My earliest recollection of running in Phoenix Park is of a time when I was still learning to walk. Possibly even earlier. That’s because as young toddlers, our mother often brought us along to watch our father, Tom, as he was running in various cross-country races in the revered club strip of Donore Harriers.
Phoenix Park had been his training and racing ground ever since he first moved to Dublin in the early 1960s, based in nearby Islandbridge. It also came to pass that on St Stephen’s Day in 1971, during the very hours he was in the park running in the Waterhouse Byrne Baird Shield, the oldest cross-country race in the world, I was being born not far away on the city’s southside. Which may explain why it sometimes feels like the Phoenix Park is in my running DNA.
In the summer of 1996, when I moved back to Dublin some years after taking up a running scholarship in college in the US, the question of where to live and continue to train was soon answered by a colleague who suggested we share a house on the North Circular Road. From there it was a short run to Phoenix Park, which over the next four years or so became my daily training ground – and still a timeless favourite.
Growing up in the southside suburb of Dundrum, we’d easy access to Marlay Park, plus the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Something about the sheer vastness and freedom of the 1,750 acres enclosed within the Phoenix Park felt different, a running paradise for all seasons, for runners of all differing aspirations, an oasis of delight within easy reach of the city.
Back then our standard distance run was the eight-mile loop, inherited as it was from runner to runner from long before my father’s time, which essentially tracked just inside the perimeter wall of the park. Commonly run in an anticlockwise direction, which meant from the North Circular Gate, we headed up past the Garda HQ, around the back of the zoo, on to the Back Road which carried on behind Áras an Uachtaráin, then headed up towards the Ashtown Gate.
Runners pass the Phoenix monument during the Dublin Marathon. Photograph: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile
From there we ran through the trails between ash and oak trees, across the Castleknock Gate, around the Ordnance Survey offices, and down into the Furry Glen. That was the only hilly part, back along the edge of the Fifteen Acres and its wild Irish deer, up the Military and Corkscrew Road, around the Magazine Fort, and across via the Wellington Monument to where we started.
For a slightly longer loop, we’d add in the two-mile lap which started from the dog pond and followed the old horse gallop, then ran back down Chesterfield Avenue. At the heights of summer or depths of winter, it never grew tiring or old, only for that same familiar sense of a deeply satisfying run.
It was one short, snappy hill after another, constantly challenged your running rhythm. And if you could transfer that physical and mental experience to a race, you could deal with any situation
— Eamonn Coghlan
Though I’ve since moved back across the city and into the Dublin Mountains, revisiting parts of that perimeter loop in recent weeks, the first thing that struck me is how little it’s changed. If at all. Phoenix Park boasts several more running loops of varying difficulties, although for a certain breed of distance runner there is none more famous than the Munich Lap.
This will be forever associated with Eamonn Coghlan, the three-time Olympian and 1983 world champion in the 5,000m, given it was designed by his first coach Gerry Farnan. Coghlan’s own running career started in Phoenix Park, when at age 11, his father Bill brought him along to the Celtic AC, located at the old Army Grounds.
Eamonn Coghlan: A Phoenix Park run ‘was always a great barometer of how fit and strong I was’. Photograph: Inpho
In the winter of 1971, when Coghlan was still a teenager, Farnan designed the three-quarter mile loop around the Magazine Fort, a testing, hilly circuit named after the upcoming Munich Olympics in 1972.
“At that stage our coach was trying to inspire and motivate us, wanted us to start thinking about the Olympics,” Coghlan says. “So he designed the Munich Lap, and he’d tell us things like ‘there’s gold in them hills’, or ‘run until you flatten those hills’, and in many ways it worked.
“Starting at one of the fort towers, it was one short, snappy hill after another, constantly challenged your running rhythm. And if you could transfer that physical and mental experience to a race, you could deal with any situation. We’d run that between six and 10 times, and on a wet or windy day, I used to hate it. But then on your best day, you’d love it, and throughout my running career it was always a great barometer of how fit and strong I was.”
Almost six decades after joining Celtic AC, Coghlan still runs in the Phoenix Park: “And still from the Army Grounds, every Tuesday and Thursday at 10am, for a 90-minute run with some of the other older club lads. Well, a run/jog/walk … but it’s still so idyllic, with a such a variety of terrain and nature. And I think if I was blindfolded, I could still run my way around the park.”
When Catherina McKiernan moved to Dublin from her home in Cavan, in the summer of 1997, her first and only concern was to live beside a good location for running. Phoenix Park ticked all the boxes, which is why she bought her first house just outside the Castleknock Gate, and still lives a short distance away.
Catherina McKiernan in 1994: ‘I still never get bored of it, even though I’m running a bit slower these days.’ Photograph: Anton Want/Allsport
At that point in her career, McKiernan had already won four successive silver medals in the world cross-country, but was moving up to the marathon – winning Berlin, London and Amsterdam in succession, her 1998 Amsterdam winning time of 2:22:23 still standing as the Irish record.
“It was perfect for me, needing a big area for training,” she says. “I would have run countless miles there, up to 100-plus miles a week, and you didn’t have to backtrack very often. And I still never get bored of it, even though I’m running a bit slower these days.
“Some days I’d be out running there, and think to myself, ‘if heaven is as good as this, we’ll be all right’. If anything, it’s even better now, much less traffic, less parking. I run down on a Saturday or Sunday mornings, you see so many different groups of people training, it’s so impressive. I’ve travelled the world, and for running, honestly, I’ve never come across a park like it.”
Over the years it’s become more popular as a racing ground. The Dublin Marathon enters Phoenix Park at the North Circular Gate, runs almost the entire length of Chesterfield Avenue, with a separate section on the Upper Glen Road between mile eight and 10; it’s also been home to the Great Ireland Run since 2003, and next month’s sold-out Dublin Half-Marathon is almost entirely contained within the park, thus the ideal training ground for anyone looking to familiarise themselves with that route.
Now passing on the park’s enduring merits to the next generation of runners is Feidhlim Kelly, head coach at the Dublin Track Club, originally set up as a sort of elite training group in 2016, only now facilitating runners of all different abilities.
“We’re in the park every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday,” says Kelly, “and what I’ve noticed is the size and variety of different training groups, with different coaches, but all coming to this central meeting point.
Feidhlim Kelly: ‘The Papal Cross is a popular meeting point … it feels like the new religion.’ Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho
“Like the Papal Cross is a popular meeting point, for parking, and sometimes you’re up there on a Sunday morning, the place is buzzing, it feels like the new religion.
“The Hole in the Wall pub, just outside the Cabra Gate, is another popular meeting point, and they’ve started giving out free porridge to the runners on a Sunday. We have all that rich history, culture and tradition of running in the park, it’s nice that’s all being passed down.
“It really does deliver so much. Whether you’re training for the mile or the marathon, you can get all your training done in here, from the Furze Road loop, or around the Fifteen Acres.
“I do think the park could possibly mark out some of these running loops, even the Munich Lap, maybe inspire more runners that way. But sometimes we have some international athletes train with us, from the US or Australia, and they just cannot believe how great the Phoenix Park is for running.”