A couple of months back, Ciara Mageean was sitting on her couch at 10.59am. The time is specific and important. She was bored, which is also important. On a whim, for something to be at, she grabbed the laptop and logged on to a bowel cancer support group on Zoom.
It was a resource she hadn’t tapped into before, mostly because she hadn’t felt the need. In all truth, she didn’t especially feel it now either. But cancer has that brutal dichotomy of days – some are the most significant and urgent of your entire time on the planet, others are long and lost and purposeless. You do what you do to get through them all.
“It was like, ‘Sure, I’ll just tune in and listen’,” she says now. “And I’m a big believer in things happening for a reason. For some reason, I was bored at specifically a minute to 11 because if it had been half-10, it probably wouldn’t even have entered my head. But now I was listening in and a lady came on who had obviously done this before because everyone seemed to know her.
“She started to tell her cancer story and while she was chatting away, she goes, ‘Oh, hold on, one of the nurses is here – Hello! Come on in! I’m on this Zoom.’ And it was her district nurse coming in to take her blood. She just kept chatting away and I was like, ‘Oh, this is their normality.’
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“It’s their normality that nurses are so commonplace in their house. It’s their normality to have a sharps box in the corner of their front room and a cupboard full of medication and laxatives. And a timeline that fluctuates because sometimes you’re good and sometimes you’re bad.”
We’re sitting in Mageean’s livingroom in Dunmurry, a quiet suburb just south of Belfast. This is the house she and her fiance Thomas Moran moved to when she came home heartbroken after the 2024 Olympics. Her running career is all around us – awards on the shelves, running track on the wall, a framed cityscape of Paris (of all places) above the sofa.
This was supposed to be their starter home, the bridge between here and Los Angeles in 2028. Once those Olympics were over, she’d be 36. She’d hang up the spikes, they’d move out to the country, they’d start a family. They’d get on with the next phase of life, catch up with their friends who’d got a head start on all that stuff while she was busy with athletics. That was the plan. Before.
Before cancer. Before stage four. Before chemotherapy. Before immunotherapy. Before the sickness and the tiredness and the lakes of tears. Before ever giving a second’s thought to death or survival, fear or hope. Before sitting on this Zoom call and hearing all of it reflected in a stranger having her bloods taken.
“She started talking and gave her name and said, ‘I was diagnosed in 2016 with stage four bowel cancer.’ She just spoke briefly, like, ‘Oh, if I was going to tell you a whole story, we’d be here all day.’ I didn’t envisage that I would be jumping on to this Zoom call and ending up feeling like I wanted to cry.
“They were like, ‘Who wants to go next?’ I said, ‘I just want to thank that lady for sharing her story. I was diagnosed with stage four in May of last year and was told at Christmas that surgery’s not an option and that radiotherapy is not an option. Kind of giving me a two- to three-year outlook. And hearing you say that you were diagnosed in 2016 and you’re still here and you look great, I didn’t know that could be a reality.’
“She came back on and she said, ‘When I was diagnosed, I was given six to 12 months to live. They told me that surgery wasn’t an option.’ And as she was talking, I was thinking, ‘For some reason, I needed to see the clock at 10.59 and to remember this call was happening and for that lady to have decided that she was going to be on it and give me that message.’
“Because I’ve always kept that bit of hope. There’s always outliers in statistics, there’s always progress in research. I’m not necessarily the same as somebody who has been given a stage four bowel cancer diagnosis and is older than me and has other co-morbidities and had more risk factors. Maybe I can be the exception to the rule.”
This should not be happening. Of course it shouldn’t. Shortly after her diagnosis, she was handed a booklet on bowel cancer from Macmillan Cancer Support. She flicked through it and came to the page on risk factors associated with the disease. She became more and more angry with every heading she read.
‘As soon as I got that diagnosis, I felt like the grim reaper was on my shoulder’
— Ciara Mageean
Age? She’s 34. Less than five per cent of bowel cancer patients are under 50. Around one per cent are under 35.
Diet? She’s worked with a Team Ireland nutritionist for over a decade.
Low physical activity? She’s the reigning European champion at 1,500 metres.
Overweight? Look at her.
Alcohol? Barely touches a drop.
