It’s time to think.
If someone asked who Dublin’s fittest player was, who’s the first name that comes to mind? Is it the extremely athletic James McCarthy? Probably the first to come to mind but you’d be wrong.
Is it personal trainer and gym-owner Philly McMahon? Nope.
How about the machine that is Diarmuid Connolly? Not him either.
Con O’Callaghan, surely?! He’s good at everything so it has to be him.
Con O'Callaghan's 2017 👑
All-Ireland club SHC 🏆
U21 Leinster football 🏆
U21 All-Ireland football 🏆
Leinster SFC 🏆
All-Ireland SFC 🏆
All-Star ⭐
Young Footballer of the Year 🏅
Dublin club SHC 🏆
Leinster club SHC 🏆That's a wrap 👏 pic.twitter.com/Hj777yDnuk
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) December 3, 2017
Nah, close but no cigar.
It’s not even recent retiree Denis bloody Bastick and look at the video of him cycling and doing pull-ups with the weight strapped to him.
The answer is surprising only for the fact that the player is not a regular in the starting team.
Shane Carthy is obviously a man who takes his fitness very seriously. Apparently, when it comes to all the fitness tests, there’s no-one to match him.
The St. Vincent’s player is teammates with Diarmuid Connolly when they go back to their club but one thing he has over Connolly is his fitness levels.
Paul Flynn was promoting Coca-Cola’s designated driver campaign during the week and spilled the beans on who we thought was the fittest on the team:
“Shane Carthy from Vincent’s often wins all the fitness tests,” he said.
“James (McCarthy) is very good. Dean Rock, Con O’Callaghan are very fit. Darren Daly is always up there in the fitness stuff, Ciaran Kilkenny too.
“There are different lads that excel in different areas but most of the lads would be quite similar but there’d be outliers too.”
Flynn also detailed the amount of training that the Dublin team do and it’s nearly like a second job being an inter-county player:
“We’d do maybe one gym, two pitch and then the weekend. We’d usually have a game or a session, one or the other,” he explained.
“Usually four (a week we’d get together). The ladies would be four or five, there’d be a trust now amongst our team now that you’d do a fifth day on your own or even a sixth. They sometimes do them collectively so they might do five days.”
No wonder they’re all so bloody fit.
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