It was OCD guilt, I was trying to see how far I could push things

FORMER FOOTBALLER NOBLE ON HOW GRIEF DROVE HIM TO TOP OF NEW SPORT HYROX

- Garry DOYLE

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.