Nothing casts fear and self-doubt into the mind of an athlete quite like the last slow walk to the starting line.
No one knows this better than David Matthews. Hand-picked as Cork’s fitness trainer by Jimmy Barry-Murphy, on his return to management two years ago, Matthews is still the only Irishman to run the 800m in under one minute and 45 seconds – his 1:44.82, from 1995, also naturally still standing as the Irish record.
Matthews may have retired some 13 years ago, aged just 26, a little burnt out perhaps from running two Olympics, three World Championships, and eight other major championships in the space of seven years, but he’s now meticulously absorbed in the sports science business, acutely aware too that sport can never be an exact science.
Matthews is thus the man charged with getting Cork’s match fitness up to race pace for Sunday’s Munster semi-final showdown against Clare – both the joy and challenge in that being Cork haven’t played any competitive hurling since losing the division 1A relegation play-off, to Clare, back on April 14th. That, in other words, will be 10 full weeks, or 70 long days, or two and a half months – and for any county hurler must feel like an eternity.
"I know all athletes would have this perception of being 'rusty' if they hadn't raced like that, in a long while," says Matthews. "For Cork, truthfully, the long break has been a great help, allowed us to bring them back down, then build them all up again.
'Top-class training'
"We've been lucky as well that we got a good run of weather. The ground has been hard, the grass cut low at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, which has made for some top-class training. I don't know if we'd have got the same amount of work done if we'd spent the whole time in Portugal or somewhere like that. Because these players have buckets of pace right now.
“So fitness won’t less us down on Sunday. That’s one less thing to worry about because Clare, we know for sure, will present a huge, huge challenge.”
This is not based on some loose theory – but rather the performance in a run of challenge games (against Limerick, Tipperary, Galway, and the Cork under-21s) and also some tailor-made training runs: “Now, you can say what you like about challenge games, but the important thing is what you put into them, and so what you take out. You can’t control what the opposing team puts out, but Cork have taken a lot from those challenge games.
"But effectively I had them for a six-week run, to work on fitness. I can say there has been some dramatic improvement in their aerobic capacity during that time, as well as maintaining the so-called strength work. I would say 70 per cent of the training sessions during that time were on match fitness.
'Repeat sessions'
"But we'd also repeat sessions, over a 10-day cycle, so that players would have some tangible evidence of how they were progressing, whether that was over a 180m sprint, or simply lining up against each other."
Barry-Murphy was quick to dismiss Cork’s relegation, at least in the short-term, and Matthews backs it up: Cork were in a entirely different phase of training during that period, which for better or for worse, didn’t quite get them over the line in a couple of very tight games.
“The purpose, when we set out on 2013, was to improve all the time. Last year, it was mostly about improving speed. This year has been more focused on strength. Some players still looked a little underdeveloped. Now, this year, Conor Lehane, for example, has added 5kg of pure muscle mass. Chris Joyce as well. Michael Cussen has got himself back into superb shape. Brian Murphy, Shane O’Neill, Cian McCarthy, these guys are definitely in the best shape of the last two years.
“Balance is key. I’m of the belief that these are athletes, who happen to be hurlers, but they’re also juggling three or four different balls at the same time, between college, club commitments, whatever. And why I believe hurling is the greatest ball game in the world. These guys need the fitness of athletes and the touch of surgeon, more so when in oxygen debt.
“Now, the last two weeks has been about keeping them fresh. Tapering, as any athlete will tell you, is a sort of Holy Grail, hard to find, but key to getting things right. But June 23rd has been earmarked all year, as the date. There’s no point in planning to peak for late August when you could just as easily be sitting on a beach in Portugal. We’ve been timing everything for Sunday.”
