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Aoife Cooke: Reigniting a Love of Running To Fulfil An Olympic Dream

ByJoanne Murphy |

Aoife Cooke, the marathon runner from Cork stamped her ticket for Tokyo at the Cheshire Elite Marathon last month running a personal best time of 2:28:36 to qualify for the Olympics, moving her to the position of 4th fastest Irish woman of all time over the 26.2 mile event. Her previous marathon time of 2:32:34 was recorded at Dublin Marathon in 2019 which saw her become the National Marathon Champion.

Aoife is a proud member of Eagle A.C. and has represented the club over a multitude of distances from 5km to marathon. In her late teens Aoife attended Arkansas Tech University on an athletics scholarship and showed great promise as a junior athlete, representing Ireland in the Euro XC in 2005. Unfortunately injury prevented her from reaching her full athletic potential at that time.

Coming home to Ireland, she took time to recover, rebuild and reignite a love of running. A New Year’s resolution to run the Cork City Marathon in 2015 paved the way for her to commence her marathon running journey which has seen her return to the top step of the podium and build on her achievements in running. With some key race successes, coupled with changes to her career and her training in recent years, Aoife Cooke has run her way into the history books and has ambitious and exciting plans to excel even further in her chosen sport of marathon running.

This was a fun chat with Aoife, her humility and positivity shine through in this episode. We get some incredible insight to her journey in sport and once again are reminded that our dreams and goals are never too far out of reach with courage, commitment and a desire to succeed.

Listen to the episode HERE if you are enjoying the podcast, please take a few minutes to give it a review on Apple podcasts or on the Tri Talking Sport Facebook Page I’d love to hear from you. You can email me directly ontritalkingsport@gmail.com or pop me a message via any of the social platforms across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.

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