Long time no see strangers!

We took a little break to restore and revive ourselves and now The Lennon Courtney Podcast is back for series 7.

This series the theme is Pearls of Wisdom and over the next few weeks, we'll be chatting to doyennes - prominent women in their fields, to share with us their wisdom and experience around life, finances, work and more.

To get proceedings underway, we decided to make a splash with our first guest. Paralympic gold medal winner Ellen Keane . Ellen hails from Clontarf in Dublin and was born without part of her left arm below her elbow. She was Ireland’s youngest ever athlete when she swam in the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games at just 13 years old, coming 6th in the 100m breaststroke. In 2018 at the World European Para-Swim Championships, she won a bronze and a season’s best performance which saw her named on the RTÉ Sport Awards 2019 Sportsperson of the Year alongside team mate Nicole Turner. Then, in 2020 she won gold in the 100m breaststroke in the Tokyo Paralympics and a nation cheered.

Ellen talks to us in this episode about self-acceptance, how she trained without a pool at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and Brendan shared his dream of becoming a synchronised swimmer - we cover a lot ; )

Thank you so much for listening and please leave a positive review here plus five gold stars. You can also do it very easily on your phone in the iTunes podcast app. Scroll down the Lennon Courtney podcast page and add a review there. It helps us get pushed up the charts by the all-seeing algorithm and more people can hear us.

Until next Thursday!

Sonya and Brendan.

WATCH In 2017 Ellen Keane gave a Ted X talk called ‘My Lucky Fin’. In her talk she tells the story of how she changed the way she looked at her disability and how that in turn changed her entire life. Watch here.

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Lennon Courtney Left Alone is produced by Esther O’Moore Donohoe.