WATCH: How Leevale are building for the future with a new high-performance facility

Leevale Athletic Club will officially open its new high-performance facility later this summer, and club chairman Donal Murnane is understandably proud of their new training centre.

“Athletics is a very simple sport in some ways,” says Murnane. “Athletes will train outdoors, obviously, but what we can do indoors is technical training.

“I’m talking about pole vault, long jump, hurdles, work with the starting blocks, as well as our strength-and-conditioning work. All of that has gone indoors, so for our field events and technical events, we’re hoping this will give us a big advantage. It makes sense that coaching someone in the high jump, for instance, is a lot easier in nice, dry conditions compared to a dark, wet night outdoors. It’ll allow us to get into a level of detail that we haven’t been able to get into before.