Run Aoife Run
Cork athlete Aoife Cooke is on the final leg of her preparation for the strangest Olympics in modern times. That she's going at all is a testament to her resolve.
When Aoife Cooke crossed the line as the fastest Irish woman at the Dublin Marathon in 2019, there was great excitement amongst her small band of supporters and fellow runners from Eagle AC, her Cork-based club. But equally, there was a fair amount of puzzlement too as spectators scrambled to look up information on the race guide and their phones to help answer the big question of the moment: Who is Aoife Cooke?
Aoife grew up in Ballincollig, before moving to Youghal as a teenager and then on to Arkansas Tech University on an athletics sponsorship after her Leaving Cert. But two-and-a-half-years into the program she returned to Cork, unable to maintain the running schedule owing to serious injuries. And then for many years, competitive running was not something Aoife did. In fact, for a while running was not good for her health.
So it’s understandable that on that glorious October bank holiday weekend in Dublin when the five foot two inches Cork woman powered to the finish line in Merrion Square many of the onlookers were wondering who Aoife was. One person who was there told me she heard people wondering out loud if Aoife was a British athlete.
As Sonia O’Sullivan wrote after that race, Aoife had come “out of nowhere” to claim a momentous double, the Dublin Marathon and the national championship, “and better still in a time of 2:32:34 – the fastest marathon ever run by an Irish woman on home soil.”
Fast forward to end of April 2021, and in the race of her life, the Cheshire Elite Marathon, an Olympics qualifying marathon, Aoife smashed her Dublin time with a new personal best coming in at 2:28:36. That time put her ahead of Sonia as the fourth-fastest female Irish marathon runner of all time, and crucially under the 2:29:30 mark needed to make it to the Olympics.
Still though, if you were to happen across Aoife’s Twitter bio you wouldn’t glean much: “I like to do a bit of running, happy when eating and drinking coffee.”
That’s the totality of her Twitter bio. Nothing about records, or injuries, or training camps in Kenya, her Olympic journey, or much really, save a few morsels of humble pie.
It’s fair to say Aoife Cooke excels at modesty. That, and running 42.195 kilometers (or 26.2 miles), about the same distance from Cork to Macroom, at some clip.
The Elfin Beast
But Aoife’s modesty belies an intensity and focus. Her Tralee-based trainer John Starrett, who runs Stazza’s Stable, christened Aoife “The Elfin Beast” after seeing her run.
Coach Stazza, as John is widely called, recalls coming to see Aoife running in early 2019, after he returned from a training camp in Kenya. Aoife was on the running track at the Mardyke with her running partner Damian Kenneally.
“I just knew straight away then what the potential was for her. I could see the focus and the discipline. There’s something different about her, and I suppose it’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s the X Factor.”
“She’s like a little fairy, a pixie in her looks, but inside there’s definitely a beast, and that comes out when she’s running.”
Coach Stazza says that in the whole time he’s been coaching Aoife she’s never missed a run and done everything he’s asked of her, “and that’s unusual.”
“She’s very, very focused.”
When I interviewed Aoife at the beginning of May, after she had secured her Olympic berth, she had already given quite a few interviews to local and national media outlets.
“It’s been a busy few weeks,” Aoife said on the floor resting against her couch. She had been out for a run earlier that morning prior to starting work at The Edge Sports, where she works part-time. Aoife also has her own personal training business, which, like much else, moved online since the pandemic interrupted life.
In a typical week, Aoife runs in the morning and the afternoon - sometimes squeezing in a run between - but all told, she easily clocks up more than 100 miles a week. Aoife posts all her runs on Strava, a social media app used by athletes and cyclists that shows routes, times and distances. I’ve been following Aoife from my computer now for a few weeks as she plots orange lines around Cork, her runs taking her to Tower, Blarney, Blackrock, Ballintemple and all points on the islands in the city centre.
Aoife’s blitz in the papers and online and the resulting story could be condensed to this: extremely talented youngster, scouted while still in school, runs her socks off in America, diagnosed with bone disease, unable to run, returns to Cork. And prior to coming home, she comes out while still in Arkansas.
And then like a hare emerging after a very long hibernation Aoife regains her health and fitness, finding that speed and endurance which is wrapped tight within her. And now she’s going to the Olympics. Fast journalism runs a straight line; life never does.
