When I started playing for Galway in 2008, inter-county teams didn’t pay much attention to recovery. Some players might have gone to the pool or the beach on the morning after a game, but it wasn’t necessarily the done thing. Nobody was under pressure to do it. On the night of a championship match the chances were we would have gone drinking.
In my first summer on the team we played Antrim in the qualifiers at the end of June. Ger Loughnane was the manager and he insisted that the team be flown from Galway to Belfast for the match. A week later we played Laois, on a Saturday, and the following morning we were called in for training. Not for a recovery session. Training.
Davy Fitzgerald had taken over in Waterford - in mid-season – and they had played a match on the same Saturday. At our session the following day our trainer, Louis Mulqueen, told us he had been talking to Davy and the Waterford players were on the beach in Tramore doing an 8km run. If they were doing that, we couldn’t do anything less, so off we went, doing laps of Pearse Stadium until we had covered 8km.
I was in college at the time in LIT, where Davy was manager of the Fitzgibbon Cup team. I was chatting to him a few days later and I mentioned to him about their long run on the beach. He burst out laughing. They had gone into the sea for a recovery session and had a bit of craic. No running. None.
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Last Sunday the Cork and Clare players would have been focusing on recovery straight away. Maybe not collectively but it wouldn’t have been optional either. The emphasis on recovery now is huge: in the sea, in the pool, a spin on an exercise bike, massage, recovery boots, sauna, good food, lots of water, just something to stimulate the process of recovery. You’re trying to get your body in decent shape for the next training session so that you can start again. All the small things add up.
For Cork and Clare, managing a two-week turnaround before the All-Ireland semi-final will be a challenge. Their opponents in Croke Park next weekend have had a month to recover, re-set and ramp it up again. They were able to plan a schedule, which makes a huge difference.
After the Munster final Limerick took a week off. Kilkenny were on a training camp in Fota Island last weekend and were still there on Monday. Meanwhile, Cork and Clare were trying to stay in the championship.
At inter-county level now the wellbeing of players is carefully monitored. Lukasz Kirszenstein is Clare’s strength and conditioning coach now, but he was with us in Galway when we won the All-Ireland in 2017 and for a few years afterwards.
Lukasz asked all of us to download an app called Actimet where he would essentially build up a profile of our wellness. After training every night we would log on to the app and answer a few questions about the session we had just done, and the following morning we would log on again to answer a few more questions: how many hours you had slept, was it a good sleep, we you sore anywhere, how were you feeling.
The questions would only take 30 seconds to answer but the key to the whole thing was honesty. Nobody feels great all the time and there is nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise. If your GPS numbers in training were down, Lukasz needed to understand why.
The length and intensity of our training sessions would have been dictated by the information that Lukasz gathered and how he interpreted it. Micheál Donoghue was the manager, and Franny Forde did a lot of the coaching, but they never overruled Lukasz. If he said we were only going to be on the field for 50 minutes the lads had to plan their session within that time frame. Monitoring the training load was hugely important.
I know the Clare players are using the same app. On a week like this, when you’re coming out of a big game and preparing for another one, teams need to lean on the science and trust in someone like Lukasz. The days of guessing or going on intuition are gone. Everything that matters is finely measured now.
One thing that all four teams will have in common this weekend is an A-vs-B game. Under Brian Cody, Kilkenny put huge store by their in-house games and I’m sure that hasn’t changed under Derek Lyng. We don’t hear much about Limerick’s training sessions but one thing that has been repeated by players over the years is the intensity of their in-house games and the impact it has on team selection.
In my experience, it wasn’t unusual for the B team to win those games and I always thought that was a good thing. You wanted fellas to be pushing hard and putting savage pressure on the lads who had the jersey. You always wanted those games to be tasty enough too, with plenty of hard-hitting. Without that bite there would be something wrong.
I can remember A-vs-B games where the A team won handy and Galway were beaten the following week. I never thought that was a coincidence.
For these teams, the last serious training sessions will be done this weekend. The most important thing after that is feeling good about themselves.
