‘I should have been dead. Without running, I could’ve been six foot under. It kept me on this planet’
In life’s race of all or nothing, the 64-year-old reveals how his compulsive energy and marathon addiction became a dangerous, destructive force but also saved him
Tommy Hughes, the 64-year-old runner from Derry, is still breaking marathon records and is determined to break 2.30 again. Photo: David Conachy
At this stage in life, it’s easy to connect the dots. To see how the drive that once fuelled him on the roads led him, many years later, to spiral towards a dangerous edge. When Tommy Hughes decided his running days were done, that obsession, that addiction, was never going to go gently into the night. And for retired athletes, such compulsive energy can be a dangerous, destructive force.
Olympians, more than most, lead binary lives, seesawing between long blocks of bare asceticism and short windows of unbridled blowouts. Denial and indulgence. Yin and yang. That’s only amplified for marathoners. Those who centre their lives on running themselves into the ground for two and a bit hours have many strengths — patience, resilience, immense pain tolerance — but the great weakness of many endurance athletes is an inability to moderate.
