Season 01 EP 03
Guests: Mary Barrett & Caoimhe Farrell
Host: Jen Shenk
Date: 10/29/26
Duration: 30:28
Jen: This is The Gratitude Letters. It begins with a letter and continues with a conversation. It’s never too late and always a good time to say thank you.
I’m Jen Shenk, and this is The Gratitude Letters. Wherever you find yourself today, I am so glad you’re here. We have a letter today written by a current Goshen College student, Caoimhe Farrell. Caoimhe is a junior here at Goshen, and she’s a member of our track and field team. The person she’s writing to is 3,615 miles away in her homeland of Ireland.
It’s Caoimhe’s track coach, Mary Barrett. Mary has coached Caoimhe since she was six years old, and Mary actually competed for Ireland herself. Mary was always there for Caoimhe. Through thousands of training sessions, in the race where Caoimhe fell, when Caoimhe got her personal best, and the day that Caoimhe decided to move across the ocean, Mary was there for her.
In a world where it feels like everyone is keeping score, these two have found something that matters more than winning. Here are Caoimhe and Mary.
Caoimhe: Well, my name is Caoimhe Farrell. My first name’s C-A-O-I-M-H-E. I’m a communication major with minors in public relations and writing.
I’ve lived my whole life in Woodford, which is a really small town in Galway, Ireland, near the coast of Clare. It’s very small, like, there’s, like, 240 something people. I don’t know if that’s changed right now. Someone may have had a baby or whatever, but it’s the kind of place that you know everyone. Like if you drive past anybody in Woodford, you get a wave.
And my school, I don’t know exactly how many there was, but in my class itself, I think when we graduated, there was just under 20 of us. Like people did look out for each other, and I’m very thankful for that, and I wouldn’t change any of it. But I definitely did struggle in the school department, both academically and just like sometimes socially.
We’re learning new stuff every week. It’s made for a brain that can sit in a classroom for hours and receive that information and then put it on a test. But not everybody has that brain. A lot of the times I didn’t have my homework done, or I had it some done because I couldn’t remember what we had talked about during the day, ’cause it had just been lectured instead of learned.
I would just, like, feel like a failure, you know? I don’t think that if I wasn’t an athlete I could have gotten through all of the schooling that I did.
So I was in athletics training because my two older sisters were, and I’ve always been super competitive, even though I wasn’t wanting to do the training. Like Bushfield is where we would train. It’s just like a, a soccer pitch, but it’s not well-kept at all. I remember seeing other kids running, and it was a mix of boys and girls, kind of a couple different ages, and all I remember was like, I could run faster than them.
Well, I decided I could. Whether that was entirely true, I don’t fully remember that.
Mary : My name is Mary Barrett, and I am q- one of Caoimhe’s athletics coaches. I’m very competitive, and I’m still competitive to this day. I mean, even though the body isn’t as strong or, or as fast as it used to be, I still want to win.
I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a PE teacher. I would have been educated in England in a convent school. A convent school in England at the time, um, was very ladylike, and the only sport I would have played at the time was netball. There was no athletics in my school, but we did have a sports once a year, the Catholic Games, where all the Catholic schools came together, and it was actually the starter, Mr. Duffy, who said to me, “You should join the local athletics track,” ’cause I would have won the sprint every year that I did it.
Then I tried high jump and they found I was a decent high jumper, so I kind of did high jump, did multi events and I’ve just, I’ve kept going. Keep going. I went through school, I did it through college, kept going as a senior and eventually got onto the Irish team in 1985. We were the first ladies team in Ireland to make the Europa Cup and did it again in ’87.
So we started the thing that Kate O’Connor now is now the European champion.
Caoimhe: She felt famous to me. And so Mary was coaching… Like, she’s coached hundreds of kids. I don’t think at first she really, like, paid much mind to me ’cause she was with slightly older kids. And I remember being like, “Oh, I need to show her that I’m fast. I need to, like, prove myself to her.” I just wanted to be the fastest, whatever that took.
And I didn’t necessarily love training at first. I loved competing, I loved to win, but I didn’t love the, like, repetitiveness of all of it.
Mary : You can put 20 kids out there doing a high, a high skip, as I call it. You will immediately see the ones that have potential to do some kind of jump. The other thing that is really interesting with kids as well, you would get a lot of kids come into training from a very young age who are put in there by parents, and there’s no passion there.
