From Rock Bottom to Everest: Pádraig O'Hora's Breathing Story
"The Higher We Got, the Stronger I Felt in My Breath."
Pádraig O'Hora — Former Mayo Footballer, Everest Summiteer & OA Instructor
From addiction and self-doubt to the summit of the world's highest mountain, Pádraig O'Hora credits breath training with giving him control at the exact moments his brain wanted to panic. He's since completed his own Oxygen Advantage® Instructor training — determined to bring what got him up the mountain back down to everyday life.
Ask Pádraig O'Hora about his training ground for Everest and he won't mention an altitude chamber or a specialist facility. He'll mention Croagh Patrick — the mountain in his own backyard in Mayo, the one he walked up and down six times in a single day as his last big session before Nepal. "Why go anywhere else? It's right there," he says. That's the kind of person he is — someone who does the work quietly, close to home, long before anyone's watching.
But the mountain wasn't always the challenge. Years before Everest, Pádraig has spoken openly about a much harder climb — a battle with alcohol and drugs in his teenage years, a time when he looked like he had everything together and was quietly falling apart underneath it.
GAA changed that. Football gave him structure, discipline, and a community that held him together when little else could. He went on to play inter-county for Mayo across seven seasons, starting their 2021 All-Ireland final — and along the way, began speaking publicly about mental health, discovering how many people recognized their own struggles in his.
A later ADHD diagnosis reframed years of that difficulty for him. He took everything he'd learned — from the pitch, from recovery, from high-pressure environments — and built a second career out of it: corporate speaking, performance coaching, and mental health advocacy.
Then came Everest.
A few months before he set off, Pádraig spent three hours with Patrick McKeown in Galway. It reshaped how he trained on his altitude simulator, and he's credited that single session with a tenfold improvement in his performance at altitude — one of the pillars of a preparation that also included the physical grind on Croagh Patrick and months of psychological work with sports psychologist Karen Weekes.
The expedition itself ran 47 days, through avalanches, whiteouts, and an icefall that stayed impassable for days on end. High on the mountain, watching a sunset with a view of the curvature of the Earth, cameras and phones dead, Pádraig described functional breathing as the thing that let him take control at the exact moments his brain wanted to panic — the thinner the air became, the stronger he felt in his breath.
The first attempt fell 400 metres short, turned back by ice-covered ropes and worsening weather. They retreated to Camp 4, regrouped, and went again. At roughly 1:30am on May 20th, 2026, Pádraig — alongside teammates Éanna McGowan and Adam Sweeney and their three-man Sherpa team — stood on the summit of Everest, becoming part of the first all-Irish team to reach the top in over 20 years.
"I'm over the moon to have achieved what I set out to do."
What followed the summit is a part of the story he's chosen to tell just as openly as the climb itself. In the weeks after coming home, Pádraig spoke publicly about the comedown — the disorientation, the difficulty reconnecting to everyday life, and moments of real low feeling that followed even a successful expedition. He returned to therapy, and used the platform of Men's Health Week to encourage others to reach out for support rather than sit with it alone.
A couple of months later, Pádraig came back to train with Patrick — this time in Vélez-Málaga, completing his own Oxygen Advantage® Instructor Certification. What carried him up the world's highest mountain, he's now bringing home to Ireland and the UK, working it into his corporate speaking, coaching, and mental health advocacy.
"Resilience is not something you are born with. It is something you build."