Brian Hurley isn’t exactly a man who can’t withstand a bit of pain or trauma.
A specialist told him he was built like a rugby player, for God’s sake. What happened to him wasn’t coming, it was barely even logical.
And, still, on July 2nd 2016, one of Cork’s brightest stars had his football career flipped upside down.
During an in-house game in CIT, Hurley suffered a freak injury when his hamstring ripped completely from his bone. His left leg slipped and the right didn’t budge and the frightening forward was forced into a splits position as the muscle was torn completely.
He looks back now and sees that he was probably overdoing it at the time but the scariest thing about it all is that there were still very little signs. On the day of that in-house game for Cork for example, he said he wasn’t even tight.
“I was hopping the week before, I thought, in training. We were having an A v B game and for whatever reason I was on the B team and I was a bit frustrated,” Hurley gave an absolutely wonderful interview on The GAA Hour.
“I was hitting the gym during the week and I was probably overdoing it. I was doing an extra bit myself and I suppose I was trying to lift everything all around me that week just to show I was flying it and that I felt good and all this.
“I can remember I was doing very heavy weights on a deadlift. I remember logging into my phone that I was tired and my hamstrings were feeling it on the Thursday and Friday – it was the Wednesday night I did it [deadlifts]. Then we had the A v B game on Saturday morning and I remember Paudie Kissane, the strength and conditioning coach, asking me how the hamstrings were.
“I said they were perfect – I didn’t know any more. I felt good.
“10 minutes into the game, I went to take on two lads and my right leg went one way and my left leg went to plant but it just slipped out and I heard ripping and the pain was unbearable. I knew I was in serious, serious trouble.”
So he started looking at why this happened as he faced eight months on the sideline recovering from a horrific injury.
“I was wearing a GPS and my speeds were down from the previous week with fatigue in my muscle,” Hurley explained.
“I just went into a point that I couldn’t come out of – the muscle itself was tired and it just gave in.”
There’s no accounting for rotten luck either though.
That was never better demonstrated than what happened to Hurley just last month.
He finally got back from injury, he had played 20 minutes against Ballincollig in a club game, he was going ‘all out’ in A v B games trying to work himself back into the Cork reckoning and then it happened all over again.
Hurley said that he ‘had never felt better’. He was lighter, he was flying, and he was playing another club game after four weeks of flat out work. Then it happened all over again.
“I went down to pick up a ball and I felt something so I popped it off. It felt like something had cramped – it wasn’t even sore, it was just a weird motion.
“The physio came on but, to be honest, I was just so frustrated, I wasn’t having the best of games so I was a bit pissed off and just wanted to get going again so I jogged around for about a minute and a half then won a ball, turned around and then just heard pop, pop, pop and I knew straight away…”
This man’s story is honestly unbelievable but how he is dealing with these setbacks is incredible. Give this interview a listen to from 37:20 below.
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