By Brian Murphy

---

In September 2005, Joey Boland was just a few days into a course in DIT that was supposed to lead into a career in quantity surveying when he fractured his leg playing a minor club hurling championship game for Na Fianna.

A dual minor of considerable repute with Dublin at the time, he was told by doctors he wouldn’t play hurling or football for another nine months.   

Ironically, it was a broken leg that led him down the road to becoming a physiotherapist.

Had he not spent the next few days lying in a hospital bed, there is every chance he would have taken a very different path in life, but the time out from a hectic sporting schedule gave him the space he needed to make the decision to repeat the Leaving Cert.        

“I went into the Institute in town with a broken leg. In and out on crutches for most of the year. I put the head down and studied,” he remembers. “My brother is a physio so I put Physiotherapy in UCD down first and it just happens that I got the points for it.

“Once you get into a course like that you are surrounded by high achievers and you pick up really good habits. Then you get a passion for it. I think people who are passionate in general find something they like and become passionate about it.”

He added a Masters in Sports Medicine from Trinity to his C.V. and then served his time working in private practice before launching his own business last summer, a crucial strand of his story we’ll return to later.     

All the while, Boland was playing senior inter-county hurling for Dublin.

However, working as a physio while pursuing an elite level sporting career at the same time can be a complicated business, even for someone as methodical as Boland.                               

At the end of the 2014 season, Boland, just like Dublin hurling, was at a crossroads. His form was that of the team’s in microcosm.

He was taken off at the start of the second half of the 12-point Leinster final defeat to Kilkenny and failed to make the starting team for the All-Ireland quarter-final, a 13-point loss which proved to be Anthony Daly’s last game in charge of the county.

It was then, after a dispiriting season, that Boland decided to push the boundaries, and to push himself, physically, to a point from which he struggled to return.  

He started making regular appearances on the running track in Santry Stadium, doing sprint sessions designed to make him quicker.

At the same time he developed an interest in Mixed Martial Arts. Through a combination of curiosity and a desire to improve his knowledge of the sport, by then booming in the wake of Conor McGregor’s success in the octagon, he took up kick-boxing and then Muay Thai, a distilled version of the sport often referred to as ‘The Art of Eight Limbs’.

“Like any athlete or like any player you are constantly trying to improve because if you don’t push the boat out you are going to go backwards because everyone else is getting better,” Boland explains.

“As you get older you feel you have achieved this or are really good at that – hurling, movement, reading of the game are my good aspects - but I wanted to get a little bit faster and to improve my tackling.

“The speed came from the track work and the tackling from Muay Thai, which is a combat sport, and improves your ability to read peoples’ movements. You’re just trying to get the extra edge.

“I got into it quite a bit, both kick boxing and Muay Thai, in Dublin for a few months. I started to like it so much and started to get quite good at it. I found it enjoyable because it was something different.

“I really like doing fitness work, but at that stage I had six or seven years of hurling and running under my belt and I needed to freshen things up.”

Initially, his interest was mostly down to a sense of professional obligation to potential clients. With the MMA boom, a new market was opening up and he wanted to be at the vanguard when it inevitably exploded.    

“I could see that Mixed Martial Arts was getting big in Ireland and I wanted to talk the lingo of somebody involved if they did come in to me. The decision was half professional and half hurling/athletic.

“For example, if you want to run a marathon and you see a physio and they have never run a marathon or don’t have a clue about anything to do with marathons, you are not going to be that confident with them, are you?”

He got into Muay Thai so much and improved at such a rate in a few months, he made the decision to travel to the home of the sport, Thailand, in late 2014, where he took part in a couple of training camps without ever actually stepping into the ring for a fight.    

“I would be killed stone dead,” he jokes.

Throughout his time in Thailand, Boland hardly wore a pair of shoes. Training, which included lots of jumping and plyometric bouncing, was done bare-footed, and in his down time he wore flip-flops in the oppressive heat. 

“When you’re in shoes, your heel is an inch off the ground but when you drop your heel an inch to the ground it lengthens the tendon because it is under that bit more stress and it takes time for the body to adjust. If you are overdoing it and training twice a day it catches up on you. 

Looking back now, Boland thinks there may have been an underlying weakness in his Achilles, which when combined with running on a track, playing a few casual games of astro turf soccer with friends and all the time spent in his bare feet in Thailand, simply placed the tendons under too much stress.

The diagnosis was Achilles Tendinitis in both feet.

“If you go to the back of your Achilles and you squeeze with your index finger and your thumb you are going to feel severe pain. It’s not too bad until you touch it or for your first minute and then it warms up and goes away,” he explains.

“Then, two weeks later it takes five minutes to warm up and then it disappears. Sometimes it can get to the stage where it’s 15 to 20 minutes, but then it gets to the stage where it comes and goes in training sessions.

“Say I am marking you and I want to burst five yards and the first few steps are sore, eventually your brain tells you to slow down and it stops you bursting quickly.

