| Starting the Olympic Season |
 I write now, just over a month into the new training season in what will be one of the biggest and toughest years of my life. In just over ten months, I will reach the climax of the last three years preparation by competing at the Olympic Games in Beijing. Between now and then I know there are going to hard challenges to meet and I am going to have to put my body through so much, but I’m ready for it and really excited that it is finally Olympic year.
Last season was a mixed one for our crew in many ways. I trained well through the winter, posting fast ergo times, lifting heavier weights than ever before and in April I won the final pairs trials with my partner Andy Triggs-Hodge in a record time. Having been re-selected for the coxless fours, we began the World Cup racing season.At the first World Cup in Linz, Austria the coxless four won gold in good style. From this position of strength, Jürgen Grobler, took the bold move of amalgamating our boat with the coxless pair and two others to form a second GB eight for the next world cup. The idea was that we have nothing to learn about our opposition from more races in the four so we relished a new challenge. It was a great experience; the change in training, crew and competition re-invigorated all of us, and was topped off when we managed to win gold, narrowly beating the original eight into bronze position. Having 18 British rowers on the medal podium at once, was a pretty unique sight! Within days of coming back from Amsterdam, my crew mate, Alex Partridge injured his knee which was a big blow to our development in the four. With an experienced substitute we won the Stewards’ Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta, in front of several people from the Royal Navy adding their voices to a great home crowd. Just one week later at the third world cup regatta in Lucerne, Switzerland, we suffered our first defeat in over two years of international racing coming home with a silver medal. It was a big reminder to never stop pushing in training After the world cup series we always go away on two long back to back training camps abroad; the training is brutal, the days long and we’re away from our wives and girlfriends but by this time all that matters to us is winning the World Championships. This year they were in Munich and we went there feeling prepared. Unfortunately, on the day of the finals, things did not quite come together as we had expected them to and despite giving it everything, the New Zealand crew rowed away to win, leaving us in fourth position, which was devastating. That feeling will not go away until I have another gold medal around my neck. As so many have said to us since the race; if we had to lose our winning streak at some point, it is better now than at the Olympics, but it is still a very painful experience. After Munich, I took a short holiday with my girlfriend and then at the beginning of October the whole squad went back to Germany for the first training camp of the season. Next month, I will be training in a single scull and the pair in the lead up to the 5km pairs trials in Boston, Lincolnshire in December. As the days get shorter and the temperature drops, the elements play a much greater part in making training tough, but already even at this stage in the season, each outing, a proportion of each day (and occasionally the night) is focussed on the Olympic goal; I will do anything it takes to win gold for Great Britain in Beijing. |
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