HOURS after chatting with Darragh McElhinney, as I tried to piece together the last two turbulent years of his career, I sent him a WhatsApp. I obsess over small details – this one in particular: the new hairstyle.
‘I meant to ask – did the new look signal a new feeling, a new chapter? Or am I reading too much into a haircut?!’
‘It was kind of just a coincidence,’ Darragh replied. ‘But once I ran well in Paris, it had to stay!’
He debuted his homemade blonde look at the FAST5000 meet in France on Saturday, June 7th. That night, running a 5000m personal best of 13:16.26, the Glengarriff man had more than a new hairdo – he had a breakthrough. That was his first PB at this distance in over three years.
‘I was emotional after the race,’ he says. ‘For others, it’s just a random meet in Paris that happens every year, but for me, it was the first time in a while I felt good and competed well. That night meant more to me than running my new PB of 13:02 in Oordegem in August.
‘Okay, I was probably happier in Oordegem because I knew how good it was and that it would get me closer to qualifying for the Worlds in Tokyo, but from a self-satisfaction point of view, Paris told me I was back on track.’
The blonde hair is here to stay, but it’s just a side note in a much bigger story: how Darragh, now just 24 years old, battled through the toughest period of his career to qualify in the 5000m for the World Championships in Tokyo. He’s back to where he wants to be, but it wasn’t straightforward.
‘I knew you were going to ask that,’ Darragh laughed. ‘At races this year, people kept asking – what went wrong when you went off the radar? Where have you been?’
It’s a long story – and the Bantry Athletic Club star is ready to unpack it all.
***
The nightmare started in the summer of 2023, ironically after one of the best performances of his career. The then-22-year-old had finished fourth in the men’s 3000m final at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Istanbul that March. Darragh was in peak shape; a five-week training camp at altitude in Font Romeu, France, had him ready to kick on – but then he nosedived.
‘I ran a 1500m in Germany in May and was meant to race in Belgium six days later, but picked up some sort of virus on the flight home,’ he recalls.
‘I felt f**ked the next morning, and it was probably a bit of immaturity on my part not to tell Emmett (Dunleavy, my coach) how I felt. The 2023 World Champs were in Budapest in August, and I was in a decent position to qualify, but I didn’t really give myself time to properly diagnose whatever I had. I just kept training through it.’
That summer was messy – every time he felt he had momentum, it never translated into a race. Darragh, not 100 percent, was chasing times and qualification points. He missed his target.
‘Ultimately, I didn’t qualify for Budapest, which was a big disappointment. I was fed up with training and chasing times, so I took a short break. But when I started back, maybe September or October, I wasn’t 100 percent.
‘Everything felt laboured and I had really low energy all the time. My performance in training was so average that I even dreaded light jogs on the easy days.’
Blood tests came back clear, but he was spiraling. The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris had always been a target, but his lack of form stressed him out. Another setback followed – he missed out on the European Cross-Country Championships for the first time.
‘I was just like, Jesus, why am I so far off? I needed to put my head down for a bit. Before Christmas 2023, I booked a one-way flight to Kenya – I needed to go somewhere I could focus on training and nothing else.’
Darragh with his mom Breda, brother Iarla and dad Tony after his 5000m PB at the FAST5000 meet in France in June.
***
Darragh has been a regular in the Kenyan highlands, going back to 2020. At the start of every year, he leaves the damp and cold behind him to set up camp in Iten – the home of champions – which rests 8,000 feet above sea level. For distance runners, it’s a little piece of heaven. Those six weeks seemed to do the trick.
‘That was probably the only time throughout that entire period that I actually feel like I got fit,’ he says.
In his first race post-Kenya, Darragh ran a new 3000m indoor PB of 7:39.92 in Metz, chopping almost five seconds off his previous best.
‘At the time I thought that changed everything for me mentally. I felt all the troubles of 2023 were behind,’ he says.
It was a false dawn. Metz was an outlier.
‘Emmett refers to that as the eighth wonder of the world, because, genuinely, that was the only good race I had between Istanbul in March 2023 and this summer (2025) – that’s over a two-year period where I had one good race. It was terrible.
‘Metz was the one good race, smack bang in the middle of all this shit.’
