Alison Casey turns 50 on the last Sunday in October.
She will spend the day running her first marathon, which she entered before she knew what the rest of the year had in store for her.
Since then she has been made redundant after twenty years with the same company, and been thrown about eight feet into the air by a retired racehorse and landed on her coccyx, which is still not right.
She has a fairly dry way of summarising all that.
"It's kind of a year like, well, you're 49, you're gonna be 50 soon, so we're just gonna throw everything at you and see how you cope."
"Resilience is the name of the game for me at the moment."
She is running for CRY, Cardiac Risk in the Young, and has raised over €2,800 with a new target of over €3,000.
North County Dublin
Alison lives up on the Dublin and Meath border, between Stamullen and Balscadden.
She is not in a running club, and she is open about why not.
"I would never have classed myself as a runner as such, because I only started running last year. I kind of felt like the clubs were maybe a bit more professional, and I wasn't really a runner."
She has three older brothers and no children of her own. Her brothers did athletics growing up. She did not.
"I grew up surrounded by horses and on the farm, so I did do a lot of horse riding."
Her family train racehorses, and her father is Peter Casey, who is remembered by a good section of the country for one particular interview with Tracy Piggott.
"That was a bit of fun."
She has horses of her own now, a couple of mares, and has bred winners.
"We've bred our own horses and they've won, and that's been really exciting."
February 2025
The running started in the most ordinary way imaginable, and very recently.
In September 2024 the horse she was riding picked up an injury, which left her with a summer doing less than she normally would. She joined a local gym, Atomic Fitness, partly because she had a birthday coming.
"I thought, I'm coming up to 50 next year. I need to be fit and healthy. And when the horse gets back, I need to be ready as well."
Then in February a personal trainer at the gym, Shannon, announced she was starting a run club.
"And I was like, I'm not really a runner. But I thought, well, sure, give it a go."
The first run was half eight on a Saturday morning, a group of them lined up outside the gym, and two and a half kilometres around the houses. Another trainer, James, ran it beside her.
"He just said, I'll go with you. Just take your time. And that was kind of it, really. That was the start of it."
Shannon built it out from there. Evening runs at seven in the dark. A timed 5K. Then parkruns.
Malahide, Donabate and a Headwind at Laytown
The parkruns are where Alison lights up, and she is the best advert for them in this entire series precisely because she is fourteen months into running.
Malahide was the first.
"We all did a warm-up, and off we went. And then afterwards we were all together, and we were delighted. We'd done our first parkrun."
"Parkrun was great because it's free to go. You just register, and the atmosphere was really good. And everybody is so encouraging. Whether you wanna run fast or whether you wanna walk, it's just a great atmosphere."
Newbridge House at Donabate followed. Then Laytown, on the beach, where the wind did what wind does on that stretch of coast.
"You run up and you run back. The wind was crazy. You kind of felt like it definitely got the wind out your sails."
"It's amazing that all the volunteers are there to support everybody. Everyone makes such a huge effort. Whether you're running fast or slow or walking, it doesn't make any difference."
"I'd encourage anyone to set yourself a goal of achieving a parkrun. And then before you know it, you'll be doing lots and enjoying it with everyone else."
The Dublin City Half Marathon in early May was the first big one, and she had a number in mind.
"On my Garmin it said one fifty nine fifty nine. The official was, like, two hours."
She was delighted with herself. The route also took her through Artane and Raheny.
"What I was amazed at was the crowd support. The atmosphere, everybody came out. It was so good."
Mags
The charity came through a friend from the run club.
Mags is a board trustee with CRY, and Alison's description of her is the kind of thing you cannot manufacture.
"Mags is a few years older than me, but she runs like a 20-year-old. She's such an inspiring lady."
"She was always a person that could run really fast, but actually she would stay back with everybody to encourage them. She'd walk if she had to. She was just always there to carry everyone through."
Alison has no direct connection to CRY herself, and she is straightforward about that.
What drew her was the size of it.
"What I liked about CRY is they're not a massive charity. They're quite a small organisation. They only employ a couple of people."
"I just think it's so important to recognise charities that work locally in the community, that can provide health screening and support for families who've maybe lost a loved one through some kind of sudden heart illness. Charities that maybe don't get massive coverage in the media."
Her father had heart problems, though not related to what CRY exists for.
What she keeps coming back to is how little any of us can see.
"Your heart health is so important no matter what age you are. We need to have awareness, particularly even in young fit people, where everything looks okay on the outside but you don't really know what's going on on the inside."
"Without funding they can't do anything. If more research can be done, maybe some of these inherited heart conditions could be, not necessarily prevented, but managed so that we don't lose a loved one."
And then the thing that has surprised her most since she started telling people what she is running for.
"There's so many people that I speak to, and they all have some kind of connection. They all know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody."
"It starts the conversation, which is great."
