No male athlete has ever won all five events in the Dublin Race Series in the same year before
Armstrong is one step away from an unprecedented five-in-a-row if he wins the national marathon title on the streets of the capital on Sunday (8.45am start).
His attempt at a clean sweep will come on the fifth occasion he has run a marathon. The Mayo man made his debut over the distance in 2019, when third in the national championships and eighth overall.
The Ballina AC athlete clocked his PB – 2:12.26 – in Seville in February 2020, a time outside of the Tokyo Olympic qualifying standard of 2:11.30.
He then got injured in January 2021 and didn’t make it to Tokyo. Between that and Paris last year, he was laid up for a “good chunk” of time.
But Armstrong hopes that a good time in Dublin this weekend will help towards qualification for next year’s World Championships. The standard for the men’s marathon has dropped from 2:08.10 for the Paris Olympics to 2:06.30 for the worlds in 2025.
“I just turned 30, which is a good time for a marathon runner, and I feel like I’m probably capable of running close to my best if we get a good day in Dublin. It’s a tough enough course, but you can run fast. Stephen Scullion ran around 2:12 or just under in the last few years,” said Armstrong, who recently got married to his Kenyan-born wife Shiru Mubea.
“For the worlds next year, it’s down to 2:06.30, so it’s harder again. Hopefully with the ranking points, that’s probably the best chance for someone like me to get in. Dublin is going to be a good one for that because we’ve got the extra points for the national championships.
“A good run in Dublin could be very important for me in terms of getting a qualifying spot, but then you’ve got to back that up with another good race in the spring.”
Armstrong’s biggest rival for the men’s title in Dublin on Sunday is expected to be Ryan Creech of Leevale AC who ran 2:12.28 in the Seville Marathon this year.
“Creech was up in Dublin a few weeks ago and we did some training sessions together and we were fairly evenly matched. I don’t normally train with him, we have different coaches. He just happened to be in Dublin and we said we’d do a session together,” revealed Armstrong, who spent eight years being coached by Ray Treacy in Providence on an athletics scholarship.
Feidhlim Kelly has been his coach since 2022. Armstrong – an accountant with An Post in Dublin – doesn’t have a sponsor, but he gets support from the Dublin Marathon to cover costs such as physio bills and the like and he also gets some financial assistance from the Jerry Kiernan Foundation.
What about turning pro at some stage?
“I’d love to, yeah, if I could afford it. Maybe if there was a stage where I felt that I was in with a good chance of a qualifier for an Olympics or worlds, I might be able to take a few months off to focus [on going full-time] for a short period of time,” he said.
In the meantime, it’s all about Dublin and his unprecedented drive for five on the streets of the capital come Sunday.
