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Author Interview with Accidental Ironman Author, Dr. Finbar McGrady

  • 13 hours ago
  • 6 min read

1. What inspired you to write your book?



I've learned a lot in this life and come through many challenging times — burnout, grief, rebuilding myself from the ground up. As a GP, I've sat across from hundreds of people navigating their own crises, and I could see that what I'd learned had real value beyond my own story.


But the honest answer is: my cousin Niall. He died of a brain tumour aged thirty-six. He was my best friend, my musical inspiration, the person who reminded me that life was meant to be lived, not just endured. His death cracked me open and forced me to ask: What am I actually doing with my life?


Over the years, people who heard fragments of the story kept saying the same thing — you should write a book. Eventually, I listened. I'm really proud of what I've created, and I hope that anyone who feels stuck or challenged in life will find real learning and value in it.


2. How did your writing process go?


I'd never written a book, so I genuinely didn't know how or where to start. What unlocked it was simply talking through the events in my life that felt meaningful — and then following them deeper than I'd ever gone before.


A lot of it I actually dictated. I'd be driving between clinics, or out on a training run, and something would surface — a sentence, a memory, a connection I'd never consciously made before — and I'd talk it straight into my phone or computer. Some of the most honest passages started as voice notes recorded just after a run or cycle. Movement loosens the thinking for me.


At times, the writing was genuinely fun. But it was also emotional and painful in stages — particularly revisiting the burnout years and the grief after losing Niall. Those were the chapters I'd sit with the longest. And they turned out to be the ones that mattered most.


Overall, it has been an immensely cathartic experience, and honestly, I'd recommend it to everyone. You discover things about yourself that you didn't know you knew.


3. Do you have any strange writing habits?


Nothing too strange — ideas just came to me at very random times. In the shower, lying in bed, in the middle of the night. I'd have to stop and make a note immediately, or it was gone.


Before I knew it, I might have lost an hour or two just following the thread of it all. That flow state, when the writing just moves, and you lose all track of time — that was when the book felt most alive.


4. What is your favourite quote?


Viktor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."


It's the spine of the whole book. I came across it during the writing process, and it stopped me in my tracks — because it gave precise language to something I'd been living and fumbling towards for years without ever being able to articulate it so cleanly. Everything in my story, the burnout, the grief, the Ironman, the clinic — it all traces back to that idea of widening the space between what happens to you and how you choose to respond. Frankl survived Auschwitz and arrived at that insight. The least I could do was try to live it.


5. Is this your only book or are you working on more?


I never planned to do an Ironman. I never planned to write a book. The opportunity arose, and I took it. That's how I live — I see an open door, and I push.


Now that this book is complete, I feel like there is still more I need to share. The connection between how we live and how our skin reflects that — sleep, stress, nutrition, lifestyle — is something I explore with patients every day and talk about constantly on my YouTube channel. I can see that becoming a book. But if I'm honest, I'll probably only know what the next one is when the door appears.


The first readers and my publisher seem to agree — they're already telling me this won't be my last!


6. What surprised you most on the writing journey?


How quickly it all came together. I suppose I already knew the story — I'd been living it for

Dr Finbar holding his book for the first time
Dr Finbar holding his book for the first time

decades. Once I started, it flowed.


What took more work was making sure the core message was strong and ran consistently through everything. Taking a reader on a journey from burnout to belief sounds straightforward, but you have to earn each step. The personal stories had to connect to something universal. The philosophy had to feel lived-in, not borrowed. Getting that balance right was the real craft of it.


The other surprise was how much writing it helped me understand my own journey more clearly. I thought I was recording something I already understood. It turned out I was still figuring it out as I wrote.


And the biggest surprise of all has been how much other people recognise themselves in my story. I worried it was too personal, too specific to my own strange journey. But the responses I've had — from doctors, from patients, from people who've never done a triathlon in their lives — suggest the opposite. The more specific and honest you are, the more universal it becomes.


7. What got left out of the final draft?


More of the music. Risque Blues in my youth, gigging with my sister in Shake it Sister, Raised on Rock — the band I play in with my cousin Leo and the lads — deserved more pages. Playing live is one of the places I feel most like myself. Standing onstage doing Sweet Child o' Mine at fifty-one, when I spent most of my teens and twenties too shy to make eye contact with an audience — that transformation is real, and it didn't fully make it onto the page.


There was also more about dermoscopy and the clinical side of skin cancer detection that got trimmed in the edit. Right call for the book's readership, but part of me still wants to write the chapter that properly captures what it feels like to find a melanoma on someone's back when they've only come in with a hand wart.


8. If you could tell your younger self anything what would it be?


Trust yourself and your decisions more. The people who you think have it all together right now don't. They are just good at hiding their uncertainty.


I spent years feeling like everyone else had been given a manual I never received — socially, professionally, personally. They hadn't. We're all figuring it out as we go.


You are wiser than you realise. The things that make you feel different are not weaknesses to be overcome — they are the source of your strength. Play your own game. Do what's best for you, your family, and your patients.


And don't wait. I kept telling Niall we'd play pool when the kids were older, go for beers when things calmed down, and make more music when life gave us the time. He was gone at thirty-six. Life doesn't calm down. It just ends. Go now. Say it now. Do it now.


The rest takes care of itself.


9. Is there anything else you would like to share?


Just this: I'm not an extraordinary person. I'm a shy kid from County Down who went red if someone looked at him. I burnt out, I gained three stone, and I blamed everyone else for a while. I've failed interviews, quit jobs, and made plenty of wrong turns.


The book isn't a blueprint for becoming an elite athlete or a successful entrepreneur. It's about something much simpler — that between whatever happens to you and how you respond to it, there's a space. And in that space is your freedom. Learning to widen that space, even a little, even slowly, changes everything.


If one person reads this book and takes one step they've been putting off — makes a career change, posts the first video, has the conversation they've been avoiding — then it was worth writing.

That's all I've got. That, and the medal on my bedroom wall.


  1. What are your social media links?


LinkedIn: Finbar McGrady

YouTube: Dr Finbar




 
 
 

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