Sarah’s late arrival to Hill-running becomes her passion

By Thomas Conway

Picture this: you’re sweeping across the Alpine countryside, snow-capped peaks towering above, verdant forestry dominating the landscape below. You’re thirsty, and you realise your water bottle is empty. Then, in the distance, you catch sight of a glacial stream, a gushing cascade of crystalline water flowing across the mountainous countryside. You fill your bottle and rehydrate. Job done. Nature to the rescue.

It sounds too romantic, too exotic to be true, and yet that was exactly the experience which Sarah Brady had in a recent trail running expedition in the Alps. She ran out of water and ended up filling her bottle from an Alpine stream.

The Rathcabbin-born hill-runner is accustomed to nature, but even she admits that that particular experience was a little surreal. She now lives in Dublin, within that vast concrete jungle that is the city, but she has very much chosen the outdoor life.

She’s a hill runner, but she’s also a naturalist, an individual who cherishes the wild and spends much of her time jogging along mountain paths and weaving through dense evergreen forests. But it wasn’t always this way. All things considered, Sarah was a relatively late convert to hill running, She never ran as a child, and only got her first taste of road running when a friend convinced her to try a mini marathon in her mid-twenties.

“I never really ran as a child or anything like that. It was only really when I was in my twenties that I first started,” she revealed.

“I was 25, living in Galway, and one of my friends wanted to do the Women’s Mini Marathon in Dublin. So, I just thought, hey, a weekend in Dublin sounds fun, and I signed up for it, did a small bit of training and eventually ran the race. But then I ended up moving to Dublin later that year and I kept up the running - just really casually, I was never a serious road runner.”

Her conversion to hill running was more the result of circumstance than anything else. One day she decided to head to an open hill running session, and immediately she was hooked. The experience, she discovered, was entirely different from running the roads. Concrete footpaths were replaced by muddy trails, flanked by green foliage and teeming wildlife. There were no clubs as such, just a group of enthusiasts eager to run, anxious to escape into the wild.

“I just went along and completely got bitten by the bug. I did my first 50k six months after that,” Brady said.

“Then I did a fifty miler sometime later that year, and then I did the Wicklow Way - which is around 127k in length. So yeah, I was never a serious runner, and it was only when I tried trail running that I found out that it was different, a different experience. Once I got started on the trails, I realised that this was completely different.

“It wasn’t just the running, it was the community as well. There’s a massive community element to trail running - everybody is so welcoming and friendly. But there isn’t really a club scene, like there is in say, road running. It’s almost as if you don’t need a club when it comes to trail running - because the sport is just so social and the community so supportive.”

That community isn’t just national. Hill running is a global phenomenon. Wherever there are hills, there are hill runners, individuals with a passion for nature and desire to plough through the thickest, toughest terrain. The training is intense. Sarah insists that it’s not as excruciating as it looks, that the wild sort of props you and carries you along, but it's still a sport which requires immense willpower and implacable determination.

She maintains that it took her a while to establish a rhythm, to start running with real fluency, and it was during Covid that she really began to thrive. In a curious way, the pandemic suited her. It granted her an opportunity to train uninterrupted, to invest fully and totally in the sport. As a result, she improved - dramatically.

“It took a few years before I became any way half decent at it, but I got a new coach a few years ago, in 2021, in the middle of Covid, and I actually had a really good season that year,” Sarah added.

“That was partly because of the new coach but it was also partly because of Covid. I think the pandemic went either way for people as regards training and motivation, but I happened to have a good pandemic, because there was just nothing else to do. I just got into a really, really rhythm in terms of training and managed to stay injury free.

“I also avoided illness - I used to get head colds and things like that very regularly - but during the pandemic we were all wearing masks and watching out for stuff like viruses, and that actually benefited me. I didn't have as much as a head cold for almost a year and a half, I was consistently healthy, and as a result I was able to train uninterrupted.”

Sarah’s life is consumed by hill running. It is her passion, and in many ways, her life. She works for a trail running website called “I Run Far”, documenting and describing various adventure races and expeditions - interviewing athletes, promoting events, publicising trails. It’s a profession which she loves, a job which has taken her from the icy slopes of the Alps to the charred crimson quarries of the Grand Canyon.

Right now, she’s in America on work duty, covering two ultra marathon events in California and Colorado. When she’s not travelling, she’s training, putting in the hard yards on the slopes of the Wicklow Mountains near her home. She insists that the experience is far less excruciating than might be perceived, but her training schedule is nonetheless intense, consisting of several sessions per week plus additional gym work, when time allows.

“It’s really not that bad. I wouldn’t say it’s gruelling at all,” she added.

“It’s just kind of a way of life when you get into the swing of it. Different people have different structures, but me, I just run five days a week. Sometimes I might have a race and that will change the structure, but typically I’ll do easy runs on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and on Wednesday I’ll do a long interval session - so that would be roughly 16k, mixing up the pace, maybe five minutes hard, one minute rest, that kind of thing. And I absolutely love those sessions. I think most ultra-runners probably hate that kind of training but I actually quite like it! And then on the weekends I’ll do a long run on the trails, maybe three hours out there, and then a hill session as well.”

Physically, the body becomes accustomed to such feats of ultra endurance. Psychologically, motivation is never an issue. There is inspiration, Sarah says, in nature. Her favourite course in Ireland is a route through the Mourne Mountains in Co. Down, which snakes its way up the slopes from the small village of Newcastle at the foothills.

The Reeks in Kerry are another favourite, as is Keeper Hill in North Tipperary. From a global perspective, Sarah has fallen in love with the Austrian Alps, but there are places she has yet to go, tracks which to her remain undiscovered.

One such example is Tromsø in Norway, located deep inside the Arctic circle, where sunlight streams over the icecaps by day and stars twinkle above frozen waters at night. Along with her partner, she plans to participate in the Tromsø Skyrace this August, a bucket-list ambition which she has yearned to complete for some time.

Sarah speaks about trail running with unbridled passion. She loves the sport, loves the opportunities it has created for her. And she believes that others can grow to love it too. The Munster Branch of the Irish Mountain Running Association (IMRA) has an active instagram page which regularly publishes details of activities and events. There are races and open training sessions going on throughout the summer season, and all are welcome to partake, regardless, she says, of ability or ambition.

What lies in store for the Rathcabbin runner over the next few months? She has just returned from the World Hill-running Championships, but there are plenty more events in the pipeline, not least the Tromsø Skyrace. In essence, Sarah will go wherever the tracks and trails take her, whether that is the Austrian Alps or the peaks of the Mournes. She could end up in any corner of the Earth, ploughing through ice and snow or shaking sand from her runners. The world is your oyster when you’re a hill runner, the possibilities limitless.

It’s “a way of life”, Sarah says, a way of life which she adores. No other sport catapults an individual head-first into nature like hill running does. And after all, the closer one is to nature, the better.