Ciara Mageean had been making plans for the end of her career and beyond, until a cancer diagnosis changed everything. The European 1500m champion talks to Mark Woods about finding gratitude amid the grief.

“I have exercised and competed at an elite level my whole life, I did everything to be a healthy person,” reflects Ciara Mageean on a running career that will, for a few weeks more, allow her to bask in being the reigning European 1500m champion as well as capturing other precious medals in the vests of either Ireland or Northern Ireland.

The 34-year-old, to her immeasurable regret, will not be able to defend her continental title. Instead, her energies are consumed with confronting the devastating havoc wreaked by cancer. “Now I’m afraid I might die before I’m 40. Little wonder there’s sometimes a little devil on my shoulder muttering: ‘What the f***’s the point in exercising now?’”

It is among the many brutal reflections laid down on paper in Mageean’s candid new autobiography, entitled My Greatest Race. Her tale is a startling mix of light and shade, of the rewarding peaks and punishing troughs that are mainstays of any high-performing athlete’s life, a rollercoaster ride she was forced to abruptly abandon on May 20 of last year when she underwent a precautionary scan for what was billed as a possible inflammation on her bowel but unearthed, to her astonishment, a five centimetre-wide tumour.

“I was on the journey back after surgery on my right ankle,” she recounts. “Getting that news was just something that was so completely flooring. But then also in that moment I thought: ‘Look, this is something – it'll be a low-level cancer, I will get treatment, and I will be okay, and I'll be fine’. At that stage, I didn't know the stage of my cancer. But yeah, in that moment, my world completely changed, and everything completely shifted.”

Mageean had been grieving already. A chronic Achilles issue had forced her to withdraw from the Paris 2024 Olympics on the eve of the Games. It was all the more deflating when she’d been in the form of her life, illustrated weeks earlier by that glorious European gold in Rome which upgraded her silver from four years previously in Munich.

After a torn calf had decimated her challenge at the prior Olympics in Tokyo, she’d rebounded to come fourth at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. It felt like the French capital might provide the mother of all highs. It simply just was not meant to be. Nevertheless, lofty goals and ambitions remained as last summer loomed.

“I was really looking forward to finishing out the last few years of my sport with the focus of going towards LA,” she admits. “That was my full drive and my full focus. And then I was also really looking forward to the life that I would have after sport, looking forward to hanging up my spikes, and then maybe being able to give back to the sport that's given me so much, and the communities that have given me so much.”

Instead, she has been callously robbed of those races unrun. Shortly after the initial diagnosis, detailed scans unveiled the full extent of her cancer. The consultant in Belfast revealed it had already spread from the bowel into her liver and lungs and the surrounding lymph nodes. Stage Four, the worst stage of all.

The immediate course of treatment was outlined, to have chemotherapy to kill off as many of the cancerous cells as possible, followed by radiotherapy and potentially surgery. Mageean was so staggered by the news that she could barely process it. It was only when she returned to the car with her fiancé Tommy Moran that the tears flowed. “When we got home,” she writes in the book, “we cried for a solid week.”

“The first few treatments,” she says, “maybe up to number three, I was like: ‘Jeez, what's everybody talking about? This isn't as bad’.” At that point, she’d still pop down to the Mary Peters Track, near her house, with the drugs slowly filtering into her body through a discreet device. Familiar faces would stop to chat, oblivious to her plight.

“As the treatments went on, and that toxicity built, then that certainly wasn't the case, and I got sicker and sicker,” she acknowledges. Nurses wearing protective shields, a pouch containing the drug marked “Toxic”, it brought home the real peril of her situation.

Mageean’s sister Maire would normally bring her back and forth for each treatment. “I’d open the front door, I’d go straight upstairs, go to sleep and sleep until about lunchtime the next day,” she outlines. “I was violently ill with it, which is the nature of being on chemotherapy. Because it's such a horrible drug that's killing and affecting everything in your body.” Long sleeps soon extended up to three days. She could barely move.

On it went, testing her resolve. She’s been through 18 courses of this now. After the 12th, she concedes, even the little gym she has at her house fell into disuse. No energy to spare. Drawing on the lessons of being an athlete who had previously been compelled to deal with bumps in the road, all she could do was inhale and push through.

“It’s really hard on the body, and sometimes I think I tap into that mentality that I had,” Mageean reflects. “I just know that it will pass. It’s like, if you're in a really hard graft of training, or you're in a hard block of training up at altitude, you're thinking: ‘A couple more weeks, and then the taper comes’. Or you're in a really tough training session, and you have a couple more reps left.”

To sum up, she sighs: “It’s just crap. That's the reality of it, and it's very tough, and I'll say it here with a smile on my face, but I certainly don't have a smile on my face when I'm going through it.”

For a long while, the sport that had been Mageean’s life since she first discovered its charms as a child growing up in the picturesque fishing village of Portaferry in County Down.