Smoking? Never once in her life.
Family history? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Basically, if you lined up everyone in Ireland, north and south, in the order of their risk of being a stage four bowel cancer patient, Mageean would be away at the back with the playschool kids. Yet here she is. This is her life.
It’s just over a year since her diagnosis. She was on a training camp in Font Romeu in France, mostly doing bike work because her ankle still hadn’t healed fully after surgery the previous September. Thomas was there; some friends from her former training group in Manchester were there.
It was a fun time, even if it was slow going on the training front. She gradually realised she wouldn’t be making the 2025 track season. Once you hit your 30s, injuries clear up in their own sweet time. You can’t cram for the exam like you might have got away with in your 20s. But that was fine. LA was the only goal that mattered now.
Mageean’s first Olympics came in Rio when she was 24. She made a semi-final, a credible effort for a newbie. Her second was the Covid games in 2021, but she tore her calf a week before her event in Tokyo and didn’t get out of her heat. Paris in 2024 was all set to be the pinnacle, before a dormant volcano in her Achilles tendon erupted in the pre-Olympic camp. Another Games gone.
So she wasn’t stressing over her recovery in May 2025. She could write you a thesis on the extent to which nothing is promised when it comes to the Olympics. You can be European champion in June and still not make the start line in August. Once that happens to you, you’re not going to worry about a slow-healing ankle three years out.
The one thing that was irritating her, though, was that she couldn’t seem to last any length of time between trips to the bathroom. Athletes are well used to keeping the toilet door where they can see it – the balance of diet, fluids, supplements and high-performance exercise can be a delicate one to strike. But this was getting ridiculous.
“On that camp, I’d have been spinning on the spin bike and would have to get off the bike to go the toilet up to six times in an hour. And not just like, ‘I need to go to the toilet.’ It was, ‘I need to go to the toilet NOW.’ And cramping along with it.
“Thomas was like, ‘Here, I really do think you should get this looked into. It’s not normal to be going to the toilet this often.’ So I said it to Sharon Madigan, my nutritionist. We said we’d get it checked out in the Institute of Sport when we got back.”
Long story short, she got referred to St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin. She intended going by herself but they said she’d be getting a mild sedative, meaning she couldn’t drive after it. So her mother went with her. They weren’t fretting – at worst, it would be irritable bowel syndrome or something in that realm. She sent her mam for a dander around the shops while she had a bowel scope.
“But then when (the doctor) came back later on, I took one look at him and I was like, ‘Oh God, this doesn’t look like it’s good news.’ The indicators were there – he brought a nurse in with him and she was asking me, ‘Do you have somebody with you?’ So I called my mummy in from the waiting room and he told me there and then that he’d found cancer.”
What would you do? The world falls in on you, how would you react? Mageean did the one thing she would always do if she could. She went for a run.
The diagnosis was on a Tuesday afternoon and she spent Wednesday morning at the Institute of Sport in Abbottstown. Gym work, a strength and conditioning session and a run. “Actually, a very good run,” she laughs.
She doesn’t really know why. Partly, it was to keep up appearances. She had an appointment at the institute that day that she didn’t want to cancel, knowing if she did, she’d have to explain why. She still hadn’t told Thomas or the rest of her family yet – she wanted to wait until they were face-to-face – so she was hardly going to tell anyone else. The easiest way out was to keep the appointment. And if she was going to be there anyway, she may as well get out and run.
‘I don’t want to be that girl who looks like a skeleton on her wedding day’
— Ciara Mageean
“Maybe it was a thing of, ‘This is what I’m used to doing.’ There was a comfort in it. Maybe I was just like, ‘For as long as I can, I want to continue being me’.”
Cancer is a thug. It smashes into your life without warning. It invades the small things. That peace you had but never noticed. That future you put off. Your solid ground, your sense of control. Cancer gets in there with a billy club and shatters it all to bits.
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The next while passed in a blur of appointments and scans and updates, each one hitting worse than the last. Early on, they clung to the hope that as she was young and fit, this was a cancer that had been caught early. No such luck. An MRI revealed that it was stage four – she didn’t need Dr Google to tell her what that meant.