“You also have the fear of snapping your Achilles and once you do that there are not too many people who come back.

“The most horrible thing is you play a match and take painkillers – I was taking them for a few months – and you get through your matches, but you get out of bed at six in the morning and you literally have to hobble and you can’t put any pressure on it.

“It gets to the stage where it is impacting too much on you and you fear for your long-term health. That’s the point where you put your hand up and say I need a break.”   

Putting your hand up and up and conceding defeat to a niggly injury is not easy. Especially when you are coming off a disappointing season; when you have invested so much in a new training regime and when you are hoping to make an impression on a new manager, Ger Cunningham having replaced Anthony Daly at the end of the 2014 season. 

Understanding the science behind an injury doesn’t necessarily make accepting your fate any easier. The clinical, scientifically trained mind of a physiotherapist and the sensitivity of an elite athlete are in constant confict.

“I purposely went to different people (physios), turned my mind off and accepted their rehab programme and protocol because as a physio and an athlete you are not going to make the correct decisions for yourself,” he says.

“A doctor won’t diagnose himself; you turn a blind eye and put your head in the sand. That’s why I had to get a road map to recovery. I stayed on it as best as I could but the odd time I would jump off it and do my own little thing.

“At some points last year we were trying to rehab the Achilles but I would overdo the rehab, try and come back too quick and it would be sore again. 

“It’s a case of sticking to what the physios say. Eamonn O’Reilly and Colm Fuller, the Dublin physios, looked after me and obviously I had conversations with other people, experts in the field, but at the end of the day, looking back, it was all my own fault.

“I was pushing myself too hard, not giving it rest, and jumping around on it when I shouldn’t have been jumping around on it.

“When you are an athlete and you are in that position you constantly put things to the back of your head and make decisions on the spur of the moment. But if I didn’t do that and if I didn’t have the type of personality, I wouldn’t be the player I am.”

  

Down through the years, Boland has fractured his leg, dislocated both shoulders and broken a metatarsal bone in his foot. All impact injuries. All injuries that are common place in an aggressive, contact sport such as hurling.

Broken bones heal. In most cases, an athlete completes a standard period of rehabiltation and returns to play within the prescribed timeframe.  

With non-contact injuries, there are no such guarantees.    

“It’s very, very frustrating and demoralising because you would be better from the outside looking in if I fractured my leg and I’d be back in three months. You’d nearly rather the fractured leg,” he admits.

“With a dislocated shoulder you’d be back in two months, whereas when you have a niggle in your Achilles you can’t predict when you will be back because it’s hard to know how bad it is.

“From a psychological and social point of view it can be difficult for players. Some people would rather do their cruciate because people will know you are injured for a year and you can’t play. With niggly injuries it’s often harder.”

The injury cost him most of the season. He missed the entire League and only returned to training in mid-summer, making his comeback in a chaotic All-Ireland Qualifier against Limerick in Thurles.

“I was like a fish out of water,” he says of the experience.

Boland started and finished the All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Waterford, but once again it was like an out-of-body experience. After all the hard work he had done in training and then the frustrating rehab, it left him with a deep sense of dissatisfaction at the end of a season for the second year in a row.

On top of the injuries, his professional and sporting lives had been on a collision course for some time.

With a demanding day job as a physio and an inter-county career that, because of his driven nature, demanded he gave everything of himself to his sport, it felt like something had to give.  

Just 27 at the time, he began to wonder if that was the end of the road for him at inter-county level.

He had already given nine years to Dublin hurling. He was there when the first shots of the Dublin hurling revolution were fired, lining out at midfield in the 2005 Leinster minor final win over Wexford, and was a mainstay of the senior team midfield and centre-back throughout the Anthony Daly adventure.  

Of the team that started in his debut game against Wexford in the Leinster Championship semi-final on June 9, 2007 at Nowlan Park, himself and goalkeeper Gary Maguire are the only men still hurling at senior level for Dublin.

“When Tommy Naughton called me up to the panel eight or 10 years ago (2007) there was a load of builders, brickies and plumbers, but as the years went on they dropped off,” Boland recalls of his first few years on the panel.

“I remember Ronan Fallon used to leave a building site at six o’clock to be in Santry for seven and he would have been on the site since 7am and then trained. It was insane and it can’t be done nowadays.”

In the nine years since the start of his, the game itself and Dublin hurling had been transformed.

In the days and weeks after the Waterford game last July, his head was full of questions.    

“You have to make available the time to play senior inter-county hurling,” Boland continues. “You are talking the guts of 30 hours a week and I don’t think I would like to hang around the panel at 28 not doing that because then you just know you could be doing way better here.

“Do I have the time to do this? I know for a fact I have the hunger to play and I really enjoy it. College students, the people with time on their hands, are really excelling at the sport.

“I am the type of person who likes to achieve highly. I like to do everything well so if I’m studying I will try and do it well and if I’m a pyhsio I’m going to try and be the best physio I can be.”

