Elite U23’s Squad Training & Development Weekend 2/3 Dec 2006

Last weekend’s training and development camp took place in Donore Co. Meath and was organised and kindly subsidised by the Leinster Branch of Triathlon Ireland. Heading the camp was: Murray O’Donnell from New Zealand, who has close to 20 years of experience and success in coaching New Zealand’s junior triathlete’s, Neil O’Brien, a medical toxicologist and nutritionist from Beaumont hospital, Neal Bryne, a Sydney Olympian and massage therapist, and Carl Peterson, a sports physiologist from the sports performance centre. There were 8 athlete’s present for the weekend: from Pulse Colin Bolger, Neil Bolger, and Darren Hughes, from 3Dtri Colm Cassidy and Tim Downing, from Belpark Enda Gallery and Niall O’Briain, and from Riverview Donal Bailey.

This training camp for our junior elite athletes was organised to assess all of our potentials and to give us guidance and some sort of structure to our training so that we can hopefully progress into that elite group of athletes on the world stage, and most importantly belief in that you can excel if your willing to work for it. Being coached by someone as experienced and influential as Murray was definitely an eye-opener of the training and dedication we need to succeed at international level.

We all arrived on Saturday morning raring to go, except for Casso, the guy has the navigational skills of a blind man, he ended up in Drogheda! The training started with a pool session in the new local pool, and was a freestyle session specific to what we need to be doing as triathlete’s. The bike spin at midday was relatively short, about 50km, but as with the swim session it allowed Murray to assess our strongest and weakest disciplines.  We had our fair share of punctures (Colin likes bouncing into pot holes!) but it was still at a good pace. After lunch, we had a run, approx. 10km, a warm up followed by farthleg and some pace work to see if we could handle injections of pace, similar to what would happen in a break during a race (Murray can run for an oul fella!). The Sunday swim was again a freestyle session, and from my experience in swimming, it hit the nail on the head as to what we should be doing, I haven’t worked that hard in a long time. We finished the session with relays which reminded us that sport is also about having fun, otherwise why bother?

Carl Peterson took us for a strength training session in the gym straight after the swim and showed why this type of training is also essential for making better athletes of ourselves (it hurt like hell!) Due to the horizontal rain and high winds we had a spin session on the turbo’s at the hotel. We were told how important these sessions are, how beneficial they can be to our training, and how to do them properly.
 

Throughout the weekend we had lectures on nutrition, how to train properly, sports physiology and all eight of us had a one-on-one talk with Murray. This entailed basically where we wanted to go, what our ambitions were, our commitment to training, fitting this into our lifestyles and how to balance life as a triathlete. Murray has a straight up attitude to everything and says it as it is, he was very honest with us on his opinion of us over the short two days, what he thought of our abilities and how far he thought each of us could go. I have to hand it to the man and I speak for all of us lucky enough to have him at the weekend that his influence motivated us to get our backsides in gear and go about achieving our goals. Murray is going to keep in touch with all of us over the coming months leading to the start of race season and help us with our training. This experience of having a triathlon coach, as opposed to having 3 different coaches for each discipline, is new for all of us

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Neal Bryne rowed for Ireland in Sydney 2000. He gave a talk on what its like progressing from a junior to senior elite athlete, and his experiences and hardships that came with such a big step, how to handle the pressures and set backs that can happen and to trust in what you do, and do it for yourself. He also got rid of all the aches and pains from 2 days with the “slave driver” from NZ!
 

Neil O’Brien was the mammy for the weekend, cooking for us with Neal’s help, and making sure we were fuelled and eating properly for the training that we were doing. Special thanks to the two of them, it was much appreciated. (I still have some ironing Neil if your get some free time!)

On a serious note, that weekend is exactly what the development team of Triathlon Ireland need to be organising to help young athlete’s such as ourselves with the potential of representing our country at international level. We can only do so much off our own backs and get so far. We may succeed at national level, but for some of us, that’s not enough. We need people like Murray, Neil, Carl, Neal and Triathlon Ireland to help us progress that extra bit further and achieve our goals. Irelands rugby squad is ranked no.2 in the world at present behind New Zealand. The IRFU put a huge amount of time, training and funds into the development and success of our national side and look what it has done for the current team. This of course hasn’t happened within the space of a year or two, it’s been happening progressively for years. New Zealand and Australia have had a triathlon development program running for over 20 years! We have to start a development program for our sport in Ireland if we want our athlete’s to succeed, it will also keep them training at home if the facilities are available and save them from going abroad.
To be honest I felt like a pro last weekend. Being coached by the hugely experienced Murray, being fed by a nutritionist, and having a massage therapist and sports physiologist at our disposal, these are the things that make elite athlete’s succeed. People were even taking our pictures at the pool because they new of what we were training for. Excuse the immaturity, but that was cool! Of course we cannot have this VIP treatment all the time but having weekends, or even a weeklong course like this every now and again, would unquestionably help in our goals to succeed and would pave the way for the growth and success of Triathlon in Ireland. If this were successful, think of where we could be in a few years time? Or less…

To finish, I would to thank all the coaches for a weekend that we all took so much from and the Leinster branch of TI for organising it, and to the other lads as well for a great time and enjoyable two days. I look forward to the next weekend in February/
March.

Best of luck in training,
Darren Hughes.