“There’s a reality that comes with that. According to the statistics, people with stage four bowel cancer have a 10-15 per cent chance of being alive in five years. And I’m like, ‘Am I going to die?’
“Tommy’s not a big crier. But we just cried for a week. He took a week off work and we just cried every day. Then we went down to Portaferry to tell my family. I’d told them already that I had cancer but then to tell them that it was stage four, that was probably the hardest part.”
Soon enough, the chemo slog began. An initial dose of 12 rounds, each a fortnight apart, filled out the rest of her 2025. The first few were tolerable, the next few were tough, the last few were vicious. She would get chemo on a Thursday and be a write-off until at least the following Tuesday. A small mercy was that her particular type of chemo doesn’t cause hair loss. It does cause nerve damage, exhaustion and unending sickness though.
Her oncologist scheduled an appointment for Christmas Eve. She brought Thomas and her sister Máire, a doctor, with her. They were hoping to hear that the chemo had reduced the tumours enough for radiotherapy and surgery to finish the job. But the news he had for them was devastating.
“He basically said, ‘We’ve reviewed your most recent scans with the multidisciplinary team and we don’t feel that surgery is an option.’ I sat there thinking, ‘What do you mean surgery’s not an option? Just go and take all of it out! Take whatever you need out of me!’
“Then he said, ‘We also feel, weighing up the pros to the cons, that radiotherapy isn’t something that we should go ahead with. Because if you have radiotherapy, it’ll put you into early menopause. The negative effect on your body would far outweigh the positive effect of trying to shrink those tumours.’
“So, no surgery, no radio. Those were the next steps we were hoping for and he was telling me they weren’t happening. For the first time, I basically asked him upfront: ‘Are you talking timelines now?’ And so I found out on Christmas Eve that the consultant probably realistically feels that I might have two or three years left.
“So that was f**king rough!”
‘I’ve not watched a lot of athletics ... I’m just so jealous that I don’t get to have that’
— Ciara Mageean
When they left the room, she hugged her fiance and her sister and the three of them stood there in ashes. Straight away, she decided two things. One, they weren’t going to tell any of the rest of the family the news until January. Bad enough that the three of them had had their Christmas ruined, no sense taking everyone else down with them.
And two, she was going to get back to Jamie D’Alton, the producer of the RTÉ television show Uncharted. He’d been on to her for a long time asking if she’d ever be interested in doing it, but it never was an option when she was running and chemo had colonised her life for the previous six months. But now? Bring it on.
“I’ve come to realise that with cancer, you can just be unlucky. I’m just really bloody unlucky. So I walked out of that appointment with Máire and Thomas and we all had tears in our eyes. I was like, ‘Well, do you know what? If I’m gonna f**king die, I’m going on that adventure’.”
A few weeks later, she was in Costa Rica with Ray Goggins and Michael Darragh Macauley. Anyone who saw the programme a few weeks back wouldn’t believe that the month before it was filmed, she was just finishing up her 12th round of chemo. And was just about to plunge into another six.
“I’m so, so glad that I did it. So glad that I didn’t wrap myself up in cotton wool and think, ‘Oh, I can’t do this because I’ve got the cancer. I’m on the chemo.’ I postponed a round of chemo to do it actually.
“That’s one of the things I wish I’d known earlier. I didn’t realise that at the start, nor did I even have the mental capacity to think about not just taking every single bit of treatment that I could, as fast as I could. Whereas now I realise this is going to be a long journey.”
How long? She has no idea. Nobody does. But in January of this year, just a few days before she headed off to Costa Rica, she got her first glimmer of hope.
The same oncologist who sat her down for that awful appointment on Christmas Eve was back with better news a month later. A PET scan had revealed that the majority of the cancer cells in the lymph around her bowel, liver, lung and abdomen were now inactive. And that the tumour in her bowel was now dormant.
In layman’s terms, it meant the chemo was having an effect. So he ordered up more of it. He couldn’t say whether it meant surgery might now be possible somewhere down the line. He couldn’t say whether it meant a change in possible timelines or anything like that. All he could say, all he was very careful to say, was that most of her cancer cells were inactive.
