ATHLETICS:Peter Mathews is a fine example of the benefits that can accrue from a bit of addictive thinking, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

IN BETTER Than Sex, his effortlessly mind-bending view of the 1992 American presidential election, Dr Hunter S Thompson describes all politics as a guilty addiction. Looking at our election campaign these days, it's hard to disagree.

“They are addicts,” he says, “and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal – like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics.”

Dr Thompson knew all about addictive thinking – and it’s still hard to believe he’s no longer with us, killing himself at his home in the Rocky Mountains six years ago last Thursday.

He’d have been 73 now had he not put that gun to his head, but as David Adams wrote in this newspaper this week, it wasn’t simply depression or disillusionment that prompted his suicide, but the realisation that the Great American Dream had been reduced to a nightmare, thanks mainly to corporate greed and political corruption.

It makes you wonder if politics was ever any different. Indeed, I got a postcard from my mother yesterday, not because of St Valentine’s Day or anything like that, but so she could issue us with the first-edition stamp commemorating the centenary of the birth of her uncle, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, the fifth President of Ireland. Born in Bray on February 12th, 1911, Ó Dálaigh would have turned 100 years of age today – had he lived that long.

Of course that would have been asking a lot, although he certainly died before his time, suddenly, in March 1978 – like Dr Thompson also aged just 67. He had resigned the presidency less than two years earlier, and without going into the detail, his political naïveté and possibly even political apathy prevented him from becoming a great president. Ó Dálaigh couldn’t easily lie and cheat and steal – like the true political junkies.

In his inaugural address in December 1974, Ó Dálaigh noted that he shared a birthday with Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who was born in 1809.

It wasn’t a throwaway remark. Ó Dálaigh shared similar ambitions to Lincoln, not least in trying to bind the wounds of his troubled land. Lincoln went a long way towards realising his ambition, before an assassin’s bullet ended his presidency, aged just 56.

I’ve been reading all about that in brilliant detail in Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which shows how Lincoln saved America by appointing his fiercest rivals to key cabinet positions. Would our politicians have the nerve to do the same?

Anyway, we shouldn’t all be dependent on our politicians to save our country, and thankfully we’re not. On Wednesday evening, I found myself in the Joly Theatre in Trinity College, a guest at a seminar on distance running, organised by the Dublin University Harriers and Athletic Club (to give them their full and proper title).

Getting a large group of students into a lecture hall on a wet mid-week evening, with no obligation to be there, and no academic credit to be gained, is yet further evidence we’re in the midst of a running boom, and their enthusiasm for the sport was deeply reassuring.

Our politicians may have sent our country’s future wealth down a cruel and bottomless black hole, but if running is one guarantee of future health – physical and mental – then perhaps we’re not all doomed.

My task was to lecture them on the reasons so many of us are lured into running, until it becomes addictive thinking, just like in politics, although I got the impression this was nothing they didn’t know already. I even found myself using the language of junkies, such as getting our first “hit” of endorphins, or the “terrible withdrawal symptoms” if we don’t run.

I probably got a little carried away when describing running as the strongest anti-depressant drug we’ll ever taste in our lives, although it works well for me.

The rest of the seminar was taken up with Peter Mathews lecturing them on the proper mechanics of running, how to deal with injury and more importantly how to prevent it, and let’s just say they paid a lot more attention to him.

I’ve known Peter for many years, in fact from the first day he joined Dundrum-South Dublin athletic club, sometime around 1989. He’d arrived up one day with no running background, only the glowing reports from our coach, Eddie McDonagh. Peter expanded on that story on Wednesday evening, and I can’t imagine those students at Trinity enjoyed a better lecture this year.

“I was working in a supermarket in Ballinteer, in the bakery section,” he said, “and I was always running about, from the oven to the shelves or wherever. Then I was put on the checkout, which was a nightmare, sitting down all day.

“I’d actually still stand up, pushing the shopping through, just to try to stay active, but it nearly killed me, really. So I went home one evening, pulled an old pair of runners out of the wardrobe and ran about two miles.

“I woke up the next day and my legs were in bits, but I did it again, and then every day. What I didn’t realise was that I was running by this guy’s house, Eddie McDonagh. He came into the supermarket one day, told me he’d seen me run, and reckoned I should join the club. At first I said no, but he kept at me, and eventually I went up one morning, and straightaway loved it.”

He was 20, had never run as a junior, but his raw talent, coupled with his ferocious appetite for hard training, soon turned Peter Mathews into one of the best cross country runners in Irish distance running history – and definitely the toughest.

He won his first national senior title just four years later, in the famously muddy course in Ballinlough in Roscommon, won again in 1998, and 2002, and lost a couple more only after some epic duels with his great rival and training partner Séamus Power.

He also won a national 10,000m on the track, in 2001, but eventually Peter’s lack of running foundation possibly caught up with him, as he suffered one injury breakdown after another.

Last Sunday, over another brutally muddy course at the Alsaa complex in Dublin, Peter Mathews won the Irish Masters Cross Country title, by almost a minute. At age 41, his best years might be behind him, but for the first time since his late 20s he’s running injury-free.

Better by design, as they say in Germany – as Peter is now qualified as both a sports massage therapist and personal trainer, and works at the Functional Training Ireland clinic, in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Street.

He dazzled the Trinity students, and me, with his knowledge of injury prevention, but his enduring appetite for competition was what captured us most.

Perhaps we are all junkies in our own way, but at least there are some addictions we can feel less guilty about than others.