It was a time trial with a twist as Fremantle’s first to fourth year players returned for the official commencement of the 2022 pre-season.
The traditional 2km time trial was replaced with four 1km efforts run on eight minutes, which were designed to test the players running intensity, according to High Performance Manager Phil Merriman.
New Fremantle recruit Jordan Clark impressed in his first official session at the Club, winning two of the runs, while Andrew Brayshaw won the remaining two.
Clark embracing everything Freo
Merriman said Fremantle would be focusing heavily on their running intensity throughout the summer.
“There’s a couple of reasons we’ve changed the time trial format,” Merriman said.
“For one, the players have been training hard with intensity over the off-season and the shorter time trial is an important measure of both aerobic speed and aerobic endurance. It gives us a bit of information on how players are recovering from effort to effort. That’s one reason.
“The other reason being is it’s a real mental grind and we want to test our players physically and mentally and you would have seen it, it was really tough.”
In addition to Brayshaw and Clark, other strong performers included Sam Switkowski, Caleb Serong and second year player Nathan O’Driscoll.
While rucks usually make up the numbers at time trials, the 203cm Lloyd Meek demonstrated his strong running capacity.
“Lloyd was excellent. He’s asked a couple of times for benchmarks for ruckmen across the competition and he would be right up there alongside the top running rucks in the competition with the times that he posted today,” Merriman said.
“We’re really happy with the way all the boys attacked their pre-season block. As I said, there’s been a big focus on intensity with our running and it’s something the players have never seen before. We want that to carry out in the way that we train. We want to train with intensity and purpose.
“So far we’ve seen that, even through we’ve only had one session. We want to attack each session with a great deal of purpose. That started in the off-season and it’s carrying through now.”
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