Toucan play at this game as brewery heirs hit the roads

ATHLETICS:FOR THE past couple of weeks as the evenings have drawn shorter and the air turned cooler a man in a suit and tie has come hurrying home from work trying hard to motivate himself for the task at hand, writes Ian O'Riordan

A pair of white-and-blue runners lies next to the kitchen door, still new-looking, too new-looking, and for a moment he dreads the thought of having to put them on.

In a quick self-examination he asks himself why he ever agreed to this. He never ran to school and he wasn't born in the mountains. He always considered running a strictly individual pursuit and until quite recently thought Nike made only golf shirts. He said running 26.2 miles was for certifiable lunatics and he would always have more sense.

But he's come too far to turn back now. This is all he's worked for. Family and friends know all about it and there's also the pressing matter of that charitable cause. So a moment later the running shoes are on and he's out the door, already feeling great about himself and what he's about to do. He is, of course, running the Dublin City Marathon on Monday.

He is the modern marathon man, once the least likely of candidates to run 26.2 miles and now committed to it almost to the point of obsession. He has little or no running background and to help highlight his cause intends to wear one of those sometimes ridiculous-looking costumes. He won't be easily recognised and my goal was to find him.

He sits in front of me now, wearing the white-and-blue runners and explaining the difficulties he anticipates in running the Dublin marathon dressed as a toucan, complete with plastic beak and fur-lined wings. The toucan, or more specifically Arthur the Toucan, will be familiar to most who live in or have been to Dublin, or indeed have drunk a pint of Guinness - and the person intending to wear this costume is Arthur Edward Rory Guinness, the Fourth Earl of Iveagh, thus Lord Iveagh, and the most direct descendent (as in great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson) of the original Arthur Guinness of 1759 fame.

"Call me Ned," he likes to say, and Lord Iveagh - as I feel I should call him - is straight away talking openly about his marathon aspirations as he would to an old mate over a pint of Guinness.

He is disarmingly laid back and if the forebears were half as courteous then little wonder their name has such a lasting legacy.

Although his father, the late Arthur Francis Benjamin Guinness, was the last family member to be directly involved in running the brewery, as chairman from 1961 to 1992, Lord Iveagh retains a strong sense of affection and identity with the Guinness brand, and understandably so. He was born and raised at Farmleigh in the Phoenix Park, the old Guinness family home he sold to the Government in 1999, and it was there he first discovered the lure of running.

"I used to go out running around the Phoenix Park as a youngster, startling the deer, or perhaps the other way around, and ever since then have always enjoyed running. It was a wonderful place to run, and that's really where it all began.

"But I can't say there is any great athleticism registered in the family. My great-grandfather Rupert rowed quite successfully at the Henley Regatta and that's the only real athletic background I can claim. Sure you only have to look at me to realise that."

Lord Iveagh is being modest here. At 39 he retains impressively youthful looks and truth is he's not exactly new to marathon running. He ran in Dublin two years ago ("rather on the quiet") just to prove to himself he could do it. Miraculously, he says, he didn't suffer a single blister, and a back pain that had troubled him for years inexplicably disappeared.

He has given himself an added challenge this time, running as Arthur the Toucan to help draw attention to his charitable cause, and no prizes for guessing what that is. In 1890, Edward Cecil Guinness, the First Earl of Iveagh, founded the Iveagh Trust, which to this day provides housing and shelter for Dubliners in need.

Growing up, Lord Iveagh would attend Christmas parties or other events at the old Iveagh Trust Hostel in Bull Alley, and the charity is still close to his heart.

There's an uncanny sub-plot to Lord Iveagh's participation on Monday in that also running for charity, though in less conspicuous garb, is the direct descendent of John Smithwick, who in 1710 put his name to the second-most-famous brewery in Ireland. Daniel Smithwick, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the brewery founder, is running the distance for the first time, and raising funds for the Children's Hospital in Crumlin.

Like the Guinnesses, the Smithwick family no longer run the brewery; they actually sold the business to Guinness in 1965, before the entire operation merged into Diageo in 1997.

For over two centuries before that they were rivals, Guinness versus Smithwick's, but neither Daniel Smithwick nor Lord Iveagh intends being competitive in Monday's race.

As Daniel is attempting 26.2 miles for the first time he has limited himself to wearing a Smithwick's-branded running top rather than anything as adventurous as a toucan costume, but his challenge is not completely without precedent as his father, Paul, ran the Dublin marathon back in 1981, and still describes the experience as "great fun".

For Lord Iveagh, the task of preparing for the marathon, as if it weren't difficult enough to begin with given his numerous other business-family interests, has the added complication of the costume acclimatisation, so to speak, as he tries to gain at least some familiarity with running long distances dressed as a bird.

He reckons he has covered as far as 13 miles in costume, but it's not something one can easily try out during the rush hour in London, where he is largely based during the week.

He does most of his running around the Elveden Estate in Suffolk, which was bought by the Guinness family in 1896 and is now regarded as home - though he doesn't live in the 70-bedroom Elveden Hall but in a more modest house next door, along with his wife, Clare, and two young sons, the eldest of whom, like all first-born Guinness-family males, was named Arthur.

Over the past decade Lord Iveagh has helped turn the 22,486-acre estate into the largest working farm in Britain, concentrating on root vegetables but with plenty of ancillary projects, including, fittingly, a micro-brewery in the potting shed, which produces his own Elveden Stout.

"It is difficult, of course, to always find the time to go running. But I bring my running kit with me most everywhere I go and like to head off wherever I can, without any headphones or music or anything like that, just listening to the birds and clearing the mind."

Rather than listening to the birds on Monday, Lord Iveagh will be running as one, and as with Daniel Smithwick, again no prizes for guessing the choice of refreshment brew for afterwards.

(You can support Lord Iveagh's effort by going online at http://www.mycharity.ie and typing "iveagh trust" in the "charity search" box.)