Mulcaire: 'There’s absolutely no way I’d still be running if I hadn’t gone to the US'

Kevin Mulcaire has been in the US for seven years and has been “injured for five and a half of them”.

BACK IN GREEN: Kevin Mulcaire has overcome many injury obstacles but is now fit and healthy and ready to run for Ireland at the European Cross Country Championships.  Pic: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

There is a certain risk, an unwanted hazard, of being a teenage prodigy: the burden of pressure and expectation that must be carried to senior level. Kevin Mulcaire knows it all too well, tracing the path back eight years to when, at the age of 17, he broke John Treacy’s Irish U-20 5000m record, which had stood for 40 years, clocking 14:02.30.

But when things fell apart in the years after, his body breaking down time and again, did that early success make things more difficult? “Yeah, it definitely did,” he says. “I didn’t want to be one of those stories: someone who was good as a junior and got distracted by drinking, getting a job or getting an injury and throwing in the towel. That did kind of weigh on me.”