It had opened the door to the Paris Olympics, but Darragh felt he needed two decent-ish 5000m times to seal the deal. He targeted the Stanford Invitational in California, aiming to run 13:20 so he’d know he was in the shape to qualify for Paris.
Darragh bottomed out, with a 14:00.42 that even shocked him. The Olympics seemed further away than ever.
‘It was absolutely horrendous,’ he admits.
‘The same feelings that I'd had in races the previous summer came back but ten times worse.
‘I was there on my own, and when I went back to the Airbnb, I remember thinking there was no way I was going to qualify for the Olympics. It’s one thing to blow up at 13:10 pace, but I went out at 13:35 pace and blew up. I needed to be running 13:15 to qualify for Paris.’
Worse was to follow. After a quick two-day stop-off in Dublin – where he had more blood tests – Darragh landed in Switzerland for what he describes as his ‘worst camp’ ever.
‘I felt just horrendous,’ he admits.
‘I had never felt this bad training in my life. I couldn't do any. I could barely jog every day. I used to just be so f**king tired.’
The darkest hour was just before dawn, when early in the camp Darragh got the results of his blood tests.
‘That was the first time my bloods were very irregular. Loads of different markers weren’t right, mostly hormonal stuff. My body was completely out of kilter,’ he says.
‘My neutrophils – white blood cells – were extremely low, they were on the floor. It showed that I wasn’t recovering properly after training, in the sense of hydration, nutrition and sleep.
‘A lot of it was actually just brought on from psychological stress. I was just getting so down about the fact that I wasn't going to qualify for Paris. It was all-consuming: I felt I had to keep trying.’
One blood test even revealed he had developed antibodies from having glandular fever. It was news to Darragh – he never knew he had it. Perhaps that explains how he felt tired all the time.
He kept chasing the Paris dream that summer. When he was just 15 years old in 2016, the then Coláiste Pobail Bheanntraí student travelled to Brazil for the Olympics, as a training partner for modern pentathlete Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe. Darragh wants to be an Olympian, so despite the ‘terrible’ training camp, he lined up in a 5000m in Germany that May.
‘No surprise, I blew up after two kilometres. I dropped out,’ he admits. ‘Emmett was at the race and I told him after, “the dream is over”.’
The challenge now was to get back on track.
***
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so Darragh needed a jolt. His coach Emmett reached out to a few physiologists, and it was agreed that Darragh was overtraining one stimulus too much and needed to add a high-intensity, low-repetition element to training. Think of a HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) workout, but for a runner.
‘This was a big change for me, because I was running massive mileage at that time, about 170k to 175k a week, but we changed it up. I started doing 100 to maybe 120k a week,’ Darragh explains.
‘Before, Thursday used to be my longest day. I used to do 3x5k – more like a marathon-type session. Low intensity, but long. We swapped that out and instead started doing 8x90 seconds with two minutes recovery as hard as I could. It was a really big stimulus change.’
It took time to see the benefits. Darragh finished third in the 1500m at the 2024 national championships, followed nine days later by the 3000m at the Cork City Sports – a race he describes as so bad that on the drive back to Dublin afterwards with Emmett, Darragh said he was ending his season.
‘I just said I can't do this anymore. What am I f**king doing? I'm not fit, I haven't had a good race all year. I'm not running well, it's not working and I need to take a break,’ he adds.
Darragh wanted a proper break, so ended up switching off for five weeks – the longest off-season of his life. His usual time-off was ten days. He and his long-term girlfriend Danielle – an incredible support during these challenging times – added in a ten-day holiday in Greece around the same time the Olympics were on. The rawness of “I-wish-I-was-in-Paris” had subsided somewhat, and evenings were spent watching the various finals.
Darragh didn’t know it at the time, but that was the end of him being on the back foot. His story wasn’t to become a Greek tragedy. Now came the redemption arc.
***
‘I had a really interesting three months of training between September and last Christmas,’ explains Darragh, who is based in Dublin.
‘We drastically changed my training, similar to what we tried in the middle of the summer in 2024, but in a more extreme way. For ten weeks, I trained like a sprinter. Genuinely, it’s the type of training distance runners never do.’
The advice from well-respected Belgian physiologist Jan Olbrecht, who Emmett reached out to, was a game-changer. Olbrecht is regarded as one of the world's top experts on lactate testing in sports training. He identified that Darragh’s VLamax – which indicates the rate at which muscles can produce energy without oxygen – was extremely low. Results from a test last September, with Darragh in admittedly dire shape after his break and struggles, confirmed it.
