Athletes run in straight lines, or else around perfectly curved bends. Hurlers run in all directions, or else around broken circles.

Athletes run off neatly timed splits, mostly controlled by the finger on the stopwatch or their pulse. Hurlers run off randomly timed spurts, mostly controlled by the pace of the ball or their opponent.

Athletes never run one step more than they need to, because the finish line is exactly that. Hurlers never know how far they have to run, because there is no finish line, only the final whistle.

Why then would an athlete end up training a hurler how to run? Gary Ryan never planned to land himself in such a role, although he’s actually part of a growing trend: he also admits to being “the worst hurler you are ever likely to meet”, yet he’s clearly helped bring the Tipperary hurlers up to speed this summer.

The biggest test of that comes – again – with Saturday’s All-Ireland replay against Kilkenny, although Tipperary manager Eamon O’Shea has no doubt Ryan will have brought his team back up to the necessary pace.

Indeed O’Shea’s describes Ryan as a “hero of mine”, and for good reason: from 1995 to 2005 Ryan was undisputedly Ireland’s fastest man. O’Shea also describes himself as a “huge fan of athletics”, and back in 1992, attended the Barcelona Olympics to fully appreciate how good these top athletes actually were.

So, towards the end of last year, when looking for a new fitness trainer to inject a little more pace into his hurling team, he reckoned an athlete like Ryan was exactly what he needed.

Great knowledge

“I’ve known Gary for a good while, through our roles in NUI Galway, and knew he’d a very good knowledge of what makes elite athletes work,” says O’Shea. “Gary may not be any at good at hurling, but the game has changed a lot in terms of preparing teams, and the way players move. Gary has a great knowledge of all that, and he’s been ideal for us, really, he’s been excellent.”

As a cousin of their 1991 All-Ireland winning captain Declan Carr, Ryan did boast at least one Tipperary hurling connection, but otherwise he’s a pure athlete: a two-time Olympian (in 1996 and 2000), he won 16 Irish sprint titles and broke 30 Irish records, indoors and out. Other athletes have come into hurling similarly unqualified (David Matthews, still the Irish record holder over 800m, has been training the Cork hurlers for the last three seasons), and the first thing Ryan admits is that training hurlers how to run is a lot different to training athletes.

“There was definitely no point in me trying to apply what I was doing as an athlete,” he says, “because the specifics of hurling are very different. But if you understand the demands of the game, the stopping and starting, the turning, and the space they have to operate to reach maximum speed, and how often they need to do it in a game, you can develop a training programme around that.

“And good coaching is always a two-way interaction. So you can’t go expecting to tell everyone what to do. I’ve worked with other athletes, but it’s about testing yourself, too, and I’ve learned as much from them, I hope, as they’ve learned something from me.

“It helps too that Eamon wants to give the players licence to do their thing. So you’re allowed try different things. Some of them work and some of them don’t. And that’s the great thing. They want to learn and they want to try different things. They want to be exposed to different environments and different challenges. So it’s not about one thing that works, I can safely say that.”

Reluctant to compare

Ryan has briefly flirted with hurling before (spending a few weeks with Anthony Daly in Clare, in 2006, and also working with Thurles Sarsfields): still he’s reluctant to compare how teams of even 10 years ago compare to teams today, in terms of training, although he’s pretty sure Tipperary are operating close to their maximum.

“I obviously wouldn’t know what teams were doing say 10 years ago, but I think there’s a total understanding now that you have to put in the work to get any results, in any sport. And we do set them fairly high standards, and they work hard to meet them. I think, year on year, everyone is trying to get better so if you go back 10 years, there’s another 10 years of learning in there.

“One of the buzz terms now about ‘functional movement’. And GAA players are much better, functionally, than they used to be. I can also say the players are fantastic athletes. Whenever I set up drills or practices runs they’ve been really impressive, in terms of the times. Especially when you consider when I was an athlete our whole devotion was essentially that physical fitness component.

“Here, they have to fit in the physical fitness component along with the hurling component. They’re still spending most of their time on the skills of the game. Although I would never compare the fitness of an athlete and a hurler. They’re two sports, and they’re not the same. Although I don’t think they can do much more, from a training point of view. Because they effectively train like full-time athletes.

“Of course it’s still a result-driven business, and people’s view of whether a team is fit or not is often driven by whether they win or not. Which is not necessarily true. Because in terms of the players’ fitness I couldn’t ask any more from them, and they’ve all given it what they can.”

The results of which will be displayed on Saturday at Croke Park.