They don’t want it. Caoimhe, naturally she would’ve been very fast, so she was a sprinter and she was on relays, and she was one of a bunch, and there would’ve been four or five other girls with her. But gradually, the four or five other girls all disappeared.
Caoimhe: I know a lot of people have found Mary to be very intimidating.
She helped organize competitions, and so people know her as, like, kind of bossy. And they would come to me and they’d be like, “Gosh, your coach is, like, she’s so scary. She’s so intimidating.” And I’d be like, “Mary? Like, she’s like my granny. Like, she’s like family to me.” A very comforting figure. But also, like, there’s been times where, like, I’ve had a really hard day and I’ll go to training and I’ll just be sitting there, you know, and she’ll rub my back and she’ll be like, “You can see that you’re tired, but we’re gonna do more.”
Jen: Caoimhe competed in the pentathlon. It’s five events scored together: 60 meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump, and the 800 meters. It’s a sport you might only notice every four years when its bigger sibling, the heptathlon, shows up at the Olympics. Adds a 200 meters and the javelin.
Athletes call these multi-events. It’s an unusual choice to compete in these, and for Caoimhe and Mary, there’s a reason for it.
Caoimhe: I think the reason that I got into multi-events, and a lot of Mary’s athletes are multi-eventers, is because Mary is great at keeping young athletes in a really good spot. And so with multi-events, the beautiful thing is you don’t specialize.
I could win a national medal in hurdles, but if I don’t work on my weaknesses, for example, if I don’t throw a shot put far enough, then my multi-events are not gonna do anything.
Mary : I probably have a philosophy. I’d be a good loser and you’ll be a brilliant winner. And I think that’s the most important thing, that if we lose at something, can we work our way through it?
If we’ve lost, have we done our best performance? How can we improve? What do we need to go back to the drawing board and work on? And I think that’s the most important thing.
Caoimhe: It’s a really great way to keep things in perspective, ’cause it’s not common for people to have all five events be great. You’re gonna have bad events.
And so it’s really important to keep people in it, and keep people trying, and keep people working at things that they’re good and bad at. And I’m really thankful for that.
Jen: Every athlete has a bad game. With a multi-event, it’s pretty much a given that you’ll have at least one bad event. Those tough losses stick with us.
Ask any athlete about the race they can’t forget, and they’ll know exactly which one. Caoimhe is no exception. She can tell you exactly which event on which day.
Caoimhe: That day was, like, Connacht Schools Athletics Combined Event, so it was my second event of the day in a pentathlon. And I was intermediate, so I was probably 16 or 17, and I was leading the competition.
My next event was hurdles. Like, this was, like, my, like, really good time in hurdles, like, my prime. And so I was like, “Yeah, this is gonna be good.” And I had nothing to lose with this hurdle race, and I just got out so fast, and I was going. Like, I’ve never… I don’t think I’ve run that fast over hurdles since then.
Mary : She was absolutely flying at the time. Go, Caoimhe.
Caoimhe: And on the second to last hurdle, I don’t even fully know what happened.
Mary : Didn’t hit a hurdle, just went down on the foot
Caoimhe: Fell straight to the track and, like, almost into the next hurdle. But I got up and, like, finished the race with, like, not even that, that slow of a time.
But I don’t know. I’ve even tried to, like, time that race and do the maths to see, like, what it would’ve been ’cause it was so good, and then I just ate track ’cause I was like, “Ah, that could’ve been so fast.”
There’s not much you can do after a fall, but I just felt so frustrated. I didn’t even care about the win that day, ’cause I had like track burned on my knees and like they were gonna… Little did I know they were gonna get really bruised. And like my whole like shin, like front calf was all like burnt and everything.
There had to be dressings on that. But I didn’t feel any of it. And I was like, “This whole thing, like it feels pointless. Like why would I finish a competition when I’ve already kind of messed up my chances?”
Mary : I won’t say she wasn’t competitive to come back at it, but what she was, it… What it does to you, and I know it does to myself, you lose your confidence, and it takes you a long time to build that confidence up again. It’s not necessarily in the physical, but it’s the mental. It’s the mental strength that is important, and that can take a couple of weeks.
It can take a couple of months. It can take a couple of years, and it takes you a little while to get back up to where you were, and then you have to go. There’s a fear there that we’re going to do it again, and if we do something a second time, that’s double trouble.