With that in mind I began our interview by telling Aoife I’d try not to ask her all the routine questions she’d already been asked. Aoife laughed graciously, and then I proceeded to ask her many of the routine questions she’s already heard. Apologies Aoife.
The run of her life
The past eighteen months have been defined by absence. Between the 2019 Dublin Marathon and this past April’s crunch Olympics qualifying race near Chester, Aoife hardly raced. This was the same for athletes everywhere, as they settled into one of the longest and strangest training seasons on record. The thing is though, athletes need races. They need the competition and the atmosphere and conditions that only a race can engender.
So maybe a good place to start off is the last race she ran, in Cheshire, the “run of her life”.
In many ways the Olympic marathon in Sapporo will be a lot like the Cheshire one, even if the geography is not. Crowds, supporters and onlookers, in fact anything that resembles a normal marathon will be banished as authorities try to stage an Olympics in the midst of a pandemic.
As of writing this, officially the Tokyo Olympics is very much still on the cards. That said, recent polls have found 60% of the Japanese public in favour of scrapping it, as the country deals with its deadliest outbreak since the pandemic began. Just this past weekend, a friend in Kyoto emailed me a Change.org petition to sign. It reads: “Stop Tokyo Olympics. To Save Our Lives”.
Prior to the Cheshire run, Coach Stazza asked Aoife to write down what time she thought she could finish in, and he did likewise. Aoife wrote 2:26:20; her coach wrote 2:26:24, a four second difference between their two guesstimates.
In the end, Aoife ran 2:28:36.
“It was a four minute personal best on what I did in Dublin. It was challenging enough conditions to run in, in the sense that it was a looped course and there was a few sharp turns and country roads. My legs were a bit more beat up after that than they were in Dublin, just because of all that,” Aoife told me.
Coach Stazza said the fact that the course was looped with so many right angle turns was a likely factor that they were both off their estimates, but the goal was always getting in under Olympic qualifying time.
“To have run four minutes faster than my previous personal best was huge and obviously and the fact that I got the Olympic qualification time and ran a minute faster than the Olympic qualification time makes me feel like I deserve it, that it wasn’t just a fluke.”
While it was Aoife’s most significant race to date, she said she tried not to put too much focus on it: for the past 12 weeks she ran a long run every Sunday, and in one sense Cheshire was just another long run. Except it came with a ticket to the Olympics.
The Cheshire race went according to plan, and Aoife knew towards the end that she was going to come home in a new personal best. But facing into the the final loop, with about 5.5 kilometers to go was “really tough.”
“The legs were really hurting. My left quad was burning as it was all left turns. There was one particular sharp turn, more than 90 degrees, and you had to slow down. I found it hard to build up the momentum on the last lap. But with about two miles to go, I put the head down and told myself this is yours to lose.”
“That last mile, it was actually called the Straight Mile down to the finish, just to know that you were going to make it, it was incredible coming into the finish.”
The other surreal aspect to the Cheshire marathon, which will be repeated in Sapporo, is what comes in the moments after racing across the finish line. At Cheshire, there was no family for support or post-marathon hugging. There was also no crowds lining the route. Nor will there be in Sapporo.
“It was very strange to be honest,” said Aoife.
The women’s marathon, which will be run in Sapporo on August 7, will start at 7 a.m. just before midnight Irish time. Originally, the marathon was planned for Tokyo, the host city, but reluctantly the Tokyo organizers relented to demands by athletes and the I.O.C. to move the marathon and the walking races north to the city of Saporro, in Hokkaido. Weather conditions there will be far less severe than trying to complete a marathon in temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius and punishing humidity.
Aoife said it would be great to run another personal best time in Sapporo: “That would be phenomenal and it’s a tough ask.”
“In terms of position I have no idea. Top twenty would be phenomenal.”
Coach Stazza says that the race is likely to be “one of the most competitive Olympics marathons of all time”.
“The qualifying standard is so much higher. There’s nobody who’s going to be running 2:40 unless they have a bad day.”
“If the conditions are not too bad, we’ll go hard at it,” he said.
(Broken) Dreams
To prepare for Sapporo, Aoife will return to America, this time to Utah, where she will train at altitudes of 6,000 feet and where the temperature will be around 30 degrees Celsius. The plan is to leave in mid-May and stay in Utah until the Olympics begin; running mates, friends and well-wishers have started a Go Fund Me page to offset the costs of the two-month training camp as Aoife has only just begun to qualify for funding from Athletics Ireland, in a process called carding, since qualifying for the Olympics.
