On a Saturday morning in Bangor, 350 runners loop through Ward Park. Near the back, walking steadily, is a man who once ran 5k in under 15 minutes. Now it takes him almost an hour – and he couldn’t be more grateful.
“You could find yourself landed in the Ulster Hospital or the Royal,"says Davie Seaton, "I’m delighted to be walking three laps of Ward Park.”
Seaton has spent more than six decades at the heart of Northern Irish athletics – as a club runner, mentor, team manager and he had a hand in the birth of the SPAR Craic 10K back in 2015.
He first caught the running bug at Inst where he took part in the cross-country team, graudating to the North Belfast Harriers - a move which took him from his native East Belfast to the clubhouse at Oldpark Terrace in the early 1960s.
“I went up there and I never looked back,” he says of his 25-year tenure with the North Belfast Harriers. “There were a great bunch of guys. Half of them were from Ardoyne, the other half basically from the Shankill Road."
In a city edging towards conflict, the club offered a rare, shared space. It was working-class, competitive and quietly ambitious. “They showed that when you could show dedication, hard work and commitment you can come from nowhere to number one,” he says.
What really mattered, though, was the welcome.
“It is a community which is friendly,” Seaton says. “You don’t say you’re strangers, just friends we don’t recognise.” Newcomers were greeted, given names, offered lifts to races. “If you’re made to feel welcome – as I was – that’s what makes the difference.” [davie]
He would later leave Belfast for Bangor where his daughter could join a club that accepted women – in the early eighties not a given among all Belfast running clubs.
His involvement in athletics spanned a spell as coach of the Northern Ireland Cross-Country team as well as chairmanships with both Athletics NI and the Belfast Marathon. Today he is both a fan and a participant in the ParkRun phenomenon.
CRAIC CHIEF: Davie Seaton focuses on final preparations for the start of last year's SPAR Craic 10K despite the distractions of wannabe runner Máirtín Ó Muilleoir 
"It's absolutely brilliant," says Davie. "I'm 100 perc cent behind Matt (Shields - founder of ParkRun in Ireland) and what he has done. All sorts of guys who on a Saturday morning at half nine would have been lying in their bed not knowing what they were going to do are now running around Crawfordsburn or Falls Park or whatever it may be. And the interesting thing for me is that more and more females are now entering into running. I can remember in the first Belfast marathon in1982, only 3 per cent of the participants were female."
A bout of ill health in recent years has reduced Davie from runner to walker, but not from participant to spectator. “You’re so glad to be able to do something You’re still doing it, and that’s the important thing.”
Less well-known about Davie's running record is that he was involved in the early conversations about launching a race in Belfast to mark St Patrick's Day and instrumental in winning Athletics NI support for the initiative - which, of course, has grown from early beginnings to be the biggest 10K in the North.
You can watch the Craic Chat podcast with Davie Seaton and Máirtín Ó Muilleoir on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify, iTunes and all podcast platforms.
