Sean Noble's trek from League of Ireland journeyman to Hyrox No8 in the world

Irish Daily Mirror

24-05-2025

Not much had changed, people thought. Sean Noble still went to the gym. He still trained every day.
Those who thought they knew him assumed he was still carving out a career for himself in the Irish League, but because they didn't follow Northern Irish football that closely, they weren't aware that this journeyman pro had called time on that particular journey and was trying something else.
But those who did know this 29-year-old Dubliner realised something had changed.
Nothing seemed different at first but then they realised that everything about Sean was new. He was getting older. Wiser. Tougher.
Most of all he was fighting to survive because grief had become an unwelcome visitor to his life.
His father, a role model he looked up to and loved, had passed away from cancer, defying medical predictions to stay alive long after he was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
'He never complained,' Sean says. 'He got upset once. But that was it. He was such a positive person.'
His dad was an army man originally, before he changed career midway through his life. Everything he turned his hand to, he succeeded at, but his greatest gift was his ability to be a father: loyal, steady, a guide.
Every day, during Noble's childhood, he had his boy exercising. 'I didn't know it but I was training since I was young,' he says now.
Football came easy to him.
He was quick. He could finish and he played on the same schoolboy side as Jack Byrne, now the League of Ireland's most talented player.
But football is ruthless. Jack Byrne went to Manchester City; Sean Noble to Bray Wanderers.
He had a spell at Waterford, too, before catching a break up North where he played with Carrick Rangers, Ballinamallard and Ards.
What happened was he was quick but just not quick enough. He could score - but others in the same position could score more.
Then he got injured and a year was taken from his career and then Covid came and then his father got ill and before you know it, he was one of those players who was drifting from club to club and staying at the one level.
When his father eventually passed, hurt took over. An author once wrote that when someone close to you dies, it's like coming out of a car crash. You may move on, but you do so with a limp and that limp is always there.
And that is how it has been psychologically for Noble.
He misses his father desperately.
But he doesn't miss football.
Because this one-time journeyman who was destined to never make it beyond the Irish League or League of Ireland is now the No8 ranked athlete in the world's fastest growing sport: Hyrox.
The sport - 8km of running with eight mini-workouts coming in between each 1km run - began in Germany eight years ago.
It has a marquee sponsor in Red Bull, now has 650,000 participants worldwide, and now has an Irishman as its eighth best participant. In a year, he plans to rise from No8 to No1.
'I want to be world champion,' he says in a way that tells you he'll drag himself to a dark place to get into the shape he needs to be in to reach that goal.
And he'll need to go there because this is a brutal sport. Average athletes complete the course in an hour and a half, the elite - of which Noble is one - do so in and around 55 minutes.
'After dad passed, I did these stupid training sessions. It was OCD guilt. I buried myself in training,' he says. 'I was trying to see how far I could push things so that I could get to sleep at night. The mourning period is tough. You hurt. You miss the person who has gone so, so desperately. My dad was an inspiration to us. He was such a good man.'
There's a gentleness to his son that masks the warrior underneath.
We met in Barcelona where he was competing for a place in the world finals. A few weeks earlier, despite coming back from injury, he was agonisingly deprived of victory in an event in Glasgow because of a technicality.
Rather than be angry, he stoically viewed it as a lesson. He wasn't sore over the ten second penalty because a man that sees someone he loves disappear from this earth gains an understanding that there are certain things you dismiss as irrelevant and certain things that really matter.
A life matters; a loss doesn't.
In any case he's discovering who he really is, the warrior within. Once, early in his football career, he made a minor mistake in a match which prompted the manager to berate him loudly in front of his team-mates. That pushed him into his shell and it took years for him to emerge from it.
But now he well and truly has, to the extent that he earns more from coaching than he does from participating. Then, because he is an elite 15 operator in a sport with cult-like participants, sponsors came calling. If he wanted, he could turn full-time now, but because he is a diligent and loyal person, he is staying on as a trainee solicitor.
But he's on a mission to be world champion driven by two things, himself and his father's memory. Noble intentions, you might say. Don't back against him getting there.