So she went to Costa Rica and started into six fresh rounds of chemo when she got back. She has just finished up the last of them in the past few weeks. What comes next? She doesn’t know yet. She tries, as much as is practical, not to make cancer the entirety of her life.
“Stressing and worrying about it isn’t going to change it. You’re so entitled to those emotions obviously. But you could lose yourself to it. I don’t know what this journey is going to look like. I don’t know at what point I’m going to get sick. As soon as I got that diagnosis, I felt like the grim reaper was on my shoulder and I didn’t know if I was going to be dead in a matter of months.
“Tommy and I are engaged but we’ve never had any rush on the wedding. But now I was like, ‘Do we need to get a move on here?’ Because I don’t want to be that girl who looks like a skeleton on her wedding day. Or having to be in a hospital bed with Tommy beside me and me in a wedding dress in the hospital bed. I want it to be a normal day.”
So that’s how she’s carrying it. Living with the normality of it all. They’re looking at wedding venues, getting out and about, going on holiday. They’ll head to the Mont Blanc marathon in a couple of weeks. Thomas wants to bring her on a jaunt to the Faroe Islands. Life is happening. No point waiting on it.
‘I need to make light of it. It helps cope with the genuine worry’
— Ciara Mageean
In the middle of it all last year, her manager and friend Sinéad Galvin suggested it was time to do a book. They’d always talked about getting around to it once she retired. Now that retirement had been decided for her, why not get it down on paper? If nothing else, it would be a good distraction.
So she and sports writer Cliona Foley went to work. They had to fit everything in around the chemo, which meant doing it when she was well enough, which wasn’t always predictable. Sometimes she’d be okay to get down to it the Tuesday after a Thursday treatment. Sometimes it would be Wednesday. They rolled with the punches.
It’s not a cancer book. Or at least, not only a cancer book. The ups and downs of a career that came to a lonely, premature stop are in there too. She never got a swansong race, never heard one last bell and got to pour every ounce of herself into one last lap. Her career ended in a physio room in the Olympic Village in Paris, without her even knowing it was over. Surgery isn’t the only event that leaves a scar.
“I’ve not watched a lot of athletics,” she says. “I see the results but I haven’t been able to turn it on and watch. It’s not a positive trait, it’s a human trait. I’m just so jealous that I don’t get to have that. If I was still running, I would get to be at those World Champs or those Europeans. That’s my European title that is going to go in August. And it just still hurts too much.
“The book has probably helped me come to terms with a lot of it. Things like Paris. I literally came straight home and launched myself into the surgery and the rehab and finding a house and getting back running. And then I got this diagnosis.
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“So I never really gave myself a chance to address it and say, ‘Yeah, that was really hard.’ But there’s still a huge part of me, and I’ll hold my hand up and say it, it’s jealousy. And it’s a lot of grief because I’m sort of grieving the loss of a career. And even just grieving the loss of being able to bow out of it the way I wanted to. I think the book helped me process some of that.”
And so she keeps trucking. Good days and bad. Sometimes, out of nowhere, she’ll be accosted by the unfairness of it all. It hurts when it happens and she has learned to let it hurt. Learned to find the dark humour in it too.
“I’ll be sitting on the couch and I’ll be like, ‘F**k. I might be dead in two years.’ I certainly won’t ... well, I don’t want to say certainly but I probably won’t make my 40th birthday. Like, that’s f**king rough.
“But we’re planning this wedding and I can’t help but think, ‘The poor lad’s going to be left a widower in his 30s.’ And then I’m like, ‘Sure then he’s going to be a bit old! It’s going to be hard for him to find a new partner!’ I say to him, ‘Here, you can’t move on from me too fast ...’
“People probably are like, ‘I can’t believe you’re saying that.’ But I need to make light of it. It helps cope with the genuine worry that I’m going to leave him on his own. We’ve been together for 13 years and you think that you’re going to have your whole life together.”
For now, all they can do is plan in the short term. Today, tomorrow, next week, next month. What’s next on the treatment front is up in the air. But summer is here, plump with possibilities. She doesn’t know how many of them she has left.
None of us ever do.
My Greatest Race by Ciara Mageean is published by Gill Books on June 18th. Read an extract in Monday’s Irish Times and on irishtimes.com.
