'I was a competitor'
Mullingar Harriers Athletic Club celebrates the 50th anniversary of its foundation later this year. To mark its first half a century, a group of members led by Bobbie Begley and Michael Sullivan, are currently working on a book that will be published later this year. The book will catalogue the club’s successes on and off the track over the five decades, as well as profiling some of the members who have made their mark. One of the first people interviewed for the book by the Westmeath Examiner’s Rodney Farry, who is also on the committee, was US based Mullingar native Louis Kenny. One of Ireland’s finest long distance runners in the 1970s and ’80s, Louis’ successes at home and abroad helped to bring the then fledgling club to the attention of the wider world.
When he speaks about his running career in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s not hard to see why Louis Kenny says he “squeezed the sponge”.
Mullingar native Louis competed during one of the golden ages of Irish middle and long-distance running when contemporaries like Eamonn Coghlan, Frank O’Mara, and John Treacy won medals at major championships.
In fact, Louis was rooming with Coghlan at the World Championships in Helsinki in 1983 when the Dubliner shook off previous disappointments at major championships to win the 5,000m. Louis was actually in the Olympic Stadium when Coghlan made history, but more on that below.
Seen by many as the greatest Westmeath athlete of all time, Louis’s journey to the World Championships began as a youngster in his home town.
“I started running with John Mulvihill, Brendan Mooney, and Niall Horan’s uncle, Seamus. I started running out of Niall Horan’s grandparents’ kitchen – over to the camp field and run. That’s where we trained first, and then we moved over to Cusack Park.”
One of his first major victories on the national stage was in August 1971, when the then 14-year-old won the 1,500m at the NACA All-Ireland Juvenile Championships.
The NACA notes in the August 21, 1971 edition of the Westmeath Examiner said that Louis’ victory “was one of the highlights” of the meet.
“A very promising runner with the Gainstown Club, Louis has a very creditable list of respectable performances to date.”
The following September, Louis was part of the first Westmeath team to take part in the Community Games national final, which took place in Santry. He finished third in the Boys U16 1,500m, a race won by future Olympic silver medallist John Treacy.
One of the most promising young long-distance runners in the country and eager to wear the green singlet, Louis, like a number of other talented and ambitious local athletes, joined the BLE-affiliated Tullamore Harriers, as members of NACA clubs were ineligible for international selection.
In March 1975, he was part of the Irish team that claimed second place at the World Junior Cross-Country Championships in Morocco, finishing ninth, the second highest-placed Irish runner after John Treacy, who was third.
Louis’s performances at home and abroad brought him to the attention of American colleges, and in 1975 he joined the ‘Irish Brigade’ at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) on an athletic scholarship, alongside fellow Midlander Ray Flynn from Longford, who he shared a room with.
The life of a student-athlete suited Louis. In 1976, he broke John Treacy’s junior 5,000m record competing for ETSU in Gainesville.
Louis returned home on holidays after his first year in college and joined Mullingar Harriers. In his first race for the club, he won the 5,000m at the semi-final of the Omega League in Santry in a time of 14 minutes, 35 seconds.
A few weeks later, he finished first in the inaugural six-mile “round-the-houses” road race organised by Mullingar Harriers as part of the famous Steak Festival.
“The evening itself was splendid, the field for the senior event was top class, and to cap it all, 19-year-old Louis Kenny from Ginnell Terrace ran the race of his life to breast the tape 200 yards clear of his nearest rival, such was his superiority over the field in the six miles event,” the July 3, 1976 edition of the Westmeath Examiner reported.
Twelve months later, Louis won the race once again. His winning time of 29 minutes, 49 seconds was 12 seconds faster than the previous year.
As the Moscow Olympics in 1980 approached, Louis was running well and was rightly viewed as one of Ireland’s finest long-distance runners. Although he experienced injury problems in 1978 and 1979, he set himself the target of qualifying in the 10,000m, but he narrowly failed to make the qualifying time.
He put the disappointment behind him, and two days before the Olympics started, he won the annual 20-mile Clonliffe Harriers Road Race. It the first time he had run that distance competitively, and he beat some of Ireland’s finest marathon runners in the process.
Although he always intended to run marathons, this unexpected victory saw Louis expedite his plans.
