It has only been a year. It feels longer, obviously. But that's all it's been. A year next weekend, in fact, since the last games were played and the hurling and football leagues were put on ice for seven months. Down played Offaly in Tullamore in football, the Wexford hurlers came to Croke Park for a game against Dublin. We didn't know it at the time but the world was about to curl itself into a ball.
For sportspeople everywhere, it was an unthinkable time. In the planet’s imagination, you could no more turn sport off than you could stop a waterfall halfway down. Yet that’s what happened. One day there was sport, the next day there was not.
And then there were GAA players. Living lives devoted to their chosen sport but finding a way to be other people too. To be teachers and publicans and fitness instructors and GPs and nurses and radiologists and dozens of other life paths that were suddenly blocked by the pandemic. In those first days and weeks of the original lockdown, The Irish Times checked in to get a sense of what they were facing for a series we called Reality Bites. A year on feels like a good time for a catch-up.
Kevin McKernan (Down footballer and schoolteacher)
When we left Kevin McKernan, he was standing in the car park of his school in Newry waiting to see how many kids were going to show up. Boris Johnson had just imposed the UK-wide lockdown and closed all schools but had made an exception for the kids of frontline workers. So McKernan was getting ready to do his duty, albeit that he had no real idea what that would entail.
“Nobody came!” he says now. “A few parents came in to take information packs but that was it. No kids came in. It’s different now. This time around, we would have 45, 50 kids in on a week. Teachers have to go in to supervise once a week, trying to keep bubbles of eight or 10. People are using it now.
“The first time around, nobody knew what was happening, nobody was really sure of the risks. Whereas now, if you’re a doctor or a nurse or whatever, you may as well send your children in because you know it’s safe. The alternative is that they go to childcare and probably don’t really get any schoolwork done.”
Like all teachers, McKernan’s role has morphed and shape-shifted countless times in the past 12 months. One of the kids in his class had a positive test in mid-December so his whole class was out a week before Christmas, making it a full two months now since they were together. On the academic side of things, everyone is getting by as best they can. But nobody knows better than a teacher that there’s more to worry about right now than academics.
“You’re trying to reinvent the wheel constantly. You’re trying to find a way to connect with children who are not in front of you, trying to take into account stresses at home, parental priorities in terms of getting their own work done and so on. You’re trying to make whatever you’re sending home as enjoyable as possible for the kids’ family. I try to set wee family tasks, project pieces and so on for them to do together.
“We’re really trying to engage with wellbeing and all that area now. It’s massive. We have to get them back into sport. I wouldn’t even be sure at this stage which is more important – getting them back to school in a controlled manner or getting them back to sport in a controlled manner.”
He is a footballer still, even at 33. Indeed, the way everything has worked out, it has probably extended his playing days a year or two. A while back, a lad got in touch looking to see would he be interested in going into business with a fitness venture aimed at schools. In a normal year, Kevin McKernan the county footballer wouldn’t have given it a second look.
"A guy rang me up and asked me what I thought about getting involved in a business venture called Primal Fitness. Other years, I just wouldn't have had the time. I would have had too much going on with football, with work, with the kids at home. I wouldn't have looked at it. I know I wouldn't. But that's a big thing the GPA have always been preaching, in fairness to them. You're more than the footballer.
“It’s an online training programme that we’re rolling out to schools that covers high-intensity training, yoga and Pilates and basically it’s a wellbeing package for teenagers and families. We’ve signed up 15 schools in the past week or so and we’re really only launching it now so hopefully more will get involved as we go along.
“After a Down Zoom the other night, one of the lads rang me and we were chatting and he went, ‘did it really take a pandemic for us and the GAA to realise we don’t need to be playing football 11-and-a-half months of the year?’ And he’s right. This can all be condensed to the point where a lad can go travelling for two months in the off season. Or a lad can put his energies into a business venture.
“I’m 33 years of age – the reduced season has probably helped me protect my body and be in a place where I can go for club and county. That’s been the big thing for me, I think it has given me a sense of being able to set targets for myself where my body feels good and I should be able to perform.”
Conor McDonald (Wexford hurler and fitness instructor)
For Conor McDonald, lockdowns are the equivalent of those little brass gizmos altar boys carry around to extinguish candles. His business is called 14Fitness, run out of the Naomh Éanna clubhouse in Gorey. If you can't congregate, you can't run a fitness class or do a gym session. Not the way you want to, at any rate.
When it all ground to a halt last March, McDonald had to push everything online. And it's been okay, on the whole. Improvise, adapt, overcome, all that jazz. The whole planet has had to do it.
“The obvious things that you miss in the gym are lost,” he says. “One-to-one contact, atmosphere, the social aspect of it. But on the whole, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I think people are really quite accepting of how things are now. They feel it’s important that we do them.”
If he’s noticed one thing above all else throughout the strangest year, it’s that all the things he and other fitness people have been preaching for years are finally finding an audience. The idea that fitness is about the head as much as the body has been around since time began but he’s finding more and more people are reaching that conclusion on their own now. Necessity can do wondrous things.
“For the last number of weeks, I’ve been doing a couple of free live workouts a week online,” he says. “The first thing I say every time is that the top six inches of your body are far more important than the six feet or five feet below them. That’s the most important message I try to get across and I’m talking to myself as much as to the people on the livestream.
“I think it’s really only starting to become widespread now, nearly a year into it. It doesn’t matter if you do it in the gym or in your sitting room. People are realising that whereas before, they might have been a bit afraid of exercise or a bit intimidated by going into a gym, none of that is actually the most important thing to worry about.
“The really important thing is your head. Every little bit of exercise you do pays you back in your head. I do think people are starting to realise that on a bigger scale now, they are seeing the psychological benefits of getting out and getting active. Maybe they’re dropping a few pounds here and there, maybe they’re getting a bit of a sweat on a few times a week. But all of it is helping them upstairs.”
For Wexford, 2020 was such a wash-out on the pitch that it might be no harm to have the pandemic to blame it one. Their championship opener was on Halloween night, with fireworks booming around Dublin's northside and making an empty Croke Park feel even more surreal than it already was. Galway floored them and they never got up. Such a let-down after the highs of 2019.
“To be honest, I found it really hard to enjoy the year. With so much uncertainty around, with no crowds. I love big crowds, I love the summer’s day, I love the championship, a proper championship. In the two weeks leading into our first championship game, I was as buzzing as I ever was. Or I thought it was anyway. I just think the whole feeling of championship wasn’t there for us. Maybe it was for other teams.
“But even just things like the lads outside the 26 not being allowed to travel to games and be around the group. On a matchday, those guys are so important to us. They’re who I want to kill the hours with in the lead up to a match because they have no pressure on them, none of them are tight or nervous. And when they weren’t there, the atmosphere in the group was different.”
Everything was different. For everybody.
