Updated at 17.07
HE’S RUN AROUND the world more than five times, holds a near 30-year-old championship record for the half-marathon, skipped up and down Carrauntoohill in just over an hour and became a world champion mountain runner a year after collapsing in the same race.
Meet John Lenihan, the Kerryman whose appetite for mountains — and jaffa cakes, as we’ll find out later — knows absolutely no bounds.
And he’s the subject of a new book titled, Tough As Leather, written by friend Con Dennehy.
Lenihan is an athlete few Irish people have heard of, chiefly because the sport in which he excels is mountain running.
The sport is growing, mind, and more and more are learning of the Tralee native, who still competes regularly, though not as quickly as he used to.
Having started out on the track, running for his local club, Lenihan was one of the fastest men in the country over 5,000 metres in the mid 1980s and was on the panel for the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles.
However, when Lenihan didn’t make the team, he saw road racing as a way to make money and supplement the income he earned working on the family farm and a factory in Castleisland. Consequently, he quickly became hooked.
“I had a fabulous love for road racing,” he explains.
“It was just something I loved. You could tinker around with so many things.
“It threw a lot of surprises at you and that’s why I loved it. There were all kinds of things to consider, like hills and the surface but there was good prize-money too and that kept me going at it.”
He won the Irish title twice over the half-marathon distance and a record he set in 1986 still stands today (half marathon championship record). He ran 63:15 that day in Dublin, which hasn’t been beaten since.
At his peak, Lenihan clocked up around 150 miles a week, but generally, it was closer to 100-120. And the most amazing thing of all was that he didn’t get injured.
“In a way, the work I did on the farm and the factory probably gave me the core and all-round strength I wouldn’t have got if I’d been doing something else and maybe that stood to me.
“Definitely when I turned to mountain running it did; that strength I built up from physical work on the farm.”
Mountain running was quite a popular sport in Ireland at the time, just not well covered by the media, as Gaelic football and hurling ruled the sports pages.
“I branched into that accidentally,” he recalls. “I went to the Isle of Man for a three-day festival and I came third in the two road races and won the mountain race quite easily.
“That really got me thinking. I was lucky that quite soon after there was a race in Sligo called the ‘Warrior’s Race with a 1,000 pounds for the winner.
“I ended up winning, beating the reigning world champion from England.
“I knew then I had a talent for running on the mountains that I didn’t have to the same extent in any other discipline, and I have to attribute my environment to that.
“Living up in the Stacks mountains, there’s not a flat metre. I knew how to run up and downhill and I think I developed a knack of running down steep hills from a young age with my father.
“I think that was probably the best thing, or the thing that stood to me most. I had the speed and the fitness from the road running to go with the ability to go up and downhill quickly.”
So far in his career, Lenihan has amassed 19 IMRA (Irish Mountain Running Association) titles, but the accolade that trumps all is his World Championships win from Switzerland in 1991.
“To fully understand that, you might have heard I collapsed in Austria a year earlier,” he remembers.
“I had been in the top 6 a number of times, but I wanted to get on the podium for once in my life. I’d have taken bronze.
“In 1990, I was in great shape going to Austria but it went totally against me, I collapsed and had to be taken away to a heated tent up in the mountain to recover.
“I really thought my chance was gone, and I said to myself I was retiring.
“But a couple of months later I began to think I didn’t want to finish like that, so I wanted another go, and that’s how I came back…Despite telling everyone I was retiring.
“I was trying to prove a point, but I just got it right on the day and that was the scenario that led me to Switzerland.”
Lenihan ran like a man possessed that day, overcoming the heat and the altitude to set a world-class time.
“It was surreal. It was that ‘is this for real or just one of my fantasies where I wake up?’ moment.
“It took a while to sink in that it really happened. It wasn’t until I went out the next day to watch the other events that it sank in. Everyone was congratulating me!
“There was nothing in my life I could describe like that experience.”
He’ll be 53 in October and has recently taken to the bike to maintain his fitness — and go easier on the hip he had replaced two years ago.
But being on the mountains, especially Carrauntoohill, is something almost sacred to him.
“I have this massive love for rugged, rural isolated landscapes and people like Arctic explorers Claire O’Leary and Mike Se — I’d be great friends with them and I can really relate to what they’re doing.
“The closest I can associate with that is running in the freedom of the mountains. It just gives me a huge lift to put on the shorts and the gear and head for the mountains for a run.
“They’re special to me. Some people ask me if I feel lonely but I feel anything but. I run as often as I can; I’ve ran around the world almost six times, my biographer (Con Dennehy) tells me from studying my training logs. I’ve ran up and down Carrauntoohill in an hour and 11 minutes, and that’s a record that still stands since 1986.”
He’s famous in his homeland of Ballymacelligott for the running indeed, but not only that, as he explains.
“If you ever meet any of my friends in Kerry and ask them about my diet, they’ll laugh at you. The reason is because next to my running, my eating and my poor diet is the next thing I’m famous for. People are fanatical now about diet but my diet is ‘seefood’…I see it, I eat it!
“At the book launch recently they were trying to get me to tell a few stories and the way they’d bribe me was with jaffa cakes…They get me every time.”
The book is currently on the bestsellers list in book stores around Ireland with plans at an advanced stage with Tralee Printing for a second run as demand increases.
Tough as Leather is published by Roisin Publications. More info here.