Borrisoleigh celebrates 10-years Attacking the Track

Borrisoleigh is a village generally known for its hurlers, but it might just be home to the fittest community in the country right now, all thanks to an ingenious initiative which celebrated its tenth anniversary recently.

By Thomas Conway

The brainchild of two fitness addicts - Pat Keane and Declan Maher - “Track Attack” isn’t just your ordinary running club. Stroll down to the Borrisoleigh GAA Complex every Monday, hail, rain or shone, and you’ll see for yourself - dozens upon dozens of normal people, all in it together, shooting around the 1.3km floodlit track which circles the pitches.

It’s more than just an athletics club or a running group. What Track Attack is is a grassroots, self-funded, community-based activity club, a coming-together of people of all ages and abilities and parishes to run, or walk, or just move around the place. The objective isn’t so much to get fit - that’s a by-product. The key word here is fun. That’s how it was at the beginning and that’s how it is a decade later. Pat Keane wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The idea was just to get people out and active, to get adults in the community outdoors and running or walking or just exercising in any way,” Pat Keane recalls.

“There was a track which had been built around the GAA pitch. In other words, we had a facility. So, I met up with Deccie and what we said we’d do is we’d hold 5k and promote it locally - just to see how it would go. We held that in August 2014, and it went really well on the night - we had well over 200 participants. It was a 5k along the roads. And that went so well that we decided we’d start doing a weekly thing, so we started that, and the very first night we had 34 people.”

It was an instant-hit - the idea was good, people were eager to get out and about, and Pat & Declan had the organisational side of things covered. Both knew what they were doing. Word spread, and eventually the numbers spiralled, growing to 371 people at one point. But as its popularity increased, the realisation began to dawn on Pat and Declan that the facilities would need to be expanded.

“The original facilities built by the GAA club were great, but we reached a stage where the numbers were so high that the place just wasn’t able to cater for the amount of people we had coming, and that had to be addressed,” Pat said.

“Through fundraising over the years we worked hard and we did expand the track. We had a load of new volunteers who jumped on board as well. Take Christy Slattery for example, he’s now a driving force behind the whole project.”

INGENUITY

The most striking thing about Track Attack is the ingenuity of the people involved. They think differently in Borrisoleigh. That flair for innovation is reflected in their fundraising efforts.

The very first thing they did arose half by fluke, thanks to local man Trevor Groome, who had decided to cycle the length of Ireland from Malin to Mizen Head. Trevor rang Pat, offered to raise funds for Track Attack as part of the process and eventually set off, flanked by three companions from Upperchurch, riding for nineteen hours non-stop across the island. It was a roaring success, and it precipitated a stream of cool fundraising ideas that Track Attack would embark on in the subsequent years, as Pat recalls.

“After the cycle we were asking ourselves, what will we do next? And then we hit on another idea - a ‘trip around Tipp’, a relay run all around Tipperary, and that took 26 hours non-stop. It was another great idea, but after that it was a case of how can we better it, how can we come up with a better, more fun idea than the last time?”

Their best adventure, or certainly their most ambitious project, was dubbed the “Presidential Run”, which consisted of a swim-bike-run relay to the ancestral homesteads of three former American presidents - Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and John F. Kennedy. It was basically a monster triathlon extending all the way from Ballyporeen in South Tipperary, to New Ross in Co. Wexford and back to Moneygall. The whole thing went off perfectly. The members loved it. Track Attack was growing. The mood was positive. And then Covid struck. Yet again, they had to innovate.

“What we did was a virtual walk,” Pat says.

“We called it ‘the longest walk’, and the idea was we would have two teams, and they would run or walk the distance from Cape Town in South Africa to Magadan in north Russia. It’s the longest walk in the world that you can do entirely on foot.”

The take-up was huge. There was more to it as well. The organisers went to the trouble of contacting various national ambassadors to represent the countries they were supposedly running through. They received video messages from the likes of Nijel Amos, the 30-year-old middle distance runner who became Botswana’s first ever Olympic medallist when he claimed silver in the 800m in London 2012.

Former Zimbabwean and Liverpool soccer goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar also wished them luck in a Facebook post. People were engaged. While the world was standing still in the midst of a global pandemic, the members of Track Attack were running their hearts out at home and on the roads.

Never a runner

One of those members, Caroline Kennedy, has her own story to tell. A Clonmore native who has been living in Borrisoleigh for the past 22 years, Caroline was never a runner. But when Track Attack launched, she saw an opportunity - a chance to tweak her everyday routine one evening a week. A lifestyle change.

“I was here at home in Borrisoleigh, working hard, coming home late in the evenings, and I heard this Track Attack thing was starting and I thought: that’s something to get me out of the house and to meet people,” he recalls.

There are dozens of others like her, novices that became avid runners, but Caroline’s story goes a little deeper. In 2017 she was diagnosed with cancer, a life-changing health scare which changed her outlook and made her appreciate simple things, like getting out for a run.

Slowly, she got better, but she went through the usual grinding process of recovery - aggressive chemo, sustained fatigue, endless hospital appointments. Eventually, when she was well enough, she started to head back down to the group again on Monday night. The treatment cured her, but running helped. Of that she is certain.

“It’s very hard to explain except to say that: the fresh air, the exercise, and the support. Those three things - they’re what Track Attack is about. And I would say they 100 per-cent contributed to my recovery. I can never say how much it benefited me,” she said.

She recalls one experience, on a frigid, snowy Monday night in February, in the middle of her cancer recovery. She was standing at the track beside another member, a doctor, wondering if all of this was doing her any good. She turned around and asked him straight up. His answer was unequivocal.

“Caroline there is nothing I can prescribe for you that’s going to give you what you’re going to get here tonight. Fresh air, exercise, with other people - that’s your medicine,” she recalls.

That revealing vignette says more about the benefits of social exercise than any advertising campaign ever could. It captures the essence of Track Attack, and speaks to the very reason Pat and Declan set up the movement in the first place.

These days Caroline is back to her best and has established herself as one of the faces of Monday night in Borrisoleigh. She loves it, describing how the group have integrated competitive runners with uncertain newcomers, praising the challenges they invent to keep people interested and the fact that young children are nurturing a love of running from an early age. In an era of growing concern over young people’s health and fitness, initiatives like Track Attack are powerful antidotes.

As the group celebrates its ten year anniversary, enthusiasm is brighter than ever. There’s a hope that, as word spreads, ever more people will flood into Borris GAA grounds on a Monday night, from ever more distant locations. New recruits are always welcome. The admission price? A desire to run, not for medals but for the sheer fun and excitement of it. That’s the ethos. It will never change.