Jen: But this didn’t break Caoimhe. Scraped raw, she was more focused than ever. There was a competition left to finish, and more important than any of it, she knew her coach was there rooting for her.
Caoimhe: But I remember her just like keeping chill, keeping me going the whole time, like kind of the same Mary she always is.
I can hear my own breath, but sometimes I can hear her and she’ll be like, “Go, Caoimhe, come on, last bit, last bit,” or whatever. Um, and like for high jump, she’ll be on the sideline sometimes, “Just focus on this and you’ll be fine,” or, “Just do this and the next one you’ll clear it.” And I’m like, “Okay.” She remains very consistent the whole time.
Like it’s just another training session. Even if you’re on like a national final, she’s still gonna talk to you like you’re at home training and you’re in the grass fields of Bushfield, you know?
Mary : I think what you do to help them as an athlete, and I did it myself. I remember when I was 14 winning our county high jump championship and jumping 1 meter 56, breaking the record and on the bee’s knees and I did something else.
But I remember going to another competition a couple of weeks later and the starting height was 125. And I remember knocking the bar three times at 125. And I remember crying my eyes out and going away. But you then have to park that and say, right, I come on the next day and I actually then work at it.
And I think that’s, that’s probably one of the best events for helping athletes. There’ll be one event and quite often the event that they go down in is their best individual event.
Jen: You know, life is funny sometimes. That same afternoon, the afternoon she fell, with barely 20 minutes to warm up, Caoimhe jumped higher than ever with a personal best.
Caoimhe: That was like right after the competition that I had fallen. And so I had only had like 20 minutes to warm up for high jump. Like it was weird because I was around lots of girls who were all jumping and trying to get in their zone. And I was like turned around and I had my eyes closed and I was talking to myself like a crazy woman.
And I was like, if she can jump that, you can jump that. Which is such a silly logic and I don’t even know where that came from. But in my mind, I was like, if she can jump that, you can jump that. Or if the girl before me knocked the bar, I’d be like, it doesn’t really matter what she does because you’re going to clear it anyways.
And I remember Mary being there, like I could see her in the corner of my eye and she was like running around because she was helping organize the event. And she had like her camera up and she was like trying to like get my jumps on. And she was like so happy. And I remember her being very proud of me that day.
She said, well done, good girl. When she says that, I’m like, yeah, I did do good. Like, well done.
You know, especially for young minds and disciplines and everything, it’s not good to have so much pressure on this one thing. And so the reason that Mary keeps so many of her athletes in multi-events up until almost adulthood is because it gives them an opportunity to be great at things and be very poor at things and try it all.
Like, I think Mary said this earlier, every single time you compete, whether it’s a great day, whether it’s a poor day, whether it’s the best day ever, you always end on failure. But you have to wrap your head around it first before you wrap your body around the bar and get over it. And I think there’s something important in that.
Jen: Two years before Caoimhe graduated, a message landed in her Instagram DMs. It was from the Goshen College track and field team inviting her to come to America. She thought it was a scam. America to a girl from a town of around 240 people didn’t feel real. A year later, the invitation came again, this time from a teammate she knew.
And for the first time, Caoimhe started to think maybe she really could go.
Caoimhe: So we did a Zoom call, and I got, like, a tour of the athletic facilities, and it looked fantastic. Because to me, I was like, “I’m gonna continue doing athletics, and that’s all I need to do.” And I get to go see America, and it looks like in the movies, which it does, by the way, very much.
And it’s just a completely different feeling. I think that in a way, I kind of needed to come to America. Not because I don’t love my country. Of course I love my country, and I love being with my family. But for me, I think that I needed that boost. I needed that extra support. Because I’m not stupid, and I’m very capable.
But if I’m ignored or if I’m just kind of left with this whole mountain to climb on my own, I’m not gonna do it. But if I can take it, like, rock by rock, then it’s much easier.
Mary : And she said, “What do you think?” I said, “That’s up to you.” I said, “If you’re happy to go there.” I would not have pushed very many athletes to go to American colleges because I’ve seen there’s been more detriment done to their performances.
There’s been more injuries. Um, a lot of them have given up the sport totally when they’re out there. And it’s very difficult. I mean, I went to college in England, which was two hundred miles away from my parents. That time there was no mobile phones, so there was a phone on our corridor. And every Sunday night you went with your, whatever it was at the time, your coins to ring home.
You rang home, and that was really the contact outside of letter writing, which I’d generally write a letter to Mum every week. So you have the other balance of homesickness as well.