In order to get state funding in Ireland, many athletes have to become successful first, on their own dime, and even then they might not qualify for carding. “You’re not really noticed here until you make it, you kind have to do it yourself and be like ‘Hello, here I am’”, says Aoife.
She doesn’t have any sponsors yet and securing a shoe sponsor would be great. What Aoife lacks for in official sponsors and state support is thus far being made up for by the goodwill of her club, Eagle AC, and the wider community.
Besides the business of running day in, day out Aoife and Coach Stazza are also in contact with Athletics Ireland, especially the high performance team there, working out the plan for when she gets to Japan. Coach Stazza said despite the massive problems caused by the pandemic, the high performance team have really rowed in behind Aoife and are doing all they can to facilitate her training and preparation once she touches down in Japan. The priority is to get to Sapporo as soon as they land in Japan.
(This year the carding scheme will divvy out €2.7m to 130 athletes and six squads to help prepare and train for the Olympics, Paralympics, the Europeans and World Championships next year. By contrast, as Kieran Shannon noted in The Irish Examiner, 67% of all government grants to Irish athletes will be allocated to GAA county players. The whole funding system is somewhat analogous to our two-tier healthcare system, which Ellie wrote about in the last issue of Tripe+Drisheen).
Like nearly every kid growing up in Cork in the nineties and aughts Aoife recalls watching Sonia O’Sullivan’s pursuits on athletic tracks and stadiums across the globe. Particularly memorable was the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the Cobh athlete’s epic battle with Gabriela Szabo as the pair threw the kitchen sink at the final 200m of the 5,000m race. Sonia was beaten to first, but with her silver medal she became only the second Irish woman to win an Olympic medal.
“She would have been a massive influence to me when I was growing up.”
Just like the kid who spend hours on the green or pitch kicking a ball with the dream of one day making it to a World Cup, Aoife’s Olympic dream “was always there.”
When she started running at the age of 11 with Ballincollig AC, it was for fun; she quickly improved, something that did not go unnoticed, ultimately landing her a scholarship to the U.S. The move stateside only reaffirmed that belief that someday she might follow in the footsteps of Sonia O’Sullivan. “During those times I saw it as a possibility for sure,” Aoife says.
Aoife comes from sporting stock; her grandfather, Jack Dempsey was a goalkeeper with Cork and “he won a few All Ireland’s, county’s and Munster finals.” Aoife played a bit of GAA but didn’t have a huge interest in it.
Her aunt, Mary Sweeney, who inspired Aoife to start running, won the inaugural Ballycotton women’s race in 1979, a grueling ten mile run around the East Cork townland.
When, in her final year of secondary school, Aoife was offered an athletics scholarship at Arkansas Tech University she hadn’t been thinking too much about what route she would take. A coach there had been tracking her progress and had contacted her with an offer.
“When I got the email I thought ‘yeah, that might be a good idea to get to the next level in running’”, Aoife says. “I didn’t research it a whole lot, just headed over.”
“Culturally it was a lot different, I did have a lot of adjusting to do,” she recalls. While Arkansas is more conservative than coastal cities in the U.S., Aoife says there was also “a fair share of open-minded people that she made friends with.”
And of course people struggled with Aoife, specifically the five letters that comprise her name, and in their formulation.
In their attempts to pronounce her name people got it wrong “all the time”. “I was called A-oo-fee and Eee-fee,” she says laughing.
The training schedule at Arkansas was intense, and looking back Aoife recognises that she was overtraining.
“You hit the ground running - pun intended - when you go over there and I was probably doing a lot more than I would have been doing back home and there was no kind of transition period.”
She also struggled with her diet, tracking her calories obsessively and developing an eating disorder. Older and wiser now she doesn’t track her calories, or hardly ever weighs herself. “I make sure I eat well,” Aoife says. After her long runs on Sunday she rewards herself with a takeaway, “from Sun of a Bun” she says with a laugh.
“I know how I feel when I’m running. My running weight is fine, because I’d feel it if it wasn’t. I think you just learn about your body and how it’s supposed to feel and what’s best for it.”
“It’s about being balanced, not being too strict, but not taking the piss either,” she says, breaking into one of her trademark laughs.