There was genuine pain from that estrangement. I wonder how she dealt with a radical shift in identity, from Ciara Mageean: world-class athlete, national heroine, to Ciara Mageean: cancer patient? “It is something that I struggle with in my head,” she says. “And I'll be honest, it's something that I continue to struggle with. I'll forever mourn the loss of the end of my career.”

She could not bring herself to watch last autumn’s World Championships in Tokyo. The middle-distance sorority is a tight-knit cluster. No matter the nationality, there is mutual respect, especially among members of the cohort like Faith Kipyegon, Laura Muir and Mageean who have been rivals for a decade and more. Fourth when Kipyegon finally broke the world 1500m record in Florence two years ago, she merrily joined in the huddle that wildly celebrated the Kenyan’s charge to history. Amid ferocious competition, they will each other on.

However, she confirms: “For a long time I couldn't really watch athletics. I wasn't watching it on TV. I would lie if I didn't say I was following it in many aspects. So many of my friends are from the athletics world, and I'm always curious about the results.

“But, and it's not something I'm proud of, I was just too hurt to be able to even enjoy my own sport. There were just so many emotions, like jealousy. I wanted to be out there, and I was missing the track. And then anger, that I wasn't getting to be out there, how all these other people get to enjoy their sport, and I'm sitting here going through chemo.”

Moran, her bedrock, would occasionally pop out to train but Mageean was too forlorn even to drop by. Yet the athletics community did not abandon its sister. Far from it. Messages, cards, well wishes, comrades who had become friends flying in to shore up her spirit. Gradually, she felt able to reconnect with the track, to tune in without sorrow and watch without regret.

“Isn't it amazing to have something so lovely that you miss it?” she declares. “I'm so lucky to have had such an amazing career on the track. Obviously I didn't want it to end the way it did but it would never take away from the joy that it brought me and the sheer happiness I have had to have been able to travel the world and represent my country.

“And the single greatest thing that I'll take away from my career is the friends I've met along the way, and they've been there for me throughout this journey as well.”

During over an hour talking to Mageean, it’s vital to note that the laughs and grins outweigh the sorrow and tears by a margin of ten to one. The day we chat is one of her “good days”. Currently, her sickness is on pause and the gruelling treatment on hold pending the results of fresh scans to measure how effective the chemo has been in neutralising her cancers. The forecasts, thankfully, seem cautiously optimistic.

“I wake up on days like this, and I'm a normal person,” she beams. “I brought my little dog to the vet this morning. After this, we're going to go for a walk, and then I'm going to drive to Portaferry. I am very much making the most of every beautiful day that I have.”

The owner of six Irish records is even running a little again. Not too far, not too fast. Mainly to clear the mind, in the company of friends. “I don't know what I could do, even for a 400m rep on the track now,” she chuckles ruefully. “I’d be far too slow to go and put some spikes on. But I’m enjoying going out and training. And it has so many benefits for your health, but mainly for me, for my head.”

She intends to travel to Glasgow to cheer on chums at the Commonwealth Games and to hop to Birmingham where her lone major title will be ceded. Wonderfully, she is trying to nail down a date and a venue for a wedding to her running mate, Tommy, all while knowing a recall to the hospital could throw any plans up into the air.

Still, since her previous round of infusions at the end of May, there has been relative calm in the midst of horrific recent storms and Mageean is gratefully lapping that up. “That comes with two types of emotion,” she relates. “One, a lot of relief that I'm having a break from chemo, because it's really, really tough, and I have been knackered. I'm now not feeling unwell and sick.

“But also just like anybody who's maybe going through things similar to me could understand, there’s a little bit of dread, because you're waiting for your scans, and you want those results to be good. But you just don't know, so there's that little undercurrent of worry. But that's just where I'm at.”

I mentioned a single tear. It comes when we speak of the encouragement offered, not just by her wide circle but from strangers beyond. She shows me a card from a young girl addressed simply to “Ciara Mageean, Portaferry, County Down, Ireland”. Such is her local celebrity in these parts that it reached the intended recipient without delay.

“Super Star is spelled with two words,” she beams. “It’s so cute. I love it.” There have been hundreds of these, dropping through her parents’ door since she went public on her diagnosis last July. “To get little messages from people wishing me to get well and calling me a superstar with two words, I think ‘how lucky am I?’”

And that’s the wretched cruelty here. Mageean is simply so very unfortunate, her number coming up by random selection in a lottery with long odds which no-one wants to win. “Actually I might die, like that's the reality of my diagnosis,” she affirms. “I might not see my 40th birthday.”

Yet she fights on with everything she has, just as she did so valiantly in Rome and elsewhere. There is a partisan crowd willing her to keep turning her legs over, so many voices loudly roaring her on. To have such support for her greatest race, Mageean’s appreciation is limitless. “I'm so grateful to have such beautiful people behind me, wrapping their arms around me,” she says, as her voice finally cracks.

“I’ve got these letters coming from all over. That somebody sitting in a stretch of Ireland or somewhere else will think about me on a day and take the time to write a little card or send a little message and go to the post office and put a stamp on it, I’m so thankful.”

My Greatest Race by Ciara Mageean with Cliona Foley, published by Gill, is now on sale