Caoimhe: She’s just texted me like nothing’s, uh, like no distance. Like she’ll text and she’ll be like, “Oh, hope you’re doing well. I saw this of you on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever.” And then she’ll go on to be like, “Oh yeah, this is how the grandkids are doing, and then I was doing this last week, and then this went well, and this went well.”
She’ll ask about training or be like she acts like the same person even though, like, I haven’t seen her in a while.
Mary : I told her she came back for too little. We wanted to see a bit more of her. But that’s Caoimhe. She had her plan, and she was going to do what she was going to do. And I said, “That’s fine.” So I said, “We’ll see you again at Christmas, hopefully for a couple of weeks, and get back and do a little bit of training then.”
Caoimhe: Yeah, Mary’s always been the exact same. I d- I don’t think I could imagine Mary any differently. I don’t think she’s capable of that, and I don’t think I’m capable of processing that. I think that she’s seen me in so many different phases, so it’s kinda like weird ’cause she’s always been the same to me.
Like she could still have the same clothes and everything. She just, she just is Mary.
Mary : I find her very mature, for a young girl, I mean. I have a lot of other students who haven’t a clue where they’re going, what they’re doing, and they most certainly wouldn’t have survived in America. But she didn’t struggle.
She had a small initial period, but you would understand that. But since that, she’s just moved on. Athletics is an individual sport, and it’s very tough. Um, you- it’s self … You have to motivate yourself. Okay, there’s a training group, but you have to turn up at that training group, and it’s up to you at the session what you put in.
Do I put 100% in, or am I just doing 70% today? So you have to be self-driven, and you have to have your own goals, whether they’re short-term, medium, long-term.
Caoimhe: It’s a tough world to be in as an athlete, especially as a female athlete, because people are always gonna have things to say. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the Jamaican sprinter, she’s just retired.
Like, she’s up there with Usain Bolt, but she has people commenting on how she styles her hair or what her stomach looks like a year out from having a baby, and you don’t hear that with men as much. It’s not that it’s entirely gone. People are always gonna comment. And so I think that’s another, like, very important thing that Mary’s taught me, is, like, she is a wonderful role model as a woman.
I was a teenager, like, looking at Mary. She doesn’t care whether I come in looking whatever that looks like or in my pajamas. She doesn’t care. She’s not there to criticize, and if I need to stop and have a snack in the middle of an athletics training session, that’s fine. Mary offers a, kind of a refreshing reminder that she is a, an incredibly successful athlete, and coach, and parent, and grandparent.
She doesn’t feed into whatever whoever wants her to feed into, and she’s not gonna let anything come in the way of that.
Jen: When we first reached out to Mary and told her Caoimhe wanted to read her a letter, she said yes right away. Ireland is hours ahead of us, and by the time we recorded, it was already late at night there.
So we spoke to Mary and Caoimhe separately, but we wanted Caoimhe to read her letter to Mary face-to-face over Zoom. You look very professional. The moment they saw each other, Caoimhe lit up. Like
Caoimhe: the newsreader. The newsreader. Welcome back to RTÉ.
Jen: She sounded like the little girl who wanted to show her coach how fast she was- Is Mom and Dad behind you?
telling Mary everything that’s happened lately, even though they text all the time.
Caoimhe: Hi, Mom. Listen, Mary, the whole weekend I’ve been moving, and moving, and moving, and moving. I have a whole flat now. Not doing
Mary : too bad. Um, I suppose we didn’t have too many compete this year.
Caoimhe: I got news that I’m going on to the next level in the speech competition I did.
It’s gonna be a bit awkward actually, Mary, so… God, this is awkward. Sorry.
Jen: And now, a letter straight from the heart.
Caoimhe: Dear Mary, we met for the first time on the squishy wet fields of Loughrea Athletics Club’s grounds in Bushfield. I was six years old, and I was wearing my little flower shorts that I was obsessed with at the time, and you had our group run all the way across the pitch and back.
I was determined to be the fastest out of all the boys and all the girls in the six to eight age group, which I was not. Just so you know, if Ireland needed a sub for the Olympic team, I would be available. You convinced me to come training for all five events of the pentathlon, even when I was moody about it.
12-year-old Caoimhe was not a fan of doing all the technical things or practicing my landing in the long jump sandpit over and over again, just one more time, but you would tell me to, so I went again. You had faith in me even if I did not. Your patience and persistence got me to training and actually kept me there.
