ATHLETICS:When it comes to the 800 metres, David Matthews knows what he's talking about and he believes the perfect level of fitness for the Gaelic footballer these days is that of the 800 metre runner, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

MOST PEOPLE have probably made up their mind by now, but if you still can’t decide between Dublin and Kerry, and who really is going to win this All-Ireland, think of it as Usain Bolt versus Sebastian Coe.

“That’s what it’s going to come down to,” David Matthews told me this week, over a coffee on St Stephen’s Green. “I mean look, who would you rather have in your team?”

I was just about to answer, when he continued: “I know 90 per cent of people would go for Usain Bolt. But he would blow up after five or six minutes. The clever ones would go for Sebastian Coe. He’d be still there at the end, still running for the last five or six minutes, when the game is most likely to be won. Because the perfect level of fitness for the Gaelic footballer these days is that of the 800 metre runner. That’s the perfect combination of speed and endurance.”

Then he pulled out some stats, included the average distances the Cork footballers covered, in the 2009 championship.

“It was about 10km per game, around midfield anyway, of speeding up, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down, but rarely not moving at all, and the best preparation for that sort of running is 800 metres training,” he said, while I nodded in absolute approval.

Not everyone will be comfortable with the idea of two runners lecturing each other on Gaelic football, especially when one of them never played the game in his life, and the other only recently played a bit at junior level.

When we first sat down we’d actually laughed off the fuss about Dublin’s early morning training sessions, knowing as runners, we’d started that in school, and always considered it lazy NOT to train twice a day.

But believe me, when it comes to the 800 metres, David Matthews knows what he’s talking about. He’s still Ireland’s fastest man at the distance, our only sub-1:45, with the 1:44.82 he ran in Reiti in Italy, in September 1995 – about a week before Dublin last played, and of course won, an All-Ireland football final. (Yes, he hardly expected his record would last as long too.)

Actually our meeting wasn’t entirely coincidental: Matthews retired from competitive athletics in 2000, aged just 26, a little burnt out perhaps from running two Olympics, three World Championships, and eight other major championships in the space of seven years. He spent a few years working in banking and finance, then in the property business (who didn’t?), yet eventually realised sport and exercise was what he knew best.

So he’s set up his own fitness consultancy, having long practised what he wants to preach, and sees the modern Gaelic footballer as his closest ally.

“We’re all dished out with a limited amount of fast-twitch fibres,” he said, after ordering another large Americano. “No matter how hard you train, you can’t change that, not significantly anyway. But our physical, aerobic capacity can be improved greatly. That’s our speed endurance, and I still see room for the Gaelic footballer to take that to the next level.

“Let me put it another way. Most world class sprinters would beat an intercounty footballer in a short sprint, no problem. But any intercounty footballer would beat a world class sprinter over a mile, no problem.

“Then, if you put the intercounty footballer up against the world-class miler in a short sprint he’d probably beat them, but he wouldn’t have a hope of beating them over a mile.” At this point, by the way, even I was getting a little confused.

“Bear with me,” he said. “Now take an 800 metre runner. He would beat most intercounty footballers in a short sprint, no problem. And he’d definitely beat them all over a mile. There’s the crux of it. And what does it tell you?”

It tells me Matthews might be a little ahead of his time on this, but then in some ways he always was. When he first broke onto the scene in 1992, winning the Irish Schools’ 800 metres for Coláiste Chiaráin in Leixlip, he was quickly taken under the wing of Noel Carroll, at UCD, who instilled a deep philosophy not just on running but on life. By 1995 he found himself training in London with the renowned Kim McDonald crew, which included the great Kenyans Moses Kiptanui and Daniel Komen, and two years later was training in Australia with Sonia O’Sullivan, becoming one of her closest confidants.

Matthews also knew all about ice baths and core exercises and macro/micro training cycles long before they were ever heard of in the GAA, and in fact reckons he was the first Irish person to ever enter a cryotherapy chamber, when he travelled to Spala, in Poland in 2000 – about five years before Brian O’Driscoll made his famous trip.

But that’s in the past, and Matthews has few regrets about his running career, except that he might have retired a little early. In 1996 he also ran an Irish 1,000-metres record of 2:17.58, which again still stands, in 1998 he finished fifth at the European Indoor Championships in Valencia – although a major championship medal always eluded him.

After building his own house in Robertstown, close to where he grew up in Kildare, Matthews realised his competitive spirit was still burning, and the best way to channel that was join his local GAA club.

Robertstown were delighted with their new recruit, and although he ended up losing two junior county finals between 2007 and 2010, Matthews had become his own test case: his days as an 800-metre runner still had him extraordinarily well-conditioned for the demands of Gaelic football, even if he was a little short on the skills.

Since qualifying as a personal trainer, he found some first clients in the Irish Olympic Handball squad, a sport which about 10 years ago actually identified the 800 metre runner as having the perfect combination of aerobic and anaerobic capacity, or speed and endurance. They could hardly believe their luck when they found Matthews was available.

“I can’t tell people how to put the ball over the bar, or to score a goal in Olympic Handball. But I know about the happy medium between speed and endurance. Assuming skill, talent and football ability is the same, that they’d be the three constant parameters, I definitely see room for the Gaelic footballer to take that speed endurance to a greater level. I actually think they could be four or five years off reaching full potential.

“Even looking at my own county this year, Kildare, and the way they were still falling down with cramp, against Donegal, in extra time. That suggested to me Donegal were actually fitter, that there was room for improvement there, in Kildare’s speed endurance. Plus the longer you can be comfortable in the pace of the game the clearer your thoughts as well.

“One thing also I learnt from Noel Carroll, who was probably 20 years ahead of his time, was that every training session had to be for a reason, about progressing, always progressing, and always questioning why you were actually doing that session. Because knowledge might be king. But knowledge isn’t wisdom.”

This is true, and so is his knowledge that Kerry boast a couple more Sebastian Coes than Usain Bolts, at least compared to Dublin. Or at least I think that’s what Matthews said.