‘I definitely wouldn't be doing any of this if we didn't have Alanna’

The day before the 2023 Dublin Marathon, Keith Russell flew back into Ireland after competing in Big's Backyard Ultra in Tennessee, writes Paul Keane.

The punishing endurance event pitted the world's best ultra runners against each other in the last man standing format, lining up on the hour, every hour, to complete a 4.167 mile loop. Fail to make it back to the start line at the top of the hour and you're out.

Navan AC's Russell and Belgian Merijn Geerts were the last two standing at a similar event in Rettert, Germany the previous year, smashing through the then world record of 85 hours, or laps.

Geerts won that 2022 event in Germany after 90 laps but covering 597 kms, and completing 89 laps, left Russell right up there among the world's elite.

It also qualified him for Tennessee the following year and while his build up was injury curtailed - a stress fracture to his femur cost him seven months of training - he still managed to stay in the game for 74 laps, just shy of 500 kms across three days. That Saturday, mentally jaded and physically exhausted, he arrived back in Navan.

Yet a few hours later, on the Sunday morning, he pulled on the shoes again and, somehow, completed the Dublin Marathon.

"It was my quickest marathon, two hours 57 minutes," recalled Russell. "I suppose you could say I had a 500km taper that week! I remember the last 10kms in Dublin, I was literally counting them down. My hamstrings were tightening up, my calves were tightening up, I was waiting for them to go at any minute."

He'll toe the start line again this Sunday for the 44th instalment of the country's biggest marathon. Another sub-three hour finish could even be on the cards though preparations haven't exactly been perfect this time either. Knee pain last year was ultimately diagnosed as a meniscus tear which required surgery in January. It wasn't until late this summer that he was back running pain-free.

Not that he'll be getting too hung up on times or results this weekend anyway. Russell's connection with the 26.2 mile distance around the capital's highways and byways goes much deeper than that, to his very soul.

For anyone not familiar with Russell's introduction to endurance running, he pushed his daughter, Alanna, around Dublin in a special running chair in 2017, sharing high fives, smiles and jokes with the crowds before planting a kiss on Alanna's cheek after the pair completed the gruelling circuit in just over three hours and 20 minutes.

Alanna, whose twin sister, Isabelle, was stillborn, had spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy, leaving her unable to speak or to use her arms or legs. It was a condition improved somewhat by the adventures she and her smitten Dad, Keith, got up to together.

On Sunday mornings across 2016 and 2017, they'd go for runs, Keith rising first to wake her, Alanna smiling back at him in knowing anticipation. Sleep came easier to the seven-year-old after those days out and their combined efforts at Dublin in 2017 raised over €70,000 for The Meadows Children's Respite Centre in Navan, funding a new wheelchair accessible bus.

Six weeks later, in December of 2017, Alanna passed away at her home. Fast forward six years, to 2023 and that backyard event in Tennessee, and Russell made sure to remind himself of her on every single lap. He tied a pink ribbon to a tree, at a particularly challenging stage of the circuit, a private nod to his beautiful daughter and running buddy. As drained and broken as he felt in the latter stages of that event, the sight of the ribbon each time lifted his spirits.

"As you went through the course, you had to go up a big incline," he recalled. "Then you came around a corner and the pink ribbon was on the tree. That was the point I picked for her. I was like, 'Right, I need to get back to this point, every lap'. It was really, really nice to have something like that there, especially in the morning time.

"The race obviously keeps going, day and night, and early in the morning you're feeling a bit tired, you're feeling groggy, but then you'd go up and see the ribbon and it was like saying, 'Good morning' to her."

His memories of Alanna are often at their most vivid around Dublin.

"At times I'd be working in Dublin and driving around and you'd come onto certain parts of the course and certain memories just hit you," he said.

Alanna's race number, 141, was retired by the marathon's organisers. Keith took part in the event again in 2018 and was presented with the Lord Mayor's Medal beforehand, in recognition of all that he and Alanna achieved together.

"That's probably the best thing I've ever done, what we did in 2017," said Russell, who represented Ireland in the 2022 24-hour European Championships.

