Running free with degree of success

ATHLETICS:SOME OF us run because we think it will better our lives. We run to cover up a multitude of sins and help us keep the fever from our cabin door. Some of us run because we think it will change our lives. We run to open up new doors and help us rise above unfortunate circumstance, writes Ian O'Riordan..

I'm not entirely sure why Barack Obama started running. I'd like to believe it was a little bit of both. Running has no doubt bettered his life and possibly helped change it. He says he was fond of the beer in his Punahou High School days in Hawaii, and didn't have a complete aversion to marijuana or cocaine either.

Obama maintained this same, easy-going attitude at Occidental College in Los Angeles but when he transferred to Columbia University in New York something changed. He started running. He frequented Central Park on a daily basis and discovered an appreciation for fitness he's maintained ever since. Basketball may still be his first love, but running is what keeps his mojo working.

You only have to look at Obama to realise how true this is. He must be fittest, healthiest-looking US president-elect in history, surpassing even the great vigour of John F Kennedy. He's the first US president-elect to make the cover of Men's Health magazine. In the November issue, the magazine's 20th anniversary special, Obama talks about his near addiction to this fitness regime, which six days a week is his only priority on waking.

"The main reason I do it is just to clear my head and relieve me of stress," he says. "Most of my workouts have to come before my day starts. There's always a trade-off between sleep and working out. Usually I get in about 45 minutes, six days a week. I'll lift weights one day, do cardio the next. I just wish I was getting a 90-minute workout."

Not even the morning-after exhaustion of his successful election could dent his conviction. There he was on Wednesday morning, dressed in a striking black tracksuit and looking like a recently-retired Olympic champion, heading to the small gym next to his home for a three-mile run on the treadmill. Although he did allow himself breakfast with his family, the ritual he says he missed most while so busy running the 21-month campaign for president.

It won't be easy to maintain this regime once Obama in the White House. He's already been warned about the security issues surrounding any extra-curricular activities. Bill Clinton was fond of the three-mile jogging path through Washington's National Mall, accompanied, of course, by a posse of secret service agents on bicycles. It's not that these secret service agents fear they won't be able to keep up with the more testing tempo that Obama is sure to present; they fear for his life.

The jogging path is within sniper range from a mile away and there's just no way of guaranteeing Obama's safety. He may, unfortunately, have to stick to the treadmill.

But running has no doubt bettered his life, and even if it's too much to say running has also helped change it, it's certainly true about Azmera Gebrezgi. She started running to better her life and there's no doubt running has ended up changing it. Just like Obama, Gebrezgi has been on an extraordinary journey, one part of which has now ended, another part of which is about to begin, only her journey is truly about rising above unfortunate circumstance, the sort of journey even Obama would be inspired by.

Next Monday is graduation day at Dublin City University, where Gebrezgi will be awarded with an honours degree in accounting and finance. She's already putting that degree to work and even if her running is not the priority it once was the success of her four years at DCU is worthy of celebration.

I first met Gebrezgi in February of 2004 when she was studying for her Leaving Cert at St Mary's Dominican Convent in Cabra and by then her journey had already been extraordinary. Born and raised in the east African country of Eritrea, she had first arrived in Dublin just two years earlier, at the age of 16, to run the World Cross Country championships in Leopardstown. That presented her with the opportunity to seek asylum in Ireland - and not just any opportunity, but her only opportunity.

Gebrezgi had discovered running as something that could better her life when she was 15 and in her final year of school in Eritrea. Winning a local race qualified her to run in the national trial, and from there she was selected to run in Leopardstown. Although it was her first time out of the country, even seeing an aeroplane, her family decided she shouldn't return. Military service would have been required once she did, and the only way out of that was marriage.

So she ran in Leopardstown, and kept running. She briefly hid out in the Dublin mountains, before finding her way to the refugee centre on Dublin's Navan Road, where she was brought in as an unaccompanied minor. From there her journey took the first of many remarkable twists.

Living in the area was Mary McKenna, the former international 800-metre runner who was coaching at Celtic Junior Athlete Club. She'd left her number at the centre on the off chance someone might ever inquire about running. Exactly a week after Leopardstown she got a call from Sister Breege Keenan at the centre, and when McKenna called around she found Gebrezgi still wearing her red Eritrean tracksuit. Within a few weeks Gebrezgi had joined McKenna's training group at the Polo Grounds of the Phoenix Park and starting the slow, difficult process of adapting to a life in Ireland.

Within a year she was the best junior girl distance runner in Ireland, winning an 800-1,500 metre double at the 2003 Irish Schools championships in Tullamore, and when I spoke to her in February of 2004 she was on an unbeaten cross-country streak she maintained until the end of the season. (She also picked up the inaugural Irish Times sportswoman of the month award.)

Having succeeded in the Leaving Cert, and now eligible to run for Ireland, Gebrezgi was offered a scholarship at DCU, with assistance from the Bill Cullen Sunshine Scholarship Fund, and there her remarkable journey continued. She juggled the training with the studying and never lost sight of her ambition to be an international athlete, but she became susceptible to injury, or more specifically, bio-mechanical problems, which ultimately prevented her from training at the necessary level.

"I say to all my athletes, you're not here to run, you're here to get an honours degree," says Enda Fitzpatrick, who co-ordinates the DCU athletics scholarship scheme. "That's always the priority. And that's why Azmera says so much about what we're trying to do here. Running wise, the odds are always stacked against you when you come out of college, so for her to have her degree to fall back on still makes it a success story."

Considering the odds were stacked against Gebrezgi way before she even came into college, that's proof that running can not only better lives, but utterly and brilliantly change lives.