Running men: The secrets of Donegal's superb conditioning
Declan Bogue
WHEN JIM MCGUINNESS accepted the Donegal senior manager job, he hadn’t any time to lose.
He hadn’t anything sorted, simply because on the occasions he had gone for the job previously, he put the effort in and didn’t get it. This time, he didn’t need any effort, the board were calling him to say the job was his.
When he was a student at University Ulster Jordanstown, he shared a classroom with the former Ulster Rugby player and now Down strength and conditioning coach, Jonny Davis. In coaching terms, he had put the reps in. He understood physiology.
One week after the first team meeting, the panel reported to Dunfanaghy for training on a Saturday morning.
McGuinness tells the story in his autobiography; ‘That morning, we did a very simple fist-passing and kicking drill, but for one minute flat out. The whistle went after ten seconds. “Where are we at? Where are we at?”
‘Not one player said one hundred percent. So we went back at it and the ball was flying about and there were mistakes galore and they were cursing and getting frustrated and complaining that they couldn’t control the ball at that speed. Mistakes were good. After sixty seconds they were doubled over, red-faced, sucking in air.
“That’s good,” I told them. “All we need to do now is replicate that for another seventy.”
Then, he brought them for afters after an hour of football. They took off their boots and jogged the two kilometres to the beach. He announced they would be doing two sets of six sprints, that would last 400 metres.
‘There were no complaints,’ he would write. ‘But you could see it in the looks they exchanged: This guy is off his fucking rocker.’
By then, he had Letterkenny man Adam Speer as his Strength and Conditioning Coach. Speer is a gym owner in his home town and has competed in Triathlons, while he has also completed Iron Man events.
When Donegal were playing games in Clones, Speer would head off from his home sometimes before first light, and make his way there by his road bike.
In time, McGuinness would add other expertise to help his squad reach optimum fitness, such as Joe Gallanagh, formerly of Munster Rugby who was there for 2014.
It’s an element of Donegal that a great number of people seize on. Their aerobic capacity under McGuinness just appears to be on a different plane altogether.
The All-Ireland semi-final mauling of Meath was a case in point. You sense the Royals slightly threw their cap at the season once Oisin Gallen’s goal went in at the start of the second half.
But sending on a series of athletes looking to put in the perfect audition for an All-Ireland final place made them look – on a day of a heatwave – in peak physical condition.
When the Football Review Committee mentioned in public that they would be requesting the GPS data of county teams to make comparisons under the new rules introduced for 2025, they never had a chance of Donegal giving that information up.
At the heart of all they do is a level of secrecy. Promises of anonymity didn’t interest Donegal, and, why should they?
What we do know is what people are prepared to share.
In 2011, after they had beaten Derry in the Ulster final, Kevin Cassidy said this about the sessions that followed, “Jim’s warmups are unbelievable. You feel like dying in the middle of them. We might have warmed up with the ball for half an hour. Then we go into our sprints, eighty-metre sprints, 100 metre sprints, shuttle runs, cones on twenty yards either side of you and you have to sprint there and back.
“You have four men in a line and if there is more than a second or two seconds difference between the four men, you go again. There is no slacking off, there is no way out. It’s the hardest I’ve ever trained in my life.”
Donegal would also adopt the latest gadgetry. When they went training, they wore GPS trackers. Nowadays, GPS chips are worn in vests or in pouches sewn on players’ jerseys. They have been known to appear even in a club reserve championship fixture. But in 2011, they were revolutionary.
None of that is to detract from the deeply held belief in Gaelic Games that hard training bonds a team and is the best shortcut to confidence.
When McGuinness first came into the Donegal team for the 1992 season, they beat Fermanagh in the semi-final, but the players weren’t happy with their fitness levels.
In ‘Sam’s For The Hills’, the definitive book on Donegal football up to the mid-90s, James McHugh noted that his brother Martin said he had no intention of turning up to disgrace himself in another Ulster final.
‘We trained like dogs for a month,’ said Martin Shovlin.
‘Horses wouldn’t have done the training we did,’ said Anthony Molloy.
Trainings soon looked different. A 15-minute run would be a warm up. Four 800 metre runs, four 400 metre runs and six 200 metre runs would follow.
Occasionally, Martin McHugh himself would take a session that was dreaded by the others. Even he had his limits though.
‘We did so much running I was fucked and I cut inside a cone,’ the Wee Man said in the same book.
‘Barry Cunningham was coming after me. He told me it was my fault that we were doing this training and that I’d have to run around those cones the same as everybody else! We didn’t see a football for weeks.’
The value of hard work was an early lesson for McGuinness, but none of it was without method.
The thing is, that most strength and conditioning coaches all do similar courses of study. They intern at professional environments and soak up the lessons.
There is a culture of information sharing and they migrate through various jobs with frequency. As a result, there are few avenues left unexplored in this area.
Perhaps what makes Donegal a little different, and this has been referenced by Eamonn McGee recently, is McGuinness’ ability to convince players that even though they feel they have nothing left to give, they have more in them.
Nobody needs insider information for this. You only have to look at Karl Lacey, staggering around, out on his feet after Donegal’s extra-time win over Kildare in the 2011.
“From 2014 to 2020 or 2018 when I stopped playing, there wasn’t much change in the drilling, but it’s the way Jim can speak,” says Darrach O’Connor, who played under McGuinness, Rory Gallagher and Declan Bonner.
“It’s just different. It just removes nearly all doubt from your mind.
“I just think to myself, my own story, the injuries I had, I went from loving Gaelic, and then feeling like, ‘Just get through the session and don’t get hurt.’
“I know rightly, if Jim was involved with the management, he would have just eradicated that. He does it in a way that you don’t know he’s pushing you, if you know what I mean. It’s just, every run matters, every single drill matters, and there’s no slacking,” he continues.
“Whereas I think sometimes other managers will sit back and they’ll watch the drill for what they’re looking for, and they might forget about certain things, whereas he always just demanded 100%, and that’s not easy.
“But when you see him deliver it, it’s doing the simple things at an unbelievably high level.”
This year, Donegal’s conditioning has stood out. In the ten games they have played so far, it’s notable that they took and eventually overcame Armagh in extra-time. Rather than settle for a draw against Mayo, they pushed on for Ciaran Moore to shoot the winner.
In wins over Louth, the second half of Monaghan and against Meath, they appeared to be growing stronger throughout the game.
Is it something for Kerry to be spooked about? Maybe not. They themselves will certainly test just how fit Michael Murphy is, especially now that the noise around his physical challenges have been amplified.
But if the game ticks into the wee small minutes and doubts cross your mind, you just never know.
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