‘He told me if I was running a marathon, my VLamax was too low even for that,’ Darragh says.
‘To get my VLamax level up was difficult, but for ten weeks I trained like a sprinter. I was still running 100 kilometres a week, compared to 175. For my three days of intensity, instead of doing 3x5k or anything like that, I was doing 8x200 as hard as I could, or 8x30-second hills.
‘I know I’ve said this already a few times, but it was the worst training block, purely because it was so hard and so different. As a full-time athlete, I was used to the longer stuff and feeling tired for the day, but all of a sudden my entire training was 8x30-second hill runs as hard as I could at nine o'clock in the morning. I was home at 10, thinking, what am I supposed to do for the rest of the day?’
With the dramatic new training regime, his body weight stopped being as regular as it was. Darragh started putting on weight, another area that needed addressing.
After six weeks, they retested his VLamax, but the scoreline hadn’t moved. That was a hard day – doubts crept in. But they stuck to the plan. Another test before Christmas handed Darragh an early present – his score had come up. That signalled a return to more normal training.
‘That’s when things began to turn around,’ he says, as 2025 presented new opportunities, with the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo something to aim for.
Darragh with his mom Breda.
***
Let’s revisit June 7th again, the night in Paris when Darragh ran his first 5000m PB in three years. Back in the hotel, still smiling after 13:16.26, he looked in the mirror and thought: I actually am back. He would run faster later in the summer, but that performance was up there with his best.
There had been darker days during his struggles when he questioned himself.
‘Maybe I peaked too young?’
‘Maybe my body can't handle it anymore?’
‘Maybe I’m not a 5k athlete?’
‘Why can’t I dig deeper in races?’
‘Is my career over?’
It reached a stage where Darragh – remember, he is just 24 years old – felt he couldn’t stand on the 5k start line anymore.
‘I haven’t been injured, I have been training all the time, so every day I was questioning myself. Why am I not getting better? Why am I stuck in such a rut?’ he says.
‘From a performance point of view – and I realised this in the summer – there was never really anything wrong mentally with me. The reason I couldn’t dig deeper in certain races is because I was bolloxed. I couldn’t move. It was that simple.
‘It’s like asking you, why don't you go and run a 5k in 15 minutes tomorrow? Because you can't do it.
‘As soon as I started to run well again, I realised I am very strong mentally in races.’
That strength shone through at the FAST5000 meet in France. His fanclub was there too – Danielle, his parents Tony and Breda, younger brother Iarla, his coach Emmett, and more. He’ll never forget the support his inner circle gave him. It was unwavering – nobody gave up on him.
Sporting his fresh new blonde look, with Eminem vibes, Guess Who’s Back would have been a fitting soundtrack to that night.
The fast times followed. Darragh ran a new world-class 5000m PB of 13:02.06 in August to surge up to second in the all-time Irish list. Three days later, he clocked a new 3000m PB of 7:35.16 to move to fifth on the Irish all-time list. In July, he had new personal bests in the 1500m (3:37.38) and one mile (3:51.99). He’s moving in the right direction, and fast. And now Darragh is back on the world stage.
‘When I had a chance to qualify for the Worlds, I thought whatever happens now, at least I'm back running well,’ he says.
An added headache was that Darragh has competed as an unsponsored athlete after losing his contract with Adidas. He knows his results in the previous two years just weren’t good enough, but he took the knock in his stride, dipping into his savings to race internationally this year, with help from Sport Ireland.
When he takes to the start line of the men’s 5000m heats on September 19th at these World Athletics Championships, Darragh will know he deserves to be there. This Beara man, like the rugged terrain around his home, is made of tough stuff. In adversity, he matured.
‘There’s no one answer as to what happened to me these last few years, it’s been a hundred things combined. It’s not as simple as saying I was injured, but I’m back and enjoying it all,’ he adds.
‘If I qualify for the World final after everything that's gone on for the last while, that would be crazy,’ Darragh quips, confident that in this form he can remind the world of his talent. He’ll stand out in the Tokyo crowd too – just look for the DIY blonde head of hair.
Guess who’s back.
