Age no barrier to current blossoming of Irish women’s marathon runners

When Ava Crean crossed the finish line as the first Irish woman in last year’s Dublin Marathon, with her time of 2:34:12 good enough for sixth-best woman overall and some nine minutes faster than she’d run before, she straight away became a sort of outlier of her generation.

Because at age 19, Crean was by some distance the youngest woman to win the national marathon title, which is awarded to the top Irish finisher in Dublin. The previous youngest before Crean was Carey May, who at age 21 won the women’s race outright in the first running of the Dublin Marathon back in 1980.