No great love for winter training

Around this time of the year, every year, was about the only time during the season that I hated training.

December training meant no games, just a mindless bore of slog after slog on the training field.

Generally throughout November and December it was Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday on the pitch and Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the gym. You'd have Sunday off, just so you could spend 24 hours dreading the rest of the week.

Once the new year kicked in, the relief was huge. The FBD would start and we’d often have midweek challenges. There’d be games coming thick and fast from the first week of January. Yes, you’d still have plenty of killer sessions, but the monotony of it all was broken up with the matches.

You see it wasn't particularly that I didn't enjoy the hard training; it was more the sheer boredom of it and primarily the fact that there were no games coming.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that winter slog, every year, was hellish. The bit of craic with the lads afterwards was about the only positive to take out of it.

Thoughts of winter sessions on a dog track in Oran, or on the island at the Forest Park leave me with a dose of the oul PTSD.

I’m thinking back to what were probably still the early days in terms of S&C coaching and it was quite primitive (in many ways I think it still is). Back then it was still very much a mantra of ‘more is more’. Run further. Train harder. Lift heavier. More, more more. Rest and recovery was fairly low down the list of priorities.

When I say primitive, that refers to the players’ uptake on it too, as much as the coaches. We trained very hard alright, but maybe weren’t as smart as we should have been with our own recovery sessions and our own sleep and nutrition.

Anyhow, as you can tell, I had no great love for the pre-season stuff. I loved playing ball and so as this was a means to that end, I always bought in fully and gave it everything.

I’ll tell ye about the dog track in Oran. It was in John Maughan’s time in charge. Des Whyte, a great sponsor of the team over the years, had a hill in Oran on which he’d put a sand track for training greyhounds. Maughan loved the thought of this kind of training.

It was torturous stuff. The hill was about 300m long. I can still spot it across the fields every time I travel the main Roscommon-Castlerea road. It doesn’t exactly bring back fond memories.

The worse the weather, the bigger the smile on Maughan’s face as we’d arrive for training. Cars would be abandoned on ditch-side and in the farmyard on the way up to the track. 30 or so weary souls would trudge up there for 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. A few minutes of a warm-up and we’d be off.

Flat out up the hill on the right hand side. Jog back down on the other side. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat. One day to change things up we had to sprint up on the left hand side.

The mind goes to strange places in sessions like that. It’s all about survival. You don’t want to be the one who pulls out or who gets sick. I would have been one of the fittest in the group. I’d always look at some others and knew that they had to be struggling more than me and so that kept me going.

There’s still quite a strong school of thought out there that those killer sessions in pre-season are needed to build a stamina base and build character in a group. It flies in the face of a lot of what the science is saying and what the S&C coaches are looking for. They’d be fully against those dog track sessions.

I do see a place for it, though, in the right context. Sometimes, as coaches, we can over-coach and go too far in trying to make trainings enjoyable for players and to take the monotony out of it.

Those gruesome slogging sessions were character building. They helped build a deeper resilience in players. They were a form of sacrifice. Suffering and sacrifice are two of the easiest ways to build motivation. ‘If I’ve suffered through all those sessions then I’m really going to make sure it was all worth it when it comes to the games’.

As I say, in the right context they can be used, though maybe not as much as back in ‘my day’.

I never remember too much of a break. County would roll into club championship and there might be a few weeks around late September or October time where you’d be ‘off’ but the next pre-season wouldn’t be long in coming.

I rarely went on a holiday. Maybe during the club season if we’d a week off at some stage. Many would have said it was too much, that I needed to switch off more and give some focus to other parts of my life. But football was always number one and I was very tunnel-visioned.

There was one winter though that I remember thinking I needed a break. It had been a bad year for me on the pitch in terms of the level of my performances. I’d been very poor and I wasn’t dealing very well with that.

Then I broke up with the girlfriend. My head was all over the place. For the first time, I was inclined not to go back in to the county team.

I reckoned I’d call the manager and tell him I wasn’t sure I’d be able to commit and that I’d need a few weeks to sort things out myself. I needed to go away on a holiday and switch off completely from football for once. For every part of my life, this was an important decision that I felt I needed to make.

I rehearsed what I’d say over and over again in my mind. On the week leading up to our first session at the end of October I picked up the phone and said my piece.

He wasn’t having any of it and told me I’d have to be at training on Saturday morning. To be fair, he was a bit more detailed than that. He talked about the need to work through things rather than walk away from them. And he said he needed me in from the beginning if it was going to work.

I was there on the Saturday morning and I did work through it. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t take the break at that time. That led on to the best years of my footballing career under the best manager I had.

That experience is always in my head any time I hear of a player wanting to take a break from football now. Sometimes it is the right move for them, but not always.

Across the country now all the county teams are back doing some sort of pre-season. The slogging days aren’t what they used to be. Players have been saved by the science. The evidence just doesn’t support pushing players to extreme levels in training again and again. Occasionally, a coach will let loose and run his team into the ground, but it’ll be carefully planned to allow for extra recovery time afterwards and limit the chances of fatigue-induced injuries.

The S&C heads are winning that battle. The negatives of over-training are just too high. Still, I think even just one session out on the dog track could be worthwhile.

Top 5 training tips for the festive season

Sticking with the theme of winter training, here are a few ways managers can change things up at this time of year 

• Pool sessions: You can do some really tough pool sessions and the big advantage is there’s little or no impact on the limbs.

• Basketball training: Switching to a completely different sport for a few sessions can make training more enjoyable. Basketball is popular with coaches due to the large crossover of skills between it and football.

• Altitude training: This has long since been held to be great for improving stamina. There are companies offering the chance to do this in Ireland on bikes in specialised studios where they monitor and control oxygen levels, temperature, humidity and CO2.

• Athletics tracks: The change of venue is a plus and teams often also take the chance to engage the expertise of an athletics coach to focus on running technique and speed-work.

• Warm-weather training camp: Donegal were in the media this week on account of their big trip to Abu-Dhabi for a week’s training. A fantastic move for any team if they have the money!