Listen to the latest episode of the Irish Athletics Podcast with Jack O’Leary HERE.

In this episode of the podcast, Jack reflects on a career-best 2025 and his goals looking ahead to the season with host Cillian Sheeran.

Westmeath’s Jack O’Leary has had a whirlwind start to 2026, spending little time on Irish soil as he prepares for what he hopes will be the best year of his career.

The 28-year-old is fresh off a 90‑second personal best over 10km on the famed Valencia course two weeks ago.

His 27:41 finish brought him under the previous Irish record, though countryman and record holder Efrem Gidey crossed the line three seconds ahead.

Crucially, O’Leary’s Valencia performance met the A standard for the European Championships in August, putting him firmly on track for a major summer.

There was no downtime after Spain. Following a short layover in Dublin, O’Leary travelled directly to an Athletics Ireland training camp in Flagstaff, arriving, he admitted, with tired legs.

“I got out here a little later than everyone. I was racing the Valencia 10k on the 11th of January. That was the Sunday, and I flew to Flagstaff on the Monday… I was quite a tired man on Tuesday’s easy run. I got dropped very badly from the group,” O’Leary told the Irish Athletics Podcast.

Looking ahead, the Westmeath man outlined plans to race indoors in the United States before returning home in March for a short break.

After that, all focus will turn to producing another top-class performance at the European Championships.

“Birmingham is 100% the focus. I’m going to race indoors here. I’m going to take a proper break then in March and then start building back up towards Birmingham and make sure I’m ready to produce.”

The past year has been transformative for O’Leary.

In 2025, he ran personal bests over both 10,000m and 5,000m on the track, before delivering the performance of his life in December with a fifth-place finish at the European Cross Country Championships.

“The 2025 season has been… everything just aligned for me. Training has all come together, the click has happened. I’m really just getting to show how good I can be and how good I know I can be. But, you know, that’s only 10–20% of the story most of the time.”

Buoyed by his recent run of form, O’Leary said he wishes everyone could experience the exhilaration of a runner’s high.

“I feel like I’m smiling the whole time now, and I’m really just enjoying life… If I could hook this feeling of happiness up to everyone’s veins, this is why we do it.”

His joy becomes even more understandable given the challenges he faced earlier in his career.

In 2021, he suffered a sacral stress fracture, which was followed by a sequence of injuries that took nearly four years to overcome.

“I started getting hamstring tendinopathy, Achilles issues, and that all in all took the guts of a year and a half to sort out and get my body back in one piece.”

Despite his recent success, O’Leary remains all too aware of the struggles most athletes endure behind the scenes.

“It’s the moments before that, where you can’t run—there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that maybe people don’t see, or maybe people forget when they see you stood up on a European podium. I was the one standing on the podium, but there were probably a hundred different people standing up there with me.

“And that’s the same for every single one of us—Brian (Fay), Dalton (Cormac), Efrem (Gidey), Darragh (McElhinney)… We’ve all been on our own journeys. That’s all part of it; that’s the beauty of sport too.”

Yet even with the hardship, O’Leary says he wouldn’t trade anything about the journey that led to his 2025 breakthrough and his electric start to 2026.

“I would have gone through 10 years of injuries for 2025 to happen again. That European podium, that’s the greatest moment of my life.

“I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but to stand up there with all your friends, with European medals around your neck, seeing the Irish flag being raised… It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.”