Alannah Donnelly was fifteen when her mother put her forward for an award she had never heard of, from an organisation she had never heard of, for a job she did not know she was doing.
"I had never heard of Family Carers Ireland. I'd never even considered the concept of carers. I was only 15. I wasn't really in that world."
"Mammy put me forward for that because of my brother Conor."
She won one of the awards. She ended up on the Late Late Show with a group of other young carers, which she still calls her claim to fame. And she spent the next few years travelling to the European Parliament in Brussels, to Copenhagen, and around Ireland, talking about something she had always thought of as simply being Conor's sister.
On the last Sunday in October she runs the Dublin Marathon for the same organisation.
Home
Alannah is 24, from Offaly, and home is her mother, her brother Conor, and her grandparents next door.
Conor is severely intellectually disabled. She is careful to say, every time it comes up, that he has no physical issues.
Her grandparents are 87 and 88, which she describes as amazing, and then, in the same breath, acknowledges comes with everything that comes with it. Her mother is looking after that too.
Alannah studies in Galway during the week and comes home at weekends to work in a local hotel.
"I Never Knew Any Difference with Conor"
What she keeps returning to is that none of this ever felt like a role.
"Growing up, I never knew any difference with Conor. Conor's my brother, and I was just doing what I had to do for him and for my mammy."
"When we were younger, summers would be me and Conor. I'd be minding, and at the weekends and in the mornings, it could be me and him a lot of the time."
"It's kind of just like being with a child all day and playing. You have to entertain him and entertain yourself."
They went to the playground. They made do. Her mother had to go to work, her grandparents were up the road and were, in her words, brilliant, and the rest of the time it was the two of them.
She noticed her friends were not doing the same thing. She just did not attach any weight to it.
"I knew it was different in that my friends weren't doing that, but I didn't think there was something of significance. You're just doing what you need to do, no more than anyone does. You do what you need to do for your family."
Her Mother
Ask Alannah about her mother and the pace of her speech changes.
"Mammy is just the most stoic, selfless person I've ever genuinely met. I know everyone will say that about their mammy. I know everyone's mammy is the best. But no, I do genuinely."
"There's nothing that's ever too much, or too much to complain about. She just ploughs on and gets on with everything. There's never, I've had enough of this."
"She's so much patience, because I did not get that from her. She is just the most patient person. She'd do anything for anyone."
And then the line every daughter will recognise.
"If I'm half the mammy she can be, I'd be very happy."
She also noticed something at the Family Carers Ireland awards that she has never been able to unsee, and it describes her own house exactly.
"The amount of people that care for their kids, they care for their dad. Often it is not just one person in isolation. It is a wide family."
An Evening to Switch Off
Alannah's description of what the charity actually does is one of the clearest in this series, mostly because she keeps it small.
There is respite, counselling, support groups, and education to help carers understand whatever condition the person they are caring for has. There is advocacy. And for young carers, roughly aged fifteen to twenty-four, there are weekends away and a bit of social life.
"It's a very isolating experience. If you're a carer, you are very much putting everyone else's needs ahead of your own, especially if it's your own family."
Conor goes to respite himself, and she is at pains to explain what it is and is not.
"It's not that anyone's going to go on holidays or anything. It's literally just an evening to themselves, and to focus on other things."
"No more than me and Conor, it's always the Conor show, and that's just the way it has to be. It gives a chance for mammy to do something for herself."
"Just an evening where people can chill and switch off for a while."
Her view of why organisations like this exist at all is blunt, and she does not labour it.
The supports are not always there from the State, and somebody has to fill the gap.
"They try and pick up the pieces and fill in gaps for people."
"I Am Not a Runner"
Alannah would like this established early and permanently.
"I am not a runner, and I will say that till the day I die."
She played camogie and was, by her own assessment, useless. She went to the gym to keep fit. She had never run anything.
Then a few years ago a university society organised a hundred-mile fundraiser for a Galway hospital, in October, and she and a few others signed up.
"I didn't even know if I could run a 5K at that point. I set out on the first day and I was like, I genuinely don't even know if I'm going to get 5K in this."
"It wasn't pretty at all, but we got there in the end."
What she had not expected was to enjoy it, and the reason is about Galway in winter as much as about running.
"Especially in college, it's very easy to say, oh jeez, I'll just stay in the library for the evening. In Galway there's that temptation very much."
"And in Galway you'd need the motivation to get outside, because the rain. And the wind."
She started doing her own 5Ks. Then she saw the Portumna Forest half marathon and signed up for it to have something to work towards through the semester.
"I really, really enjoyed the half. That distance was nice."
A three-quarter marathon followed in September, which she entered out of pure curiosity about whether she could.
"That was not pretty at all. But got through it anyway."
Then, last December, in the middle of exam season, sitting in the library procrastinating, an Instagram post came up advertising charity entries for Dublin.
She signed up on the spot.
