Injury hell over, Mayo's Armstrong ready to take on the world this weekend

Hugh Armstrong's big summer goal is the half marathon at the Europeans in June.

Hugh Armstrong of Ireland competing in the marathon at the 2022 European Athletics Championships 2022. Picture: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

The injury list is a long one, but ahead of this weekend’s World Cross Country Championships in Belgrade, Hugh Armstrong is delighted to be talking about it in the past tense.

“Oh Jaysus, I had several,” he says. “There was a while there I was in an awful heap with a bad hip, bad back, bad knee, bad hamstring, achilles – everything.” 

For the 29-year-old Mayo distance runner, the worst of all came in 2020 and 2021, the Ballina native sustaining multiple stress fractures in his sacrum. 

“I was very happy to come out of that hole,” he says. “I’ve gotten a fairly clear run of health the last while, thank God. Hopefully I can keep it that way.” 

Having missed a large chunk of 2023, Armstrong returned to finish third at the cross country nationals last November, going on to finish 20th at the Europeans in Brussels. The injury nightmare has taught him to put a new emphasis on strength training, while he’s also eased back on mileage.

Armstrong still runs 80-90 miles a week but supplements the equivalent of 30 miles extra on an elliptical machine. Since 2021, he’s been coached by Feidhlim Kelly, whose Dublin Track Club stable includes Irish record holders Mark English, Andrew Coscoran and Brian Fay. 

He says Kelly puts “great time and effort” into his athletes and “nearly puts more effort in on the times you’re not going well; he’d spend hours with you looking up things you can do.” 

Between 2013 and 2017, Armstrong studied at Providence College where he was coached by Ray Treacy, whose brother John was a two-time world cross country champion. Armstrong has watched the grainy footage of Treacy’s 1979 win in Limerick countless times. While he’ll have more modest goals on Saturday, what matters is maximising his potential. With so many Europeans bypassing the event, he’s embracing the challenge.

Hugh Armstrong of Ireland, left, and Keelan Kilrehill of Ireland compete at the 2023 European Cross Country Championships at Laeken Park in Brussels, Belgium. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

“You don't get that many chances to run at a World Championships,” he says. “I understand that European athletes maybe struggle to get anywhere near the front and maybe that's why some of them are pulling out and I understand some have track priorities, especially with it being Olympic year, but for me it was an easy decision. It's a race I always wanted to run. It's the race where you can challenge yourself the most. It's the hardest race in the world.” 

Few would argue. Awaiting Armstrong is a 10km suffer-fest that gathers the cream of global distance running, a race that will start off fast and never relent. To make it more gruelling, the Serbian capital will have unseasonably warm temperatures of near 30 degrees, Armstrong getting a shock when he checked the forecast this week.

Still, he’s spent much of his life preparing for a race of this calibre. Now he’ll test himself against the world’s best. 

“Coming from the west, we have a good tradition in cross country. In primary school the two sports we’d have done were (Gaelic) football and cross country running, so I’d always put good value on the cross.” 

Armstrong, who has a full-time job as an accountant with An Post, is also knee-deep in marathon training, hoping to crack his PB of 2:12:26 in Hamburg on April 28, though he won’t use heavy legs as an excuse this weekend, given marathon training gets him “the fittest of anything”. 

His big summer goal is the half marathon at the Europeans in June and Armstrong has “pushed on nicely since the Euro Cross” in December, where he finished 20th and helped the Irish men’s team to fourth.

Ireland won’t have any teams in Belgrade but Armstrong will be joined by Sligo’s Keelan Kilrehill in the senior men’s race. They trained at the same venue in Ballina in their youth and finished a few seconds apart at the Euro Cross in December. “It always brings you on a bit to see the green singlet and a teammate,” says Armstrong.

With times irrelevant, Armstrong will have a straightforward approach when the gun fires on Saturday afternoon and the world’s best distance runners set off at a scorching pace. “Finish as high as I can,” he says. “I know it’ll be a big step up.”