Looking back...The Dromina 10 Mile Road Race - 1984

The next big race on the local calendar is of course the Charleville Half-Marathon which is coming up next Sunday, the 18th of September at 10am. The race is being organised by North Cork AC and the race director is Michael Herlihy, a former winner of the Cork City Marathon. While this may be the first year of this particular race, what inspired Michael to start this particular Half-Marathon was the history of previous medium distance events in this part of North Cork. The Charleville '10' mile road race was a popular event back in the early 90's which in turn had it's origins in the Dromina '10' back in the mid 80's.


The Dromina 10 mile road race in it's day was as big a race as the Ballycotton '10' and attracted runners from all over the country. One of the main people behind the race at the time was a local priest Fr. Liam Kelleher. The first race was in 1982 just as the running boom at the time was starting and lasted for just 5 years until the last race in 1986.

It's best year was possibly in 1984 when Jerry Kiernan won the race in 46.30, just a short time after finishing 9th in the Marathon at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and a couple of weeks before running a high class time in the Chicago Marathon.

In that year, there were 720 finishers with 126 beating the hour mark with 9 runners running faster than 50 minutes. Compare that to the 2011 Ballycotton '10' with 2,384 runners and 107 beating the hour.

A full 3 page report with results was printed in an Irish running magazine at the time called 'Marathon'. I have put these pages up on another website and you can see them HERE

Hopefully over the next few weeks, I will put the results for all 5 of the Dromina '10' races online. If anyone has any old photographs of the Dromina race and would like to share them then send me an e-mail......address shown on the right hand side of this page.