Phily Bowden Ran the New York City Marathon for Ciara Mageean

Ciara Mageean, the 2024 European 1,500m champion, died early Sunday at the age of 34, a week after she and her husband, Thomas Moran, celebrated their wedding with family and friends at Darver Castle in Co. Louth. Marathon Handbook reported her death that morning, and in a follow-up on the wedding noted that one of the guests, the British marathoner Phily Bowden, had flown to Ireland for it in the final week before racing New York.

Bowden has now described how that Sunday unfolded, in two posts on her Instagram account. The news reached her before the race had even begun. “At around 6:00 this morning, on the bus to the start of the NYC Marathon, I found out that Ciara had passed away,” she wrote on Sunday evening. “It still doesn’t feel real, and I’m not sure it will for a long time.”

She ran anyway, and finished 17th in 2:30:45, a long way from the 2:24:36 that won Sheila Chepkirui her second title in three years. Bowden spent much of the race on her own. In a second post on Monday she wrote that she was proud of “rallying for 14 miles of solo running and closing the gap on the field in front of me in the last 10km,” and said it had not been the New York she had imagined. It was also her first marathon since London in 2025, after a year in which she was injured.

She tried to treat it like any other race. “You can try to put it all in a box, to stay in athlete mode and focus on process over emotion for 26.2 miles and I did my best, but I’m human, and it’s never that simple,” she wrote. Parts of the race were a blur, she said, and at first she felt numb about the result. “It’s hard to care about a few seconds here or a few positions there when running a marathon seems so irrelevant right now. But I know that’s not how Ciara would see it.”

She also thanked the women in the professional field “who were there to catch me yesterday.”

The two had trained together in Helen Clitheroe’s New Balance Manchester group, and Bowden’s tribute was full of small details from those years. On mornings at the track in Stockport, she wrote, Mageean would stop to chat and joke with the visually impaired and disabled athletes who used it, and “if I ran past they’d say ‘is that Ciara?’ and be thoroughly disappointed when it was just me.” Mageean was, Bowden said, “the first person I’d want to call when I was sad, or excited, or when I needed someone to tell me what to do.”

A week before the race, in a video filmed during a workout in Dublin, Bowden had explained her detour from Arizona by saying that “a very special person in my life” was getting married in Ireland and that she “couldn’t exactly miss it.”

Her post from Sunday night ended with the race itself. “I thought about her every step of the way around New York today,” she wrote. “I gave it everything I had, and I hope I made you proud, Ciara.”