I didn’t like it at the time when you were stern, yet supportive, while I was a teenager. I was sometimes lazy or sore, and you made sure I ran the session anyways. I tried so hard every time you corrected my leading leg over the hurdle with the reminder to snap it down when I hurdled, even though I flicked it out anyways.
The times you rubbed my back as I puked my guts up after running the 800 meters at the end of the Connacht Schools Multi-Event Championships after a long pentathlon are gross yet fond memories for me. I puked after every 800-meter race for the five years competing at the Connacht Schools on the bright blue track in Athlone.
Gladly, I made it to the black rubbish bins in time to barf. You always said that my tendency to puke was a way of getting my nerves out, though it often just felt like my breakfast was what wanted out. I always looked for the texts you sent me when you couldn’t make it to watch me race. They were sometimes the only thing that kept me sane as I walked to the start line, shaking while I set my blocks.
I loved the races you were able to come to. I could only hear your voice in the background through the crowds clearer than any other. “Caoimhe, push now. Snap that lead leg,” or, “Caoimhe, get up again and finish strong.” I remember the affection you gave me after I fell in what would’ve been a personal record race in the 60 meter hurdles.
You helped keep me calm while my dad cleaned the little rubber track pieces out of my legs after hitting the track in between the hurdles. It stung and sent raw pain throughout my legs and made my eyes tear up. I had little specks of blue rubber embedded into the burns on my shin, back of my shoulder, hip, and cheekbone.
I could not have competed the following three events without you being there to guide me through them, telling me to breathe and just to finish strong. I recognized the pride you had with each medal I won. You always took pictures of me, regardless of whether it was the County Galway medal that I got for getting through the race or a national medal that I got for running faster than I ever had before.
You gave me the reminder that I should be grateful for everything I achieve, even when I consider myself to have failed. Your support when I told you I was moving 3,615 miles across the world to do athletics in a time zone five hours behind Ireland’s was so abundant. I truly don’t believe there is any coach who would feel happy about their athlete moving away after spending so much time training with them, but you were the anomaly.
You embraced the move with an open mind and supported me through it entirely. Your presence made my faith stronger in all aspects of my life. The world knew I needed a coach like you, who was supportive of me even when I am training with a new team, a new coach. The letters you send me in the post and the occasional text message never fail to make me smile.
Thank you for mentoring me into the athlete I have become today. Without you as my coach, I am not sure I would have achieved what I have in getting to the States, winning all of the county, provincial, and national medals I have, and especially in gaining the discipline I have now, both on and off the track.
You will always be my number one coach, both in person and across the globe. Thank you, Caoimhe Farrell.
Mary : Wow. One Letter.
Didn’t think I had that effect on you.
Caoimhe: Now I need to know about your, uh, my effect on you, eh? Where’s my letter?
Mary : Good God, I’d have to be half to sort of compose one. Yeah, my English was never my strong point, I’m afraid.
Caoimhe: It’s all right. I’ll forgive you just this once. But, well, when I wrote the letter, I didn’t actually, um, anticipate having to read it to you, so gotten a bit further than I thought it would.
Mary : God, it brings back all the memories. Sh- I actually remember that. That kind of stuck in my head for lots of different reasons.
Caoimhe: And I PB’d and… Do you remember I PB’d in almost everything? Yeah. I know I was, I was bouncing.
Jen: I don’t know about you, but I could listen to them like this all day.
So is there someone you’d like to thank for making an impact on your life? Perhaps someone who’s your coach as well, or a person who’s influenced your life in a powerful way. If so, we would love to hear from you. Just visit our website at thegratitudeletters.org, where you’ll find everything you need to send us a letter of your own.
The Gratitude Letters is a brand-new podcast about the people we’re grateful for and taking a moment to let them know. In each episode, someone writes a letter of thanks and we bring it to life. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Search The Gratitude Letters wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Today’s show was produced and sound designed by Yebu Ji. Sound engineering by Alex Dugger. Original music by Hannis Brown. Our marketing manager is Melissa Troyer, and our audience engagement manager is Courtney Dobrzykowski. Duane Stoltzfus is our executive producer. The Gratitude Letters is part of More Than Just Stories with funding from Lilly Endowment.
And until next time, I’m your host, Jen Shenk, with a reminder that it’s never too late and always a good time to say thank you.
Thanks for listening.