. He finished up at DCU last year and has been doing substitute teaching this year, his last few months spent at St Fiachra’s national school in Beaumont.

Twice a week, he’ll make the trek across to UCD to train with Dunleavy’s group, though most of his running is done alone on Dublin’s northside, logging 95-100 miles each week alongside gym sessions. He’s 23 now, an age when so many dreams fall by the wayside as full-time work encroaches on time and energy. “You have to make a choice in your life,” he says. His is to stay this course. Dunleavy often tells him that he’ll shine brightest at the marathon, but for now Kilrehill is happy to ply his trade at shorter distances.

The going at Gowran Demesne, alongside the racecourse, will be soft, heavy in places, but Kilrehill is fine with that. “I’d be grinning; I know a few lads who won’t like it.” It’ll be nine kilometres of slog, just under a half-hour of hurting, and a journey to one very dark place. Kilrehill has been there many times before. He’s ready to go again.