That, essentially, was his dilemma. Could he do both at a level that would satisfy the standards he expected of himself?

The solution he found says alot about his character. Instead of compromising both or ditching one, Boland decided to take the matter into his own hands and opened his own physiotherapy practice in Dublin city centre last June.

He took over an existing practice, Functional Training Ireland on Upper Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin 2, which focused mostly on personal training, rebranded it as Sports Physio Ireland and switched the focus back to physiotherapy.   

“You worry if you are ready for it and if it’s the right decision because it’s a huge amount of work to take on and you have to throw everything into it,” he says.

“My aim was to get the company working really well and efficiently enough to work normal hours and to be able to then commit to go back playing county hurling or whatever it is.

“If it was the case that I thought I wouldn’t be able to do it, you would simply have to stay back because you can’t let your business suffer.

“The fact that you are not working for anyone else and once you are on top of your schedule, and you are there every Sunday evening doing it out for the week, means it generally works out alright.

“In fairness to (Dublin manager) Ger Cunningham and the lads there’s three key things: family and partners, work and hurling. They all intertwine. If there is a family issue there is no problem missing work or training and if there is a big work issue they don’t mind you missing training.

“If something comes up in hurling, you’ll go out of your way to change it, but in fairness to the guys they are six weeks ahead of schedule. There’s no excuses this year.”

In an era when we are repeatedly told that it is almost impossible for an inter-county player to have a meanignful professional career, Boland’s testimony proves otherwise.

He lives by a schedule these days, but he’s busy making it work. His day starts at 5.30am, he gets a gym or rehab session done before breakfast, answers his emails and then sees clients and attends meetings before lunch, and will try and work a power nap in if he can find the time.    

On training days, he’s out of town by 3.30pm, home by four, relaxing and preparing mentally for a session, be it in the gym or on the field. Little things like having a permanent parking spot close to work and having a prepared gear bag stashed at work or in the car help.   

“As soon as the session is over, I am out of there, no hanging around. Hopefully I’ll be home for 9.30pm or 10 o’clock. Max seven hours’ sleep. Not ideal, but it has to be done,” he says.

“I don’t find it exhausting because I think I am used to it. We have facilities inside to have a nap so if I feel the need to lie down for 20 minutes to half an hour during the day I do. I might even get to the hurling wall in the middle of the day.”

It all sounds exhausting, but Boland loves the challenge of trying to make all the pieces fit.

“When you are running your own place, you don’t actually mind getting up at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning or seven on a Saturday to do two to three hours’ admin and then tip off to training. I actually enjoy it,” he continues.

“I love the buzz of being busy. I don’t think that I would like to be sitting at home and just having hurling to think of or to just have a job and that’s it and that’s all I think of. I like mixing the two and seeing if I can be on top of everything. I enjoy the challenge of being efficient.

“They say at home that I just can’t sit still. If I have half an hour to 40 minutes spare, I’d be gone to get in a quick puck session or I’d be gone for a coffee with the laptop to get some work done.

“I hear people talking about box sets and I think in my head, ‘when do people get the time to watch them?’ I get home at half nine, having been gone all day, and I’m dead.

“Saturdays are made up of a bit of work and a bit of training and the time I do have spare I want to either meet my friends, spend time with my girlfriend or just watch a soccer match.”

It’s not the life everyone would choose, but it works for him and all the pieces have their place.

Four weeks into a the new year and so far it’s working well. Having played at midfield or in the half-back line for most of his career, he’s found a new home at corner back and has hurled consistently there throughout the Walsh Cup.

On Saturday night, there’s an early season taste of the big time when Dublin take on Wexford in the Walsh Cup final at Croke Park (5pm). Injury free and back playing regularly, Boland is just dying to get stuck in and to see where the rest of the season takes him.

“To be honest, last year seems like I had no real impact at all. I feel like I have miles left on the clock if my body allows me to do it and if I get fit and healthy. I’m curious to see if I can get back to a good level, say to where I was two or three years ago when I was injury-free and we were playing games regularly.

“But when you have been away from that high intensity game for a year then you question yourself. ‘Jesus, do I have the ability to get back here?’ That’s why you want to put in the 30 hours a week – to be able to say when you do finally hang your boots up that you gave it your best shot.

“Last year, when I was injured, I didn’t want anything to do with it. I found it very hard to turn up because when you seem so distant and far away from the game you question can you ever get back there. You start to hate the game because of that.

“But then you go back into it and you start enjoying it. It can come and go and it has come and go over my career. We’ve had some really good runs at stuff and we’ve had really bad losses and you literally can’t look at a hurley for months.

“I suppose that’s the roller-coaster ride we’re on. It’s been a constant in my life for a long period and I think it will be in my life for a while yet.”

Dublin face Wexford in the Bord Na Móna Walsh Cup final at 5pm in Croke Park next Saturday. The game is followed by the meeting of Dublin and Kerry in the Allianz Football League, which throws in at 7pm.