She has raised over €3,000. White's Agri, the local store where she buys her horse feed, have pledged another €500 to CRY at the end of the year.
July
The training was going well. She had committed to the marathon back in February, booked the Ratoath half well in advance, and had the whole thing mapped out towards her fiftieth birthday.
Then in July she was retraining a retired racehorse who was not himself.
"I think he kind of got a little bit of an injury, but he decided to get rid of me while I was on him."
"He threw me up in the air, and I fell from about eight foot, basically on my coccyx."
Her first thought was her back.
"I was really concerned I'd broken my back, just simply because of the jarring."
She got herself up, got back to the house, and iced it.
"My husband knows what I'm like by now."
The next day she could see what she was dealing with.
"Basically the cheeks of my arse were black."
She waited a week before going anywhere, on the reasonable grounds that there is not much to be done for a coccyx. Then she started struggling to walk, and went to Beaumont on a Friday evening.
"People are looking at me thinking, oh, she looks alright. To all intents and purposes I look fine. When you go into A and E there's lots of people really unwell there."
"I went through to triage to the nurse, and she's like, what's wrong with you? I said, I had a fall a week ago. She said, can you show me? So I had to pull my trousers down, and she's like, woah."
The X-ray was clear. They recommended an MRI, which she has not had.
"I kind of thought, well, there isn't really anything that can be done, so I just need to rest."
"I probably will need to do that, but I'm so determined to get to the marathon that I don't want anything to hinder me."
Four weeks off. Then back, gradually. It is still there.
"It's kind of like sitting on a tennis ball, basically."
There is a knock-on effect too, which her physio in Stamullen has been managing. The right side took more of the fall than the left, which has pulled on the quad and set her knee off again.
Fairyhouse, from the Inside
Her comeback race was the Ratoath half, taken deliberately easy, and it delivered something she had not anticipated.
The race starts and finishes at Fairyhouse.
Alison has ridden a horse round Fairyhouse. She has bred and owned a horse that won there. Her father and brothers have had plenty of winners there, and she has been going since she was a child.
"So I was delighted then that I'd actually run around there as well."
"Albeit on the inner track, where the ambulance goes."
Three weeks before we spoke she did the Lusk 20-mile, which she had not researched beforehand.
"I didn't realise there's so many hills. It's a loop, so you do it three times, and it's like, oh Jesus, I've gotta go up that big steep hill again."
She had been quietly avoiding hills since the fall, because of what they did to her glutes, so a three-lap hilly loop with an uphill finish was not the plan.
"But anyway, it didn't matter. It was all good stuff. It was an uphill finish as well, so I'm thinking, well, it'll do me good."
She came away recommending it to anybody preparing for Dublin, and mostly talking about the people from Lusk she met on the day.
From Sub-Four to Getting There
The target has moved, and she is clear-eyed about why.
"I was thinking I could definitely do a sub-four beforehand. Could have been three fifty. But that's way off now."
"Getting there is the most important thing. Just turning up, now, at this stage. If I could do four and a half hours, I'd be delighted."
"The objective is to get there in one piece, to do it, enjoy it, soak up what everybody tells me is a great atmosphere."
On fuelling she went and got properly set up at the start, which not many first-timers do.
She had a gait analysis done at Run Hub, came out a neutral runner, got the right shoes, and has gone back to them for advice since. They started her on Precision Fuel gels, which have agreed with her, and she went in last week to stock up rather than risk running short.
"So I'm all organised. I've got those gels, and hopefully they'll be alright on the day."
Sixteen from Stamullen
Alison will not be travelling in alone.
Sixteen people from Stamullen are running Dublin, some from the gym and some from another running group in the village. They are going in on a minibus together and meeting afterwards.
As for the day itself, she is somewhere between excited and disbelieving.
"I feel a little bit like, is this really happening? It's a bit mad. And obviously it's gonna be my birthday as well."
"I do think, god, this is a bit surreal."
"I'll definitely feel proud when I cross that finish line. It'll be a huge sense of achievement, and it'll be a bit of relief as well, after everything."
"Everyone Can Do It"
Alison's advice comes from somebody who ran two and a half kilometres around the houses twenty months ago.
She makes the case first for the kind of people she grew up around, which is a nice observation nobody else in this series has made.
"From the horse world, people that have worked with horses are generally hard workers. They're outside in all elements. And they like having a bit of structure, having a plan. And they're competitive as well."
"There's a lot of jockeys that will run around the racecourse before they even start their day's work of riding in races."
Then she widens it out.
"No matter what size, shape, or how fit or how unfit you are, anyone can put a pair of trainers on. And whether you start walking or you run and walk or whatever, you can start somewhere."
"Everyone can do it, and it's amazing what you can achieve. Just enjoy it."
You can support Alison's fundraising for CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young) ahead of the Dublin Marathon here.
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