John O Keeffe is in the RA
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Timmy’s looking to win the Tipperary peace award.
Timmy is a live Candidate for Alright Sort of the Year 2018.
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That never happened
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Dan Breen was a fantasist
Just as well for he would not win a grammar and punctuation award.
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And a facist
Running for life: Seamus Hennessy’s marathon mission
The former Tipperary hurler hopes to help 200 families by running the Antarctic marathon next month in aid of suicide and mental health charities
Michael Foley
November 11 2018, 12:00am, The Sunday Times
The long run: former Tipp hurler Seamus Hennessy faces a 60km trudge through wind, snow and iceBRYAN KEANE
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It came to Seamus Hennessy last year in Peru, riding the rail near Machu Picchu. For four years he had shared the story of his mother and the tragedy of her suicide when he was 11, trying to start conversations and liberate people trapped by the same types of trauma. Being a Tipperary hurler helped bounce his story into public attention at the start, but people were still listening years later. Now, he wanted to change things again.
He remembered coming out of a school one day after giving a talk feeling he hadn’t connected like he wanted. When people shared their stories with him, sometimes he struggled to figure out the right response. He’d keep talking and sharing his story for sure, but what else could he do?
He could raise some money for charities while sharing the same message, but to accept people’s money Hennessy wanted to hurt for it. He thought about what he hated: long-distance running, the eternity of the road, the mental torture. Bingo.
It was 18 years since Josie had died. Maybe 18 marathons in a year across seven continents? “Dad put a line through that pretty quick,” he says. “Thankfully someone saw sense. He said hold true to one of them, what you consider the most difficult one.”
Easy. That was the Antarctic marathon, a brutal 60km trudge through wind and snow and ice, scheduled for next month, December 13. He chose Pieta House and Living Links Tipperary, a support group for families bereaved by suicide, as the beneficiaries. He remembered seeing a figure that placed the cost for Pieta House at €1,000 to help any individual that comes through their door. He set his target at €200,000, enough to help 200 people. Two hundred families. Two hundred communities.
He targeted corporate Ireland first and visited a few companies with a presentation and a compelling story but got nowhere. “It was a bit of a kick in the teeth. I was thinking it’s a relatively attractive proposition. They’re very worthy charities. It’s a unique event. That’s not how it panned out at all.”
That rejection led Hennessy to an unfolding story more authentic to his message than anything imaginable. Instead of cheques from big business, every donor is a face or a name or a place. Over 70 events, stretching from fun runs and charity walks to 24-hour fasts, have already been organised to raise money across the country. This weekend alone GAA clubs and individuals will host and take part in events across Mayo and Roscommon and around Tipperary down to Wexford.
People have cycled the Ring of Kerry, ran the Dublin marathon and scaled Mont Blanc, every donation nudging the total past €125,000. He keeps a spreadsheet detailing the names of around 150 individual donors, how much they donated and how they have been thanked. There are days when the responsibility wears him down too, when he wants to burn his runners and disappear back into the crowd. “But that’s natural,” he says. “It’s a very sensitive, difficult topic. A very personal story.”
It’s a strange thing to offer such hope to those in darkness while also wishing none of this had needed to happen in the first place. For years he was the child soloing from one end of the family bar around the pool table and back that grew into the load-bearing hurler on teams of brilliant Tipperary minors and U21s. Between 2006 and 2010 he played five All-Ireland finals across the grade, winning four. He scored a point with his first touch as a substitute in the 2010 senior final. He finished as U21 Hurler of the Year with another All-Ireland. He had everything won and the capacity to do even more, then his knee came against him. After four surgeries over a few years and a couple of attempts to get back, he was gone.
“That was difficult because I didn’t envisage what happened happening. But what made it much easier and relatively easy to take was that it wasn’t a result of my own behaviour. If a manager said I can’t have you round anymore, I’d harbour a lot of self-guilt because you let yourself down. But I could always take an element of acceptance in the fact I tried, and it wasn’t to be.
“To me that’s important, that you hold a sense of honour and standard that you want to adhere to. You want to do it in your normal life. You want to live in a way that’s the right and fair way to live.”
The same values inform everything that has followed. In the middle of his injuries in 2013 he came across Jim Breen on television, the founder of Cycle Against Suicide, talking about suicide and mental health. It struck him how rarely those stories were told in public. In the year after his mother died, Hennessy had attended counselling one evening a week over three months. He kicked a football and played and painted while the facilitator asked questions about his feelings, gently drawing the conversations out of him.
“It took 12 years for me to start to join the dots that the programme enabled me to talk about how I felt, and also helped me realise being vulnerable isn’t weak. It’s a strength.”
Talking back then had changed his life without even knowing it. What might sharing his story do now? He wrote a blog on a Friday night and put it online that weekend. “Once my dad was comfortable with it in the public domain, I was quite comfortable with it. It just felt the right thing to do. The only intention was always could you support just one person, and by association, that person’s family?
“I definitely feel that core message — to talk — comes from that inability to talk. I’d love to have one more minute in the kitchen where you think maybe I can change the course of all of this with one more minute. It seems a bit odd, but it’s that inability to talk to mam again, to say talk to me.”
The same kindness that people speak about when they remember his mother now underpins his work and this run. Instead of a full 20-week training programme his hurling season with Kilruane pushed into August, squeezing his time down to 10 weeks. The hardest work is going on in his head, storing pictures in his mind of the runners dotted across the vast white emptiness, imagining the pain and the joy of the finish line.
He took inspiration from rugby player Damian Browne’s successful row across the Atlantic, writing out and repeating a couple of lines to whisper, speak and scream when the pain and isolation feels too much. Handling the cold and the thin air, the snow showers whipping across the endless open expanses of white, the hours of running, avoiding frostbite, that can wait. A month out from the race with a flu bothering him, he will do what he can. That much alone can change a life.
To donate go to ie.gofundme.com/runningforjosieor search Running for Josie on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
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The best of luck to him. An awful trauma for an 11 year old to have to experience.
He’s a great great young man.
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+1 on that
Would have been an inter county stalwart but for the Injuries
Hadn’t heard of him up to that post but seems a decent skin going by the article.
Ah Mike. A class hurler. Great wrists. Could play any line of the field.
He scored some 21 yard free with the last puck of the game against Cork in 2010 a few days after they hammered us in the senior. Would have been a travesty if that u21 team hadn’t won the All Ireland
Things got a little heated at the Killenaule AGM. The lad who spoke has a nephew on the Tipp team called Bubbles.
He has a son on the Tipp team called Mouse.
Didn’t Joe senior do a little time before?
Mouse and Bubbles must be cousins so
Amazing powers of deduction pal.
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