Jason Cowman’s day begins at 6am with squatting exercises in the Hilton gym where Gert Smal is creaking open his oak-like Springbok legs on the adjacent treadmill.
The reporter only stumbles across this duet due to a jet-lagged inability to sleep. Procurement of sleeping tablets later that afternoon ensures any further exposure to the alien environment of a weights room will be avoided for the remainder of this North American tour.
By 10am it is already 26 degrees. Switch setting from hotel to the CES Performance Centre just outside Houston. Cowman is busy prepping for the most strenuous session of the week.
“You know it is going to be warm, you know it is going to be humid and you know we are going to be suffering in terms of jet lag.
"It is just to plan around those things and overcome them as best as we can. Otherwise they become pitfalls but once you know they are happening you can work around them."
Build awareness
Hence the bin liners under jerseys when training at Carton House?
“Not at all. The idea of the bin liners wasn’t to get any physiological adaptation going, it was just to build a bit of awareness so the boys understood when they arrived over here it was going to be uncomfortable when they trained.
“As much as you encourage guys to take on more fluid if the body doesn’t want it it doesn’t take it. The idea of the sweat vest is to create an increased desire for fluid intake during their sessions.”
His switch from Leinster to Ireland strength and conditioning coach since last summer’s tour of New Zealand has proved a quantum leap for Cowman.
“I was thinking about this after the Six Nations and it is chalk and cheese, it really is.
"At national level, you have one week's training before the first Six Nations game, which is win or bust. The pressure in that time to get a team right is tremendous.
Chance of winning
"What you have to do is micro-manage the first couple of weeks of the Six Nations and really get that right to make sure you give yourself as much chance of winning that first game and being in the hunt.
“It is entirely different. I was six or seven years with Leinster with reasonable success, but I consider myself a novice at this level. I can’t just transfer the programme that we had provincially and dump it into a national programme and expect it to work. That’s naïve.
“It is a steep learning curve, but hopefully I’ll come through it.”
Ignore the modesty, players swear by the Dubliner’s methodology.
But it has been a painful season for everyone in camp Ireland. The head has been severed from the management, with Les Kiss in control until the Joe Schmidt era begins.
The chronic injury list of the spring begged a multitude of questions about Ireland’s preparation. Or maybe it was simply a case of the smaller genetic make-up of Irish men finally coming home to roost.
A freakish few months?
“Man, I’d love to know the answer to that question. There is a lot of people who can hang their hats on cause and effects in terms of injury but the other side of the fence is that sometimes you just can’t mitigate against them.
“If you look at the patterning of it there wasn’t three or four hamstring tears. There wasn’t repeated injuries occurring. There was lots of trauma, an ankle here and there.
"It was certainly a difficult time for me, the first time being in as strength and conditioning coach trying to overcome those injuries. It was pretty challenging."
Extra one per cent
People in sport regularly talk about that extra one per cent separating champions from the rest but Cowman takes a more practical stance.
“One of the things that annoys me about people talking about ‘marginal gains,’ you hear an awful lot about the extra half a per cent: ‘If I could just get that extra half a per cent I’d be successful.’
“We focus in on, ‘Is 90 percent of what we’re doing better than everyone else?’ And, if it is, then we have a great chance of winning.”
The players arrive in dribs and drabs. Dynamo MLS squad outside on the soccer pitch, doing a piggy-in-the-middle, tiki-taki training as an already searing Texas sun beats down, pause to check out these Irish giants.
Mercifully, Cowman conducts his warm-up in the air-conditioned gym on artificial turf beneath a 10 foot poster of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
Soon after Saturday’s starting XV take to an isolated pitch in the corner of the complex, occasionally reaching sustained levels of intensity against willing dirt trackers for a 45 minute session.
Kiss has the conch now, Cowman happily taking a back seat.
We ask about the 85 per cent humidity that awaits Ireland at the BBVAstadium on Saturday (even with the 7.45pm kick-off).
"There is not much you can do about it. These guys are going to be asked to play 50 minutes plus and you kind of got to get on with it. We are hoping to get water breaks, we are hoping the exposure to the training this week will help them in some way as well.
Lots of intensity
"I'd be one for training with lots of intensity and try to keep the time to a minimum. Hats off to the coaches, they took on board the advice."
By noon it’s 32 degrees. Sticky hot. The squad has retreated to their eighth floor epicentre but Cowman’s work continues on.
He gathers a pack of those in need of some special, personal rehab and heads to the local Rice University gym.
Just another arduous day in camp Ireland, he doesn’t make the curve look so steep.
