Beara Way Ultra

To start with, The Beara Way Ultra 100 miles came highly recommended by both Eoin Keith and Brian Hutchinson, and after looking at pictures and reading stories from past events I have to say it did look good. On top of that, last year’s (I’m including January 2026) running escapades for me featured a few DNFs and I really wanted something to enjoy.

The Beara Way Ultra is a low key event organised by the Irish Mountain Running Association (IMRA) and takes place over in west Cork. It’s a circular route that takes you round the Beara peninsula in May, a very beautiful route that sort of dips your toe into what options there are around those hills and coastal areas to explore. Aside from that, the people are so welcoming, the whole thing is very relaxed and the people you come across are nothing but encouraging and inviting. They really want you to see and experience this place, and they want you to bring your pals.

I began my prep for this off the back of a DNF at the Spine Challenger North. Without going into the details, that didn’t work out for me so I went into a new training block with wounded pride, and realising that pride was going to get me nowhere, anyway. My goal was to enjoy, and to enjoy meant being prepared: physically fit and ready, psychologically as robust as I could be and with a half decent plan. Training went well although I was without Anya as she had picked up an injury from the Spine race and was going through investigations, surgery and rehab for a meniscus tear.

It wasn’t a big training block but I stuck to it including the massively important strength and conditioning sessions (S&C). Without the S&C the whole thing would fall apart. I worked on developing strength in my legs for the climbing and repetitive nature of moving well over 100 miles. The key here is moving well over 100 miles, not just the first 50 but all the way. This is probably the first time I’ve had a clear focus on setting off as I hope to finish i.e. maintaining good form and able to run it in.

My midweek runs ended up being a mix of road and treadmill efforts, mostly, with the occasional easy trail. Road was for hill reps, strides, tempo or moderate efforts and occasional longer easy runs. Treadmill worked out great for recovery efforts: no hills and a very controllable run which kept me honest meaning I didn’t push the effort level at all but kept it as active recovery.

Long runs were mostly circular routes from my front door, I have a variety of options that can grow from 2 to 4, to 6, to 8 hours, mixing trail and a little road, hills, flat runnable sections, single track and some hikey sections. Most of my long runs were very runnable and I tried to keep my effort and pace in check but could feel my strength improving week on week.

My only concern as I headed over to Cork was that I hadn’t done enough climbing. I had hardly touched my poles since the challenger north. One of my poles was still snapped from that adventure and didn’t get sorted out until the week before Beara.

Start faff

Looking back I still think I could have improved on the climbing but actually my legs felt good and strong throughout Beara and I was climbing well even on the last climb - on that note, when someone says “one short climb and then it’s downhill all the way”, don’t ever believe them. It was the only time during the whole race when I swore, reflecting out loud that what they should have said was “one short climb then another that leads to another wee climb until you get up to almost the height you were at before with maybe a strong westerly wind trying to take you off your feet.” Anyway, climb it I did, and the 5km downhill run at the end flew by as I passed a heap of runners heading out on their on 20-odd km race. You can’t stop and walk anyway when you come across a load of runners all giving you words of encouragement.

Running down a hill, kind of.

So, there was plenty of trail and plenty of climbs. I clocked 6000m elevation although the race profile says 5500m. Indeed, for the entirety I felt that I was either hiking up a hill or coming down a hill with plenty of tarmac in between. The midweek road runs certainly paid off and whenever I hit a section of road, I was able to run it quite happily, always keeping myself in the moment (run the mile you’re in). Many times in the past a long section of tarmac has put my gas at low peep and I’ve reverted to an uncomfortable walk-jog approach. This time I just kept ticking along. The same happened on runnable trail and I popped along nicely, not really feeling any burn or fatigue until late on in the race, meaning I was coming up on people who had maybe gone out a little hot and I was trotting by quite happily. You know, the kind of thing that pisses people off.

Food, nutrition, fuel: I chose to fuel with gels and snacks, the first time I’ve place this much reliance on sports nutrition as opposed to real food to get me by and it really worked for me. I did make sure that I ate some proper food at aid stations; sandwiches, soup etc and had no GI distress at all. The biggest downside was that my gels were a mix of ones that had caffeine and ones that had sodium. The caffeine helped to keep me focussed but I must have taken on too much because I found it really hard to sleep after the run!

I did have room for excellent fish and chips in Castletownbere, accompanied with a pint of Guinness in the square. Now that was good. My lovely B&B hosts also left me a wee congratulatory bit of cake.

If I had taken the time to pull out my phone for pictures you would see some beautiful views around the peninsula. On the Saturday morning, after the rain clouds cleared it and the sun took over it was everything I hoped for. The sound and view of the Atlantic Ocean is something I’m familiar with but never from this location. It was awesome, but don’t take my word for it, get over there!

Eoin and I had a good blether over the first few miles of the race, catching up on news and just enjoying spending a wee bit of time together like we were popping out for a weekend long run. Hanging around in the square afterwards we were able to continue that blether and share stories about our run. Unfortunately I had an early departure the next morning and was also to whacked to hang around in the pub later on.

Michael Sweeney and the team of volunteers were amazing throughout. It’s a magic, low key event where everyone there really seems to care about you.

Thank you, all!