In December 1980, he made waves at home and abroad when he ran the second-fastest debut marathon in history at the Rocket City event in Huntsville, Alabama. His time of 2 hours, 12 minutes, and 19 seconds also knocked a whopping 45 seconds off Neil Cusack’s Irish record.
A report in the December 18, 1980 edition of the Westmeath Topic put Louis’s performance into perspective.
“His time would have been good enough to give him fifth place in the Moscow Olympic Marathon and was the nineteenth fastest in the world in 1980 and the twelfth fastest in Europe.”
Although still young for a long-distance runner, Louis was reaping the benefits of his four years at ETSU. Between November 1980 and February 1982, he was in the form of his life. In that 16-month purple patch, he broke the Irish records in the 15km road race, the 10-mile road race (twice), the half marathon, and the marathon.
In August of 1982, Louis returned home, and wearing the maroon singlet of Harriers, he won the inaugural Lakeland 15 Mile Road Race.
In its report on the race, the Westmeath Examiner said that “Kenny’s winning time of 74 minutes, 38 seconds was impressive running, and it must surely guarantee him selection in the marathon event in the European Athletics Championships to be held in Athens next month.”
The Examiner wasn’t wrong. Louis was named in the Irish squad and travelled to Greece, hopeful of making his mark on the international stage.
Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed when he got injured while out for a run with another member of the Irish team a few days before his race.
“Louis Kenny was out on a routine run in Athens on Monday and was returning to his hotel when he failed to notice a low bar jutting out from a bus shelter and fell headlong on the pavement, striking his knee and head.
“His head became badly swollen, and there were fears that he had broken a bone or torn a ligament, but subsequent X-rays revealed that had not happened,” the Westmeath Topic reported.
His injuries may not have been too serious, but Louis’s race was run before it even started.
Fast forward almost 12 months, and Louis was named on the Irish team for the World Championships in Helsinki, where, as mentioned above, he shared accommodation with Eamonn Coghlan.
That time, he did make it to the starting line for the marathon but did not finish the race.
“It was an incredible trip. I was disappointed [that I did not finish]. I had a sciatic nerve flare-up. I don’t know if it was my training or what it was, but at about 18 miles, I just couldn’t go on. I couldn’t feel my foot hitting the ground. It is a thing you can get when you are a marathon runner, but I was back in the stadium to see Eamonn run.
“It was incredible, and to be his roommate, the two of us there all the time before everything and discussing stuff. He is a neat character.”
Louis had harboured ambitions to run in the marathon at the Los Angeles Olympics, a race in which his old Community Games rival, John Treacy, famously won the silver medal. However, he was unable to return to Ireland for the trials.
He continued to run competitively for a few years but struggled to get back to his best. By then he a young family to provide for, and competing was not as high up on his list of priorities as it once was.
“That injury [the sciatic nerve flare-up] kind of nagged me for a while, and I couldn’t really shake it off. I don’t know, there might have been a little bit of scar tissue or something, and it kept putting pressure on the nerve.”
Based in America since he flew over as a teenager to join the ‘Irish Brigade’ at ETSU half a century ago, and now living in Nashville, father of four Louis is philosophical when he looks back at his running career, a career that most athletes can only dream of.
“You just squeeze out what you can. I was able to put stuff together.
“I would say that I went off the track too early. I probably should have stayed on the track for a few more years and gone on to the marathon later. There may be something to it that maybe if I had waited [it would have been better], but I was eager to run distance.
“I came home in maybe my Sophomore year [1980] and won the Clonliffe 20, which was a surprise. I may have been too eager.
“If you look at horse or greyhound racing, which I grew up in, and boxing, you’ve got to let the man get older before moving to the longer [competitions] – there’s a seasoning type thing.
“I think that it might have been wiser for me to wait maybe four years [to move to the marathon], but that’s the way life turned out. I wanted to go into that area.
“I think the Europeans in 1982 were my biggest disappointment because I had just won the Lakeland 15 and had run some really good runs. I knew the form I was in.
“Karl Lismont from Belgium got a medal that night in Athens. I had beaten him in a 10,000 metres on a track. I hadn’t worn spikes; I had just worn flats because I wanted to keep myself fresh as I had the marathon coming up.
“I had run 28:45 not really trying too hard, and I had beaten Lismont by about a lap and a half. I have a feeling I would have medalled in Athens. These things happen, and you just have to take it.
“I don’t think I was super, super talented, but I squeezed the sponge. I was a competitor.”