Tipperary para athlete Declan Ryan's wonderful run in the London Marathon

The 2019 World Para Athletics Marathon Championships took place on April 28th within the London Marathon and Declan Ryan from Clonoulty was flying the flag for Ireland and did his parish and country proud. 

Declan is a visually impaired athlete, diagnosed with Leber's Optic Atrophy and runs in the T12 category under Internation Paralympic rules. 

In this competition he is tethered to a guide runner by a 50cm tether. 

Declan does some of his training in Dublin and has two guides from Dublin that ran with him in London.  Michael O' Connor ran the first half and Ger Forde took over at half way. 

Declan ran a new personal best of 2hrs 45mins 42 secs, knocking 4 minutes off his previous personal best time.  He finished 10th in the race and within that he was the 3rd guided runner, beaten for 2nd by 7 seconds and 1st by a further 2 seconds but a top 10 performance in a top class world competition was an outstanding result. 

Declan from Clonoulty has been running for a number of years, working very hard and improving his performance times from year to year.  He fits his training in around his work with Paddy Power as a quantitative analyst in Dublin and is continuing on his quest to qualify for the Paralympics in Tokyo next year.