I did not go into the Dublin Marathon looking for anyone. I went into it looking for the version of myself I had lost somewhere between mortgage payments, office lunches eaten at a desk, and a marriage that had become polite rather than tender. I was thirty-eight, married twelve years, and I had trained for the race mostly in the dark, before work, along the canal where the water held the city lights like broken glass.
My husband, Eoin, was not cruel. That was part of the difficulty. If he had been cruel, there would have been a clean story to tell. He was decent, tired, careful with money, and kind to waiters. He remembered to put petrol in my car and forgot to ask if I was lonely. I forgot to ask him the same. We had become two people sharing a house in Drumcondra, passing each other in the kitchen with mugs of tea, saying things like “bin day tomorrow” and “your mother rang.”
I signed up for the marathon after my father died. It sounds dramatic, but it was practical at first. I needed a reason to get out of bed early and do something that hurt in a measurable way. Grief was shapeless; running was simple. One foot, then the other. I joined a small training group that met near Phoenix Park on Saturday mornings, but mostly I ran alone. Eoin came to none of the long runs. He said he admired me for doing it, and I believed him, but admiration is not the same as attention.
On race morning, Dublin was bright in that thin October way, cold enough to make everyone hop from foot to foot at the start. I remember the smell of heat rub, coffee, wet leaves, and nerves. I had pinned my father’s name to the back of my charity vest because I thought it would make me brave. Eoin kissed my cheek near Merrion Square and said he would try to catch me around the halfway point if the traffic wasn’t impossible. I pretended not to mind the “try.”
I met Ciarán somewhere after the stretch through the Dublin Marathon route had begun to sort people into the hopeful, the reckless, and the already suffering. I noticed him first because he was laughing at himself. His knee was strapped badly, the tape peeling away in a white curl, and he kept looking down at it as if it had betrayed him personally. He had dark hair, a face flushed with effort, and the calm panic of someone realising there was still a very long way to go.
We fell into the same pace by accident near Rialto. I had slowed to take water and he nearly dropped his bottle. I picked it up without thinking, handed it back, and he said, “You’ve saved my race.” That was the first thing. Nothing grand. No thunderbolt. Just a small joke from a stranger when my body was beginning to ache and my mind was becoming a narrow tunnel of breath and road.
For several miles we ran side by side. We did not tell each other our secrets. We spoke in scraps, as runners do. Weather. Pace. The cruelty of inclines. His sister waiting in Terenure. My father’s name on my back. He said he was running for his brother, who had survived a bad accident the year before. I remember feeling, absurdly, that the city had placed us beside each other for a reason. That is a dangerous feeling when you are tired and under-loved.
In Terenure, the crowds thickened and someone shouted my name from my vest. A child held out orange slices. A band played something cheerful and slightly out of tune. I scanned the faces for Eoin and did not see him. I told myself he might be further along, caught behind the barriers, maybe with coffee in his hand. I told myself not to be childish. Still, the absence landed hard.
Ciarán noticed, though I had not said anything. He did not ask too much. He just stayed with me when my pace dropped and said we would get to the next mile marker. Not the finish, not glory, not some heroic nonsense. Just the next mile marker. I have thought about that many times since, how intimacy can begin with someone offering you a smaller distance when the full one feels impossible.
By the time we reached the later miles, everything hurt. The bottoms of my feet felt bruised. My shoulders had tightened. My father’s name, pinned to my back, seemed heavier than paper. Around Grand Canal, I started to cry, quietly at first, then with no dignity at all. I was embarrassed, but Ciarán did not make a performance of comforting me. He ran close enough that I knew he was there and far enough that I did not feel watched.
I saw Eoin near the finish, finally, leaning over the barrier with his phone raised. He looked proud and relieved, and I hated myself for feeling disappointment before gratitude. Ciarán and I crossed within seconds of each other. At the end, wrapped in foil blankets, we hugged like people rescued from the same small disaster. His body was shaking from cold and effort. Mine was too. I remember his hand on my back, the scratch of foil between us, and the awful thought that I wanted him not to let go first.
He did let go. Of course he did. We exchanged numbers because we had promised to send each other finish-line photos, and because the day had cracked something open in both of us. Eoin found me then, smiling, saying I had done brilliantly. I smiled back, medal against my chest, phone already warm in my hand with Ciarán’s name saved in it.
For a few weeks it was harmless, or that is what I told myself. Photos first. Then a message about recovery. Then a joke about stairs. Then longer messages sent late at night, after Eoin had gone to bed and the house had settled into its old silence. Ciarán was not single. He was living with a woman named Maeve in Sandymount. He mentioned her early, almost carefully, and I mentioned Eoin. We were both decent enough to confess the facts and selfish enough to continue.
We met for coffee near Stephen’s Green, which was the first real mistake because we both knew it was not about coffee. He looked different in ordinary clothes, less mythical, which should have helped. Instead it made him more real. We walked without a plan, past office workers and tourists and buses sighing at the kerb. Nothing happened that day except that we admitted, without saying it plainly, that something had already happened.
The affair itself was not glamorous. That is the truth people rarely say. It was not hotel rooms and perfume and secret laughter in candlelight, not mostly. It was anxiety, checking phones, guilt sitting behind every pleasure like a creditor. We met in places where nobody knew us: a quiet corner of Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street, once in a café near Heuston, once for a long walk by the sea because we convinced ourselves walking was less sinful than sitting too close indoors. We kissed first near the Samuel Beckett Bridge on a wet evening, both of us old enough to know better and lonely enough not to stop.
I will not pretend I was swept away against my will. I chose it. I chose each message, each meeting, each lie told lightly at home. I chose the quick change of clothes after work, the invented errands, the careful deletion. And I also chose the strange happiness of being seen again. With Ciarán, I felt witty, desired, awake. He listened when I spoke about my father. He remembered small things. He looked at me as if my face still held surprises.
At home, Eoin noticed before I admitted anything. Not the details, maybe, but the shift. One night in December, he asked if there was someone else. He asked it very quietly, while loading the dishwasher, which made it worse. I said no. The lie came out quickly and left a taste in my mouth I can still remember. He nodded as if he had expected both the lie and the answer underneath it.
The end began not with a confrontation but with another run. Ciarán and I met in January in Phoenix Park, where the trees were bare and the paths were slick with rain. We had planned to run an easy five miles, but neither of us had the heart for pretending. He told me Maeve had asked him the same question Eoin had asked me. I told him I had lied too. We stood near the Wellington Monument, both of us breathing clouds into the cold air, and the romance of our secret suddenly looked small beside the damage around it.
He said he loved me, or thought he did. I said I loved him, or thought I did. That was the most honest we had been and also the least useful. Love, I learned, does not automatically make a path. Sometimes it only shines a light on the wreckage. We were not brave lovers trapped by circumstance. We were two unhappy people who had found warmth in the wrong place and mistaken it, for a while, for rescue.
We ended it that morning. Not cleanly, not heroically. There were a few messages after, then fewer. I told Eoin the truth two weeks later, not every detail, but enough. He sat at the kitchen table with his hands folded and looked older than he had the day before. I expected anger, and there was anger, but underneath it was grief. His and mine. We went to counselling for six months. We did not save the marriage in the way people mean when they say save. We separated the following autumn, carefully, sadly, without trying to turn each other into villains.
I do not know what happened to Ciarán and Maeve. He wrote once, almost a year later, to say he hoped I was well. I did not answer. There was nothing good left to add. Sometimes I see runners in marathon tops near the canal and wonder if he is out there too!
