“My perfect day in Portaferry is with our three spaniels around my feet. Our garden backs on to the windmill hill. I go through the fence, up into the fields, looking up at the windmill hill and looking out to the mouth of the lough and back towards my hometown. The sun is high in the sky and it’s a beautiful blue sky.
“You can see the Irish Sea and the Isle of Man off in the distance. You can basically see the whole of the peninsula from that field. And I have three happy little dogs by my side. Whenever the grass isn’t cut and the wind’s blowing, the silage is lovely.
“That’s my favourite place because that’s my entire world right there as a kid. I can see my primary school. I can see the parish church and just beyond that you can see Portaferry GAC. I swing around and I see my entire town.
“I love the people you’ll pass and chat with; somebody who’s in the choir with my mummy. I don’t think there are many places in the world where you can knock on a door and walk in. It’s giving my coach a hug I had as a kid…
“Joey Duck was a lovely gentleman from home who lived along the shore front. Anybody from Portaferry GAC knew Joey. Joey spent his life at sea.
“If I was going for a run and I saw Joey sitting there, I would stop the watch. I’d sit down for a couple of minutes and chat with him. Joey has passed away since.
“That’s Portaferry for me. It’s home. It’s the community, the place and family. I feel so fortunate to be from a town like that.” – Ciara Mageean
JUST over a week ago, Ciara Mageean stepped onto a treadmill for the first time in four months. It felt both weird and wonderful.
She was with her physio over in Manchester when they both decided it was time to take those first tentative steps back onto the treadmill after ankle surgery.
“It was an eight-minute trot,” she says. “It wasn’t perfect and there are still a few niggles in adjusting but for my head it was very special.”
At this stage, there’s nothing the Portaferry runner doesn’t know about Haglund’s Deformity.
The European gold medallist gives chapter and verse on how the bone on her calcaneus protruded and irritated the bursa, which is between the bone and the Achilles tendon in her right foot.
When she was 19 and in her first year of university in Dublin, she’d the same issue with her left ankle and had it surgically repaired.
For over eight years since, she’d managed the injury in her right foot, promising herself a thousand times over she’d one day get it sorted.
“Each season I got through, I’d think: Is now the time to fix it?’ It’s amazing how quickly you forget the pain you were in, and you just focus on your next goal,” she says.
“As well that, when you’re working towards an Olympic Games you don’t want to put that on pause.
“I’ll be honest: my plan was to have the surgery after the Olympics in Paris, which I did but, unfortunately, I didn’t foresee it would put me out of the games.
“I did the same prep as I always did, the same as I did for the World Championships the year prior where I came fourth.
“It was going to give at some point. I was just so unlucky with the timing of it all.”
It’s a Wednesday evening and Mageean is guest speaker at a Women’s Workshop For Safe Winter Running and Walking at the Theatre at the Mill in New Mossley, a few miles from her new home in Belfast.
The event is organised by Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council in association with the ‘End Violence Against Women and Girls’ campaign.
Before sitting in a side room with The Irish News, Mageean delivers an uplifting talk in front of a packed room on the highs and lows of “running in circles”.
She’s swamped by invitations to give talks and to support different causes. This one is close to her heart.
Her fee for this evening’s workshop, one of the organisers discreetly tells me, is for the council to make a donation to Women’s Aid.
On the eve of her third Olympic Games appearance last summer, Irish sport was rocked by the news that the 32-year-old 1,500m runner had to withdraw because of injury.
A small, protruding, cantankerous bit of bone on her right heel ruined a life goal.
There’s part of Mageean that will never truly come to terms with missing out on the Paris Games in 2024.
Indeed, it’s only recently she’s been able to talk about it without crying.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay,” she says in a rare moment of melancholy.
“I won’t be okay about missing out on the Olympic Games and being in the shape I was in. But life’s not always fair.
“I try not to dwell on it. But listen, we’re Irish – we’ll try and put a bit of humour to it.
“If I sit in any pensive moments, I think: ‘That moment is gone and I’ll never have it back.’
She adds: “I try to put it in perspective because people go through much worse than that.
“It’s something I can’t undo and can’t change. It’s something I’m constantly processing...
“I’m always of the opinion that sometimes the lowest point in your life can be a catalyst for change and opportunity for growth.”
One of the changes she’s made to her life was to move back home and prepare for the next Olympic cycle – Los Angeles in 2028 – while trying to get fit for September’s World Championships in Tokyo.
Her outlook on life, she says, has “definitely evolved” and she’s learned to embrace other parts of her life outside of “running in circles”.
She got engaged to her long-term boyfriend Thomas Moran earlier this month, moved back home, and wants to start a family one day.
“I felt I had to be all-in with athletics and there could be no other distractions. And do you know what, it’s a really dull life and a really challenging life when you put absolutely everything, every ounce of your being into that.
“It can be really lonely and stressful… but you still can have those goals alongside a happy life with fulfilled relationships and having fun with your friends.”
With the idyllic fields leading to windmill hill only a short drive away now, Ciara Mageean’s life is suddenly more centred.