He didn't run Dublin last year because of injury but took up a position at mile eight - the age Alanna was when she passed away - and doled out as much encouragement as he possibly could to participants.

"We put a picture there of Alanna and everyone sort of salutes her as they go by, it's really nice," said Russell. "I really noticed that last year when I was standing there, people shouting my name, shouting Alanna's name. Just saying, 'Hello', remembering her."

By day, Russell runs Boyne Fire Systems, a company specialising in fire protection systems, but he coaches runners too.

"I do a bit of online coaching and I'm coaching up in 121 Fitness as well, we have a running group," he said. "It's great, getting people out on a Tuesday night to do speed sessions, Saturday morning for the tempo sessions. I love it."

One of his group is running the Dublin Marathon and has been leaning on him for advice. It's not a role Russell would have envisaged for himself back in his 20s when he was playing Gaelic football for Navan O'Mahonys or enjoying soccer.

Anything he's done since then, he says, he owes to Alanna, who stirred the runner inside him. And she is still there, driving him on.

"She is, absolutely," nodded Russell. "I definitely wouldn't be doing any of this if we didn't have Alanna. She changed my life. How far I got in ultra running, how I was able to push myself like that, it's all been down to her, keeping her memory alive."

Alanna passed away on 13th December 2017, nine days after her eighth birthday. To mark the anniversary, Keith is booked in for the upcoming Malaga Marathon in Spain on 14th December.

"I like to try to do something around the date each year if I can," he said.

Fitness-wise, he's feeling good after a couple of difficult years. He had put his body through the ringer to make it to the top of the ultra running ladder and, inevitably, it broke down.

"I went from doing the marathon distance straight to 172 kms and then from there to doing 209 in a 24-hour race," he explained. "That was in the space of a year and a half. And, to be fair, I got maybe seven years relatively free of injuries."

The wonder is that his body held up as long as it did to such punishment, like deciding on a whim one Friday evening to run the entire perimeter of Meath, all 365 kms of it, and making it about three quarters of the way around before slumping down on the wall outside a filling station in Slane and, grudgingly, conceding defeat. A friend, noticing that Russell was falling in and out of sleep and a danger to himself, begged him to quit. Taking part in RTE's Ultimate Hell Week in 2019 was another test of his own mettle.

There were more conventional events, like the 172 kms Dublin to Belfast race he completed that same year, finishing third, and the various backyard and ultra slugfests he's subjected himself to, but he's always been open to a fresh challenge.

Such as the one he and a pal took on a couple of years ago on the new greenway from Navan to Kingscourt.

"It was a 50km cycle, then a 50km run, then a 50km cycle," he recalled. "It was 9th December. Again, something nice to do around Alanna's birthday and anniversary. It was in a storm actually, it was absolutely horrific, torturous! But we raised €3,000."

Asked to estimate how much he has helped to raise for various charities over the years, Russell reckons it's around €250,000.

He popped up regularly throughout the summer just gone in the results sections of local road races, clocking 17.39 at the Oldcastle 5k in July. The 17.53 he managed at the Tara 5k in late August was perhaps even more impressive, given the notorious climb outside Fox's Pub.

"That was my goal, by the end of the summer, to break 18 minutes," he said.

A 5k dash is some way off the ultra marathon distance, of course, but Russell is getting there, recovering and rebuilding.

The Dublin and Malaga marathons will signpost any weaknesses or deficiencies that he needs to focus on entering 2026. Then he'll up the mileage and fine tune for what could be his most bizarre challenge yet in March, The Tunnel.

It's a 200-mile ultra marathon through the darkness of the UK's longest foot tunnel, in Bath. The entire race is completed underground with lights switched off between 11pm and 5am, just to add to the difficulty.

According to the race website, it will be a 'mind bending test of extreme endurance and sensory deprivation'.

No better man for it.

"I think if I just keep up with my strength and conditioning, keep doing the right things, I can have longevity within the sport," said the 42-year-old, who hopes to pull on the Ireland singlet again. "Mentally, I have no issues. I know that once I can keep my body right, then it's what I want to keep doing. And I do definitely have the hunger for it."