Looking back Aoife thinks she was far more strict on herself when she was younger and that probably contributed to her injuries. Before she was diagnosed with osteopenia, a condition defined by weak bones, Aoife had success stateside in cross country running. She won a conference and regional championships and was placed ninth at the nationals. Back in Ireland, she came third in the national championships and as a junior she qualified for the European cross country championships.
But, having been diagnosed with weak bones and being sidelined from running, she made the decision to return to Cork. “I had to say to myself ‘You came over here to run, you’re on a scholarship to run, you can’t run, so what are you doing here?’”
That’s a tough prospect for a young athlete to face, and it also meant starting from scratch with her academic studies. Back in Cork in 2007, Aoife enrolled in a new course, starting back as a “fresher” at UCC, this time studying sports studies and P.E. She was diagnosed with a pelvic stress fracture so “even walking was hard for a while”.
She tentatively went back running in her first year at UCC, but she started picking up injuries again, and so she made the decision to stop running.
Meanwhile, well-wishing friends and family would often ask when she was going to go back running. “At the time I felt I needed to sort out my bone density before ever going back competitively.”
The road back
While she wasn’t running much, and not at all competitively she followed races and race results and there were times she wondered if she could have won certain races if she had put the training in. “You kind of think of all those things.”
For a while she joined CrossFit; looking back on old photos she said she definitely beefed up. In time, Aoife did go back running, keeping it to “low intensity stuff” wary of what she had put herself through before, but also wanting to see what her body was capable of.
In 2015, she entered the Cork Marathon, running it in 3:15 without doing much in the way of training. The year after the Rio Olympics in 2016 and with a lot more training, Aoife shaved nearly 30 minutes off her Cork time in the Amsterdam Marathon. The Tokyo Olympics then started coming into focus. However, the bar for qualifying had risen considerably: qualifying athletes would need to come in under 2:29:30. By contrast the slowest qualifier from Ireland for the Rio Olympics was around the 2:37 mark.
“When they made that announcement about changing the qualifying time I thought ‘I’m never going to do that,’” Aoife told me.
But by 2019, Aoife’s pace was picking up considerably. She did a 10 mile race in Mallow in 55:17, “which was a huge, huge deal” for her. That run propelled her on to Dublin where she ran her personal best, and edged her closer to the Olympic qualifying time. But then came the pandemic in early 2020, and since Dublin she’s only done one race, another “10 miler” in Dungarvan.
When Aoife approached John Starrett, her trainer, in early 2019, he was quick to tell her the “goal’s got to be the Olympics.” Coach Stazza says he was “100 per cent certain she could get there”. As it happened, the difficulty was finding a race amidst a global pandemic, especially as the Vienna Marathon, which she had planned to do in April 2020 was called off.
When I asked Aoife if it was strange going for so long without races she was unequivocal: “Yeah. I mean, I love racing.”
“I think it’s important to race for everyone really. It’s good also to have a target. So it has been hard not having races, particularly when I was trying to get the qualifying time and there just wasn’t any races to do it.”
That the Cheshire race actually happened was in itself a minor miracle, and one for which Aoife says she “feels so grateful.”
Since qualifying for Cheshire, Aoife has been added to the doping list which means she has to give a detailed account to the doping authorities of her whereabouts. “There’s a one hour slot where you have to be available all of the time,” Aoife explains.
Given that there’s been so many doping scandals in athletics (and cycling and even show jumping) Aoife said she too shares the public’s skepticism at certain times.
“We’d all kind of think it at times when an athlete does really well and breaks a record, and if immediately people are thinking ‘that’s a bit suspicious’”. But equally, she also recognises that that impulse towards suspicion is also sad. “A lot of them (athletes) are probably legitimate, but it’s just that kind of knee-jerk reaction when there’s a phenomenal performance”.
“I don’t tell people I run marathons”
When I asked Aoife is she tells people who don’t know her that’s she’s a marathon runner (as opposed to someone who occasionally runs marathons) she immediately laughed and said it’s probably the last thing about herself that she would reveal.
“I like talking about running to my running friends and if people want to ask about my running then I’ll talk about it, but I don’t like the one to bring it up first because not everyone is into it,” Aoife says breaking off laughing again.
And at this point Aoife shares a joke that’s probably well-known and well-worn, but well worth telling again:
“How do you know if someone is training for a marathon?
Don’t worry they’ll let you know?”