An Honest Training Block
Alannah is not in a club and is clear about why.
She is in Galway Monday to Thursday and home every Friday, Saturday and Sunday to work in the hotel, often until one or two in the morning.
"You're not getting up early to head out to do 10K. So a lot of it has happened in the evenings. There's been a lot of dark nights, and windy and wet nights."
And then she does something most people being interviewed about a marathon will not do.
"I'll put my hand up and say this hasn't been an ideal marathon training block, and I won't be breaking any records. That's for sure."
"But I get out, and I've done as much as I can do, really."
She is honest about the regret that comes with that, this close to the day.
"Now that I'm coming so close to it, I'm kind of like, oh, I wish I had really put so much into it and given it my best shot."
"But hindsight's great. In the moment it's not as easy to do all these things."
She would not rule out what she calls a redemption one.
Her race strategy, meanwhile, is the least complicated in this entire series.
"Head down, one foot in front of the other until I cross the finish line. That is as complicated as it's getting."
"I'm not looking for any time or any pace. I just want to cross the line."
Jelly Babies and a Honey Sandwich
The fuelling plan matches the strategy.
"I do not do gels. I don't like the taste of them. They don't agree with me."
"My go-to is jelly babies."
Beyond that, it is whatever her friends and family can hand her as she goes past, since they will be spread around the course at different points.
"I'll have a piece of banana and stuff like that as I'm going around, and maybe a little honey sandwich."
"If I was taking it a bit more seriously, I probably would look into nutrition a bit more. But I'm just going to stick to what I know and what I know suits me."
€3,000 and Counting
Alannah had quietly wondered whether she would even reach the minimum that comes with a charity entry.
She is at €3,000.
"I'm doing very well. I'm very, very lucky. There's so much support from everyone locally, and friends and family, and everyone's sending the link around in WhatsApp groups."
What she thinks is driving it is not her.
"When people see that it was for Family Carers Ireland, they remember the whole wider thing, and that it's about Conor. It's not for me, which is good."
She keeps raising the target, and intends to keep raising it.
Medicine, Because of Conor
Alannah is in fourth year of medicine, having taken the long route there. Three years of biomedical science first, and four attempts at the entry exam before she got in.
She announced the plan on national television at fifteen, which she remembers with some discomfort.
"I said it on the Late Late Show. I said, I want to be a doctor. And I said, Jesus, if I don't make it into medicine, it's going to be fierce embarrassing."
She has no specialty decided and is in no rush, though she is on a psychiatry rotation in Galway at the moment and finding it genuinely interesting.
Where the interest came from is not in doubt.
"It's very much influenced by Conor. I would have gone to so many appointments with him over the years."
"Actually, probably the least with actual doctors, because he doesn't have any physical issues. But psychiatrists, and then speech and language therapists, OTs, all these allied healthcare workers. That would be the huge influence."
She thinks it has given her something else as well, which she is careful to caveat because she is only on placement.
"It's very easy to sit in front of someone and say, you need to do x, y and z. But there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes. There's so much more to it than writing out a prescription and sending them off on their merry way."
"I suppose I have more of a rounded view of medicine, and of the limitations of it."
The same instinct explains why she likes the hotel work too.
"I love just chatting to people. You learn so much by just listening to people. Oftentimes you don't need to ask a million questions. If you just let people chat, so much will come out."
"And sometimes that's all people need, is someone to listen to them."
Full Circle
Conor may not make it to Dublin on the day. The crowds and the logistics of getting around the course to different spots might simply be too much for him.
Her group of friends will be there, one of them running it too. There will be people dotted around the route, including cousins who live on one of the roads out of town and therefore, as she points out, have no excuse.
What she keeps coming back to is the shape of the thing.
"To be able to give back to Family Carers Ireland is something that I'm really proud of."
"They gave me such amazing opportunities when I was younger, and they do so much for so many people. To be able to give back a little bit, and hopefully contribute to someone else's journey with them and help another family, is just so amazing."
"It's kind of full circle in a way."
"Just Go for It"
Her advice is aimed squarely at people who think running belongs to somebody else.
"I still don't think that I'm a runner. But I think you have this perception that you have to be sprinting straight out of the blocks, and that you have to be meeting certain times."
"If I've done a 5K, I've done a 5K. I don't think it makes any odds if I did it in twenty-five minutes or thirty-five. It's still 5K."
"Even if you don't feel that you're at the level of other people that you're seeing online, you're still going for a run, and you're doing it for yourself. That's the main thing. It's not for anyone else."
"I know everyone says it, but it is so good for your head. You're just out, and everything else kind of disappears away. It's just you and your own thoughts for a while."
The last word, though, belongs to her brother, and she gives it to him without being asked.
"Conor has made me the person I am. I wouldn't be studying medicine. I wouldn't be running the marathon. I wouldn't be so many things without Conor."
"We could all learn a lot from him."
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