I was Head of Performance at Kintetsu for all six of Quade's years at the club. That means I've got all his match and training GPS from 2019, when he was 31, through to 2025, when he was 37. You don't often get six straight years of data on one elite player in the same environment, and I wanted to see what it showed. Part of that is professional interest, and part of it is that I was there for all of it.
First, what this isn't. GPS doesn't tell you whether someone is good at rugby, or whether they're doing the things that win games. I wrote about that in GPS Is a Receipt, Not a Target. I can't tell you from this how well Quade played. What I can show you is his physical output and his work rate, and how they changed as he got older.
There isn't a lot to compare it with. I couldn't find a study in rugby union that follows a player's match running as he gets older. The closest I could find is in soccer, where a LaLiga study of 154 players over eight seasons (Rey et al., 2022) had total distance falling about 0.6% a year. Distance is where that study starts, so it's where I've started too, and then I've gone a level deeper each time.
The short version is that his running in games didn't drop off. At 37 he was level with backs about ten years younger on volume and ahead of them on accelerations. Two things did come down: his high-speed running and his top speed in games.
What was the team doing in 2019 and in 2025?
Before reading anything into Quade's numbers I wanted to know whether the game around him had changed. Over those six years Kintetsu moved between competitions, changed coaches and changed how we played, with more kicking in some seasons and more running and passing in others. All of that moves GPS numbers. Wherever I could, I compared Quade with the other backs who played at least an hour in the same game. They had the same pitch, the same weather and the same opposition. I used the 43 league and playoff games where he played at least 60 minutes, and I worked things out per minute on the field.
The other backs' match numbers hardly moved between 2019/20 and 2024/25. They ran 78.5 metres a minute at the start and 77.0 at the end, and they covered about 6 km both times. The games were asking about the same of the backs in 2025 as in 2019, which makes it a fair place to measure him from.
Level one: how far was he running?
Distance and metres per minute are the first level of GPS. They're the numbers that get quoted after a game, and they're where I started.
In a typical one of those games he covered about 5.4 km at 31 and about 5.9 km at 37. At 31 he was about half a kilometre short of the other backs, because he was playing 68 minutes to their 79. By 37 he was playing the same 80 minutes as them and he was within about 90 metres of their distance.
Per minute it went about 79, 74, 79, 78 and then 75 metres. It moved around from season to season more than it headed anywhere, and the 75 in his last season is still higher than the 74 he ran at 32.
His median minutes in those games went 68, 69, 73, 76 and then 80. At 31 about one league game in six went past 75 minutes, and in his last season two in three did. That's a coach's decision and it depends on the scoreline, which is why I wouldn't use it as a fitness number. But a coach has to be happy to leave a 37-year-old out there.
The trouble with level one is that it averages everything together. A number like 75 metres a minute includes all the time standing around at scrums, lineouts and kicks at goal. It also says nothing about how often he had to stop and start. So I went down two more levels.
Level two: what happens when the ball is in play?
The second level is his running while the ball was in play, which was about 30 to 40 minutes of his game. We tagged the video for when the ball was live, and I lined those tags up with the GPS.
With the ball in play he ran about 119 metres a minute in 2023/24 and about 109 in 2024/25. The other backs ran about 111 and 107. Across all five seasons, his running with the ball in play stays within a few percent of theirs.
The number that did come down in his last season is his high-speed running with the ball in play, to about 70% of the other backs'. It had been low once before, in 2020/21, and he came back from that. 2020/21 was one of our best seasons. We had some outstanding coaches, we won our pool and we made the final. I think the lower number that year says more about other people doing their jobs and a clear way of playing than about his legs. A fly-half who kicks and directs more gets fewer long chases, and I'd want to see the video from his last season before I put that one down to age.
Level three: how often did he accelerate?
The third level is accelerations. For a fly-half that's a lot of the job: getting up into the line, stepping, stopping to pass and chasing back.
Counting hard accelerations and hard decelerations together, per minute on the field, he was above the other backs in every one of the five seasons. It holds with the ball in play as well. In 2023/24 he made about 3.9 a minute to their 3.1, and in 2024/25 about 3.3 to their 2.7.
Per minute has a weakness, though. Time at scrums, lineouts or standing in a defensive line counts against you even though you can't accelerate in it, so a stop-start game eats into the number. I find ADI, the acceleration density index, more relevant to the effort in his running. It's acceleration load per 10 metres covered, so time drops out. On ADI he was level with the other backs at 31 and above them in three of the next four seasons, by 7% and then 4% in his last two. In his last season he was above them in 9 of his 11 games.
The one that surprised me was what happened after the Achilles. His hard accelerations and decelerations went from 1.07 a minute before the injury to 1.22 after it, while the other backs stayed about where they were. 2023/24 was a hard season. We were in the top division and won one game out of 18, and when you're losing, key players try to do more and cover more ground. So I'm not saying higher numbers mean better rugby. But it shows the capacity was there at 35, after a serious injury, and he was doing more of it than the players around him.
Then I split out the backs under 28. On metres per minute he was ahead of them in two seasons, and in the other three he was never more than 1.6 metres a minute behind. On hard accelerations and decelerations he was ahead of them in four seasons and level in the other. On ADI he was ahead in four of the five, including his last.
What happened after the Achilles?
He ruptured it in Argentina in August 2022. The season before the injury he ran 78.5 metres a minute in games, and in 2023/24, his first full season back, he ran 78.1.
I ran the Japan end of his rehab, which makes this the part of the data I know best. He did the first seven months in Australia and came back to us in March 2023. The whole rehab was built around getting him ready for our two playoff games in May.
