Tuesday night's Off the Ball on Newstalk featured an excellent interview with Laois hurler Cahir Healy.
The full back, who is a primary school teacher in London, commutes home regularly for games and training at weekends. He also trains on his own and with a hurling club in London during the week.
He told Joe Molloy and Colm Parkinson about his current regime.
Train with Robert Emmetts during the week, when they're training. They're a senior hurling club over here.
Two other nights a week, I rent out an indoor hall in a university I used to go to.
Bring a bag of sliotars and a hurl and work as hard as I can for an hour in there. Ger Cunningham gives me a programme of things to do. 20 yards from the wall I've got to get such an amount of strikes in such an amount of time.
So work the balls off myself, for the want of a better word, for an hour and go home then again.
This is something which he has been doing twice a week since January.
It does get difficult.
When you'd be halfway through a session and your tongue is beginning to hang out and you're getting tired and you don't have someone beside you.
You know yourself, in a game it was always easier to push yourself where you had to mark somebody. Because you're like, well if I'm not pushing myself he's going to be winning the ball and making me look useless. Whereas you're on your own, all you have is the voice in your own head. There's no Cheddar shouting at you, 'come on push it harder'.
The temptation comes into your head three quarters of the way through. 'I'm feeling tired, I could just blow it up now and no one would know'. You don't ever let yourself do it. The thought comes into your head and you've just go to kick it out as quick as it came in.
The reason for the interview, apart from it just being interesting to hear about the player's incredible dedication, was Laois's upset win against Offaly at the weekend.
Healy spoke about the dark days of Laois hurling, such as losing to Cork by 34 points, and how things have turned around under the stewardship of manager Cheddar Plunkett.
He also explained the culture change of the panel since Plunkett joined in 2013 which has precipitated progress. Along with the manager demanding more of the players, Healy felt it was the little things such as proper organisation of physio time so no one was late for training which made the differenc.
You can listen to the interview here.
Picture credit: Matt Browne / SPORTSFILE
