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The Start of Winter Training |
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This last month has seen the end of any residual warm sunshine from the summer and the start of the winter training season. Icy cold winds are an all too frequent presence lifting the mirror flat lake into an unrowable storm; the ever weakening sunshine does not rise until our second session of the day and rain and sleet has beaten our enthusiasm into near submission.
 November is the backbone of low intensity and high volume training. We have spent hours on the water and in the gym, day after day, improving our base fitness and with little to show for it but more confidence leading up to next month’s important selection trials in pairs. Every Wednesday, the squad of twenty-four guys has a tough performance test called “the half-hour”. We sit on a rowing machine pulling twenty strokes-per-minute for thirty minutes pulling as hard as we can for every stroke. This test is both respected and feared by all athletes and really separates the men from the boys. The benchmark for the top guys is 9000 metres, which is an average of 1 minute 40 seconds per 500 metres. Have a go at your own risk.
Training is going well and I am improving week by week but this really is “nose-to-the-grind-stone” time. By the middle of the month I had picked up my first small back injury from a heavy weights session. It was more annoying than a serious worry, but I still had to go through the proper medical chain to get checked out. Before the end of the day, I was back in the gym only on a “sick boy’s” static-bike rather than the rowing machine.
After ten days and a lot of physiotherapy, I was back into full training but not soon enough to attend the British Indoor Rowing Championships. I had to forfeit my place at this year’s event in Birmingham where a handful of our team’s strongest guys compete. My coach asked me to perform the gruelling 2000 metre, flat-out race five days later when I had fully recovered. I posted the fastest time in the team this season and beat my score from this time last year by five seconds. My coach and I are both very happy with that.
I am writing now from a high altitude performance training centre in the south of Spain; Sierra Nevada. It is day six of this eleven day camp. We are 2319 metres above sea level which makes breathing during exercise feel like you have a fistful of straws pushed into your mouth. We train four or five times per day, over six hours of work in total, on the rowing machine, lifting weights and in the gym. We eat seven-thousand calories of food and sleep for twelve hours. This is some of the hardest training we do in the season. Some people are counting down the days until we return to Britain. I say bring on day seven!
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