Talking Health and Nutrition on the Dohern Loop Trail with Daniel Davey, a performance nutritionist with a deep appreciation of the walks of his native County Sligo.
When people start a fitness regime, walking is often high on their list of activities, helping them develop and improve their level of fitness. Within a relatively short time, you can increase your walking pace, lengthen the walk or head uphill, all good for cardiovascular fitness.
But walking is more than just about physical fitness. It’s also good for our mental wellbeing, and then there’s the social benefits of walking in company. And when you consider walking in the overall context of our general wellbeing, you can also focus in on nutrition, the fuel that provides the energy for us to walk on longer, more challenging routes.
And this brings us to this week’s guest on Sligo Walks. In recent months, we’ve heard from some well known Sligo people about what walking means to them. Olympic swimmer Mona McSharry took time out from her training programme for Paris to tell us about her favourite walk – the Benbulben Forest Trail. And singer Tommy Fleming brought us on a tour of the spectacular coastal walk at Aughris before heading on a two month tour of Australia.
With our top talent helping promote Sligo both at home and abroad, this week, we take the comparatively short trip to Chaffpool in Tubbercurry, where Dublin-based performance nutritionist Daniel Davey met us to talk about the new Dohern Loop Trail, a walk that is close to his heart for lots of different reasons.
Anyone who has seen Daniel’s work online – he has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram – will know that his core message to people is that the food we eat has an impact on our ability to work and exercise, and that these elements come together to promote a healthy lifestyle.
“I think that understanding the depth of science behind the value of nature is really important. It is now shown that not just the exercise component, but where you exercise, and exercising in nature brings down our stress responses. So we’ve got the exercise component, we’ve got the management of stress and then we’ve got the social aspect,” he says of the multilayered benefits of walking.
At some level, we’re all aware that the food we eat has a direct impact on other parts of our lives. All athletes follow bespoke training programmes where dietary needs form a central component. But away from high end performance, the rest of us are gradually becoming more aware of replacing chocolate bars and energy drinks with slow release energy food like nuts, seeds and fruit.
“Everything is connected. Our relationship with food, exercise, mindset, wellbeing, sleep, it’s all connected. So, one part of my expertise is in nutrition, but my broader message now is that if you’re not sleeping well, if you’re not moving, if you’re not managing stress, it doesn’t matter how well you eat. It’s that point that you can’t do any of these elements or these pillars of health on their own,” he says.
Here in Sligo we are fortunate to have lots of walking trails that tick different boxes. Coastal, uphill, woodland, lakeside, we have long county wide walks or short looped trails in different towns and villages. Many GAA clubs now have floodlit amenities to enable the people in their communities to walk and stay healthy all year round.
In the case of the Dohern Loop Trail, this serves the community in a different way. The route goes back centuries. According to Daniel parts of the trail were used for many years to drive cattle through and there’s a suggestion that ancient settlements were once built here, something which won’t surprise many, seeing as the Hill of Knocknashee overlooks the walk.
For Daniel, the launch of the Dohern Trail is a special day. The trail passes through his own family’s land. “We had a small beef and sheep farm when I was growing up and my memories of Dohern Hill and the outdoor life was seeing the cattle with my Dad, and checking the sheep,” he says.
The Dad mentioned was Peter Davey, well known local actor and a member for many years of the Phoenix Players in Tubbercurry and of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo, among others, and who unfortunately lost his battle with cancer almost three years ago.
“I don’t know would he have ever imagined that we would be running an event like this across Dohern Hill,” he says, adding that the proceeds from the event will go to the Sligo Cancer Support Centre. “What has been so special for me is that everybody locally has been chipping in. I’ve also enjoyed connecting with home on such a meaningful activity, (it’s) beyond anything that I could have imagined.”
For months the local committee has worked together with Sligo County Council to develop this walk. Just the day before the race, the signs went in, and now, for the people of the community, a newly redeveloped 5km trail is now in place, which will benefit locals and visitors alike. And while it can take a while to get there, where there’s a will there’s a way and the work will get done once the community is willing to roll up the sleeves and work with the landowners and with the Council.
“It’s all very doable, it’s achievable once you’ve got a core committee put together. You need people who are willing to do that bit of hard work, that bit of teamwork,” adding that while it didn’t cost a lot of money to develop the trail, the local Meitheal, working in cooperation with other stakeholders, has delivered a great community project. Paying tribute to those who worked on the project, he concludes by saying “Look at the work that’s been done, that’s what you get when the community come together to create something.”
Click on the link for information on the Dohern Loop Trail.