It’s astonishing to be a middle-aged man and to realise that despite your professional calling as a sports hack you have no real idea as to what exactly goes on at factory level in modern sport

IF YOU are nerdy and socially ill-fitting Halloween is just not for you. In fact, it is one of those holidays you come to dread. It’s like being Stephen Hawking trapped on a stag night in Temple Bar. It’s being the shy kid pushed out to stand on a biscuit tin and sing a song for the relatives while your voice is breaking and your cheeks are burning. Personally, I get more craic out of Good Friday.

You’d think the business of wearing masks and dressing up would numb a soul to the sheer social horror of it all, but my earliest memories of Halloween are of struggling with claustrophobia behind a too-tight plastic mask from Hector Grey while people behind me tugged the elastic which held the mask in place, yanking a good chunk of my hair with it, before letting the elastic fly back as a stinging rebuke to the presence of my ears.

And then the elastic would break and I would have to hold my mask up by the chin, which is quite humiliating when you are 17 and trick-or-treating.

Then, of course, there was the cringing, blushing awareness of how instantly obvious it was to neighbours that it was the geeky kid down the road who was at the door in his less-than-cunning disguise. Yes, hold on Tom, they’d say without fuss or fanfare, as if I was collecting the milk money. In those days for some reason (or perhaps – oh, the horror – this was just me) nobody said “trick or treat”. You knocked on the door and said “Help the Halloween Party” and then, beseeching, held out your little plastic bag into which an indigestible crab apple and a handful of suspiciously musty monkey nuts would be placed begrudgingly.

You’d turn to go, thankful they hadn’t asked with those crushingly theatrical adult winks and pitying looks if there wasn’t anybody else coming to your, ahem, “Halloween Party”. But just as you turned toward the gate you would hear the house-owner call out for somebody within to fetch the Mars bars and crunchies because a posse of cuter scamps was arriving, to be greeted with delighted cries of “Well, who have we here, Long John Silver and his hearties?” Bah.

All this, and then home for Halloween party games which I believe to have been the inspiration for some of the more celebrated tortures inflicted in places like Guantanamo.

So it was with heavy heart and massive trepidation I spent part of Saturday afternoon in one of the most terrifying places one could possibly spend Halloween. All the old memories and nightmares came flooding back.

A year ago Pat Reynolds had 40 head of cattle grazing on a field belonging to his father in Glanworth in east Cork. That surely was as nature intended. The animals would fulfil their destiny and play their part in the manufacture of milkshakes and burgers at the drive-through, the pinnacle of the modern food chain.

Pat ploughed up the land and now he has an assault course on the field and a gym in the house. And, as if that isn’t unnatural enough, the business seems recession-proof. People, instead of travelling for weekends in Frahiliana, apparently like to sculpt their physiques just in case the good times ever return and they see a beach again.

Pat has a large house fronting onto the road and it is filled with the shiny chrome of gym equipment along with the baffling array of blinking computer screens to monitor the effectiveness and general wellbeing of the user. The business is called, rather spookily, K2NY, which stands for Key to a New You, precisely the sort of intent-laden title which makes passing journalists more scared and squeamish than cattle milling about outside an abattoir.

Teams looking for something different by way of a training session come flooding to the assault course, especially now that winter is here, and it’s grand and muddy and all floodlit for the masochistic sickos. Inside the house of horrors there is every manner of machinery and implement for knocking weight off you and toning those bits of the human that as part of the evolutionary process are supposed to just flap and ache. If nature wanted us to be in places like this we wouldn’t have been given remote controls.

(By the way, having a gym spread through the rooms of a large house is an oddly comforting idea for those of us who, completely intimidated and ashamed, slouch past those gleaming, well-lit supergyms with their long rows of complicated equipment, each unit of which is being used by some self-confident Adonis sheened in gossamer-light sweat but conspicuously lost in the pleasures of his body and his iPod. Being able to go into an ordinary-sized room with two or three machines and an instructor in it seems like the way forward.)

It was odd and tiring being there watching other people sweat, because we had spent the morning in Cloyne and some time talking about how Christy Ring would arrive down to the field outside his house on a Saturday afternoon and hurl there amidst the scalping and the flaking until it got dark. He would do this irrespective of whether he was playing a Munster final the next day or a mere club game for the Glen.

That was then. The gleaming machines of K2NY and the assault course and the motivational speakers and the nutritionists and the monitoring, measuring and biophotonic scanning (like a little detector about what you eat and how you look after yourself and how much hospitality you offer free radicals) are what sport is about these days. A world away from the popular imagination.

This is the face of modern top-level sport, the sort of crucible where athletes are made and tested. With the GAA’s ban on collective county training in the last couple of months of a calendar year, some counties are staging an endless series of “trial” games, and almost every county has its players working in places like this with small platoons of consulting experts helping to get them perfect for the handful of top-level games which they will play in the heat of summer. They are doing this to their muscles and that to their body-fat ratio and following a programme of running, eating and weights.

And somewhere in somebody’s brain at the heart of a committee is the happy notion that every other county team will be turning up for duty yawning and pot-bellied sometime in early January. They’ll step put onto a muddy pitch slagging each other about how they wintered and the fine bit of frontage each has developed, and then a stern voice from the gloaming will demand four laps during the course of which there shall be much vomiting and weakness of the knees. God be with the day.

To stand in a place like Glanworth and listen to sports people talking about the cross-pollination of the ideas and expertise which goes on in modern sport, with drills and exercises and programmes being swapped from sport to sport and tailored and adapted in the process, is to realise that all the old bigotries and prejudices are redundant. Whatever game you watch and love has moved on and the players are minted and buffed in places like this. The hurler is borrowing and learning from the rugby player who might be on a programme adapted from the hockey player who took some ideas from a soccer session, and so on.

It’s astonishing to be a middle-aged man and stand amidst all that much machinery and monitoring equipment and realise you were born at the wrong time and despite your professional calling as a sports hack you have no real idea as to what exactly goes on at factory level in modern sport.

We moan all summer about the limited access we have to dressingrooms after matches and the inaccessibility of players. And there is so much that can be learned here under the bright lights.

It’s just the scary way those fit people eye you up when you wander in with your fizzy drink and Tracker bar which keeps you out.