And we both laugh. But, essentially this is, as we say in the journalism trade, the nut graf or the essence of this piece: a story about a person training for a marathon.
It just happens to be the marathon that the world tunes into see how it transpires.
Cork Aoife
When she’s not running or working, Aoife acts. Listening back to the interview, my voice doesn’t hide my surprise when she told me she’s acted in a quite a few dramas which her theatre group have written and staged.
As with racing, performing has also been on hold. In a normal year, together with acting friends from the LGBTQ community, the Cork-based LINC Drama group usually stage a play at least once a year at the Cork Arts Theatre.
“It would be great if we were able to do one this year,” Aoife says, especially as we have all become so fed up of having everything mediated through screens.
Aoife came out when she was 20, while she was still in America. Much like her marathon running, her sexuality is not something that is top of the conversation agenda for her.
“I think because I came out before I came back to running it was probably helpful. I was out before I started getting successful as a runner so it’s not like I was this big successful athlete and then had to come out. I guess the way that it happened was helpful for me. It was never something I thought too much about really.”
One of her favourite running routes is through The Marina, which since 2020 has been pedestrianized, and then continuing into Blackrock. Sometimes she’ll follow through on to Passage and then Monkstown. “It’s beautiful on a nice day,” she says.
Whatever the outcome in Japan, whether the race goes ahead, or doesn’t, Aoife has her sights on running faster marathon times. Right now, all she can do is train, train every day and try not to think about what will transpire over the next few months.
Ultimately, Aoife would like to sit atop the list of the fastest Irish women to have run the marathon - she still has a ways to go to get there and surpass Catherina McKiernan’s 2:22:23 which has stood since 1998. However, still only 34, and the way she’s running down her personal bests you wouldn’t bet against Aoife. Coach Stazza, her trainer, thinks the 2024 Paris Olympics is where she could shine.
“It’s all part of an eight-year plan,” he told me, outlining that after the Olympics there’s the World Championships in Oregon in 2022 and then the Paris Olympics in 2024. “That’s where she wants to medal.”
Coach Stazza thinks Aoife is capable of running down McKiernan’s record and getting under the 2:20 mark, “and then it’s about holding it and creating a legacy.” Cork, and the community of supporters here, figure strongly in that grand plan. The first three months of each year will consist of training in Kenya at Coach Stazza’s hight altitude training camp in Iten. From there, it’s back to Cork and racing in Mallow, Duhallow and Cobh amongst other places, followed by more high altitude training in Utah and then back again to Cork, and prepping for marathons such as Dublin.
“My home is definitely in Cork,” Aoife told me. “I love Cork, I love the people and meeting up with my friends. It’s that kind of small city where you can go in to town and you’re almost certain you’ll bump into someone you know - I really like that.”
A short Q+A with Aoife
Q: Post pandemic, where are you looking forward to going eating and drinking in Cork?
A:Son of a Bun for food, Fionnbarra’s for drinks.
Q: Any books you're reading now, or that you'd recommend?
A: A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Q: What's one - or two things - you'd like to see improve in Cork?
A: Nothing...Cork is perfect ;) Maybe better public transport and options for things to do a night time that doesn’t involve the pub.
Q. Words of advice you've held on to?
A: Very simple one: do what you need to do to make yourself happy. Everything else will follow.
Q: A favourite character from a book or play?
A: Jo March from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.
Q. Which person, either or living or dead, would you like to go for a drink with?
A: My grandad. Even though he never drank. 😀
Bonus question via short interview with Mairead Lonergan of Eagle AC
Q: Funniest running moment to date.
A: Funniest moment (although it wasn’t at the time!) I was running up the Wilton Road in Cork years ago and I had a bottle of water in my hand. It was about 5 p.m. so there was a lot of traffic. I ran past a car and a guy wolf whistled out the passenger window of the car and I actually jumped with fright, then the traffic started moving but stopped again so I went past the car a second time and he did the same thing and again I got a huge fright! On the third time I took the bottle of water and threw it in the window at him and sprinted off. I think he deserved it !!
Loved this article. I was one of those who wondered who Aoife Cook was, and now I know. I’ve seen her running down the Marina and was impressed by her focus in running through a thronged, chatty Cork crowd! Loved the bit about Tokyo, we’re missing out this year on the atmosphere of the Olympics so it’s good to get a feel for the place.