AAI Indoor Games 2025 (11th Jan)

Four Mullingar athletics took part in the AAI Indoor Games at the NIA in Dublin on Saturday 11th January. First up was the Women’s 1,500m where Grace Byrne and Jessica Cunninghan toed the line in a quality field. Unfortunately, Jessica had to stop midway as she was feeling the effects of a recent heavy head cold, but Grace was determined to get a good opening to her track season following on from an excellent cross country season and stuck with the early pace throughout and came home in fourth place in a new personal best of 4:35.89.

Moving on to the Men’s 1,500m Conor Sherwin and Jamie Wallace ran very good races to open up their 2025 season. With their attention more focused on upcoming schools cross country at the moment, they took the opportunity to get some speed into their legs but the race didn’t develop as they were expecting and it turned out to be a very tactical race, but both were very still happy to get racing indoors after the cold spell.

Colm Walsh competed in the Men’s 3,000m Race Walk, which set out at a very fast pace. Colm is very experienced and knew the pace was too fast and couldn’t be sustained, so rather than give chase he wisely ran his own race and settled into second place behind. The leader inevitably had to ease back in the closing stages, allowing Colm to start closing the gap, which spurred him on and while he still finished in second place, he was very pleased with his time of 15:17.18 so early in the year [TW/CW].