The strength came first. In February his operated leg managed 18 single-leg calf raises to a metronome, and by April it was 31. His calf strength on the force plates came up to within about 10% of the other leg.
The first proper running on GPS is 8 March, seven months after the rupture, with a top speed of 6.5 m/s (23.4 km/h). His acceleration came back quicker than his speed. On 13 March, when his top speed in a session was still about 6.1 m/s (22 km/h), his best acceleration was already 4.1 m/s², close to his harder sessions before the injury. The plan had him at 90% of his top speed by mid-April and 95% by the first week of May. On 3 May, nine months after the rupture and at 35, he hit 8.86 m/s (31.9 km/h) in training. That's about 98% of the fastest he'd run for us. He was at 8.8 m/s (31.7 km/h) or above on three different days that month.
The volume came up with it. In the week of 13 March he did about 430 metres of high-speed running, and six weeks later he did about 2,100, when the plan said 1,400. He was ahead of the plan every week in April. We pulled it back in the game weeks on purpose.
On 22 April he played one minute to qualify for the playoffs. On 7 May he played 37 minutes in the first game against D-Rocks, and on 13 May he played about an hour in the second. That day he ran level with the other backs, with the ball in play as well as across the game. He was above them on hard accelerations and decelerations, and he hit 8.27 m/s (29.8 km/h). He played well, and we won them both.
How hard was he training?
You can't get this from a game, and it's the part of his GPS I most wanted to see. I went through every training session on file, 526 in all. The hard rugby drills are things like transition, game flow, attack against defence and small-sided games. In those he ran 2% more per minute than the other backs at 31, and 2% less at 37. On ADI he was within 2% of them in every season. Those were the same drills on the same clock, and by the end the backs around him were about ten years younger.
I also counted the sessions where his best five minutes reached his best five minutes in a typical game that season. In his last season there were 31 of them, about one a week: 14 across 11 weeks of pre-season and 17 across 19 weeks of the season. The season before, there were 18.
That season we also tagged 30 sessions of 15v15 at game intensity, 288 short reps in all. He ran 129 metres a minute in them, against 109 with the ball in play in his games, and he was at or above that game number in 26 of the 30 sessions. The other backs in the same reps ran 125.
One session shows what that looked like. I've picked one of his hardest from his last season rather than a typical one. On Christmas Eve 2024, when he was 36, he did 104 minutes on the field: units, a skills rotation and then a 15v15 at game intensity, played as three blocks of short reps, most of them one to two minutes long. He covered 6.4 km, more than in a typical game that season. He played the first and third blocks. Inside the reps he ran 138 metres a minute in the first block and 130 in the third, and in his games that season he ran about 109 with the ball in play. His high-speed running in the reps was 18 and 23 metres a minute, against 17 in play in a game, and he hit 8.10 m/s (29.2 km/h).
What was his top speed?
The game against Kubota in February 2024 is the one I enjoyed. He was 35, about 18 months on from the Achilles, and he hit 8.85 m/s (31.9 km/h). That's level with his best league speed from the whole period, 8.84 m/s (31.8 km/h) when he was 32. I can't call it the fastest he ever ran, because he touched 9.15 m/s (32.9 km/h) very briefly in a pre-season game in December 2021.
His last season is the one that looks low if you only read the match numbers. His best in a game was 7.93 m/s (28.5 km/h) and he never got above 8 m/s (28.8 km/h). But a match only shows you what the game asked of him. A fly-half can go a whole game without a clean 40 metres to run into, and that's a different thing from not being able to get there.
In training that season he got above 8 m/s (28.8 km/h) in six sessions, and not only in straight-line running, because they included units and that 15v15. His best was 8.25 m/s (29.7 km/h) when he was 36, and he hit 8.19 m/s (29.5 km/h) a couple of weeks after turning 37. It's lower than the 8.85 m/s (31.9 km/h) from the season before. But at 31 the fastest I have him is 8.68 m/s (31.2 km/h), and across the six years that's a drop of 0.43 m/s (1.5 km/h). A training number isn't a proper speed test either. The 8.25 m/s (29.7 km/h) tells you he could at least do that, not that it was his limit.
So did he decline?
Not in the way you'd expect from a 37-year-old. On level one he finished within 100 metres of backs about ten years younger, and he was covering more than he did at 31 because he was playing the whole game. With the ball in play he kept pace with them. On accelerations, by the minute or by the metre, he was above them, and on ADI he was above them in both of his last two seasons. What came down was his high-speed running and his top speed in games, and even then he was still getting above 8 m/s (28.8 km/h) in training at 37.
This is one player across different competitions, coaches and game plans, and he's only in the data because he kept getting picked. My own view, and it's a view rather than a finding, is that the way he kept training is a big part of why he could still do this at 37. I watched him do it, and I don't think you stay level with backs ten years younger without it.
I should say that Quade and I built an app together called PRE SZN, and I'm not a neutral party here. His program, PRE SZN Elite, is in it if you want to see how he trains. The data here stops in May 2025 and the app came later, and nothing here shows what it would do for you.
If I were looking at an older player, I'd check which part of his running has actually changed before assuming all of it has. I'd look at his training before reading too much into a match top speed. And I wouldn't stop at level one.
All of this is Catapult 10 Hz GPS from October 2019 to May 2025: 43 league and playoff games where he played 60 minutes or more, and 526 training sessions. Every comparison is with the other backs who played an hour or more in the same game, or were in the same drill in training.