2010 European Tour: Quick Update

Hello All.

My first trip back on the international rowing scene was not at all like my last one in 2008.  Although the trip promised many great things, it was cut short quickly.  As you can see from the picture of Terry talking to us after we were knocked out of Henley by the USA – we looked good.  To compliment our uniform, Oakley sent us each a pair of racing Radars and each a pair of casual sun glasses.  Of all the perks of being an under-payed athlete, having a good relationship with Oakley has to be the best!  Thank you Pat!  One of the new guys in the boat must have told me every other day of the entire tour just how much he loved his new glasses.  It blew him away that the Oakley Radars didn’t fog up on him.

Henley turned out to be a bit of trouble as I got quite ill.  A few days before the races started I was hit hard by Campylobacter jejuni, something associated with traveling in Mexico.  I was knocked out with blood for diarrhea and yellow bile for vomit.  It was wonderful.  Somehow I managed to pull through, however, there was one point that I was certain I was having a seizure in the middle of the night.  It was just my body shaking from the chills of my high fever.

The city of Lucerne is always a place of peace; even in the bustle of the World Cup regatta.  There has not been a year that I have been around the regatta with so many entries though.  It seemed like every other event had quarterfinals, which is generally reserved for only the men’s and women’s singles.  This is a result of being the last race for three months heading into the late world championships this November.  In the 4- we were only two boats away from quarters.

The field was tough, and we were only a few seconds away from making the final.  Momentum is such a critical element in events like Lucerne, and we kept having ours interrupted.  Over the entire trip we had less than 10 workouts in the line-up that we raced in.  Including the races themselves, we boated the line-up less than 20 times the entire trip.  The field in the 4- is amazing too, so to have any disadvantage in big trouble.  I watched the A-final of the event live on Eurosport, and it was amazing to watch.  Next time I will be in it!

Dave

Royal Henley Regatta

If you could imagine stepping back in time, depending on where you look, 20 years, 50 years, some glances even 100 and more years. This is a time-warp regatta that can boggle an athlete’s mind much the same way the “Olympic Spotlight” can – only Henley’s older. There is a brief and interesting history of the regatta and the course on their website, but here are the nuts and bolts of what you need to know:

1. Two boats face-off against each other, winner takes all, moving to the next round of races until a champion is crowned;
2. The course is 2112 metres long and is rowed into the stream, so the race becomes very long in a headwind or after a decent rain;
3. There are wooden booms chained to pillars that have been pile-driven into the river bed every 20 metres or thereabouts. If you hit the booms you are screwed – if you hit a pillar you are injured;
4. The regatta is very popular with rowers, so many schools, clubs and countries come – but it is also a cultural experience because the regatta is also part of the British social class system. There is a huge cost to get into the “Steward’s Enclosure”, but then there are dress expectations once you are inside the enclosure. Men: Pants, Jacket and tie – don’t take that jacket off! Women: Dresses – nothing that divides your legs, and the dress must go past your knees. I thought that there was also a hat expectation, but it appears that hats are an optional sideshow.
5. As popular as the regatta is to rowers, there is no loud cheering allowed. Clapping only from the Steward’s Enclosure.

Anyway, the first time here was with Brentwood College School in 1996.  Tony and Yvonne Carr coached (and mothered) us to the Princess Elizabeth Cup.  My second time was with Canada (UVic and VCRC) in 2003.  Mike and Anne Spracklen coached (and mothered) us to the Grand Challenge Cup.  Now, in 2010, with Canada (Shawnigan Lake and VCRC) Terry Paul is coaching us in the Steward’s Challenge Cup.  Our first round was against Argentina.  We advanced and face USA (Princeton T.C.) today at 5:10 PM over here – 9:10 AM in Victoria.
Well, wish me luck! And if you’re up you can always listen to the race on the internet!
Dave

Vancouver, February 11, 2010

http://photography.rumoncarter.com

I woke up this morning and got my first workout in right away!  Thanks Rachel for the motivation.  I had to go for a run though because the ‘gym’, and I use that term loosely, was full at the hotel.  I ran past the Heiniken House and then past the Olympic Oval.  Then I came in and jumped on the elliptical machine for 25 minutes.

On my run I realized just how close to the UBC Boathouse I was.  I could be there in less than 10 minutes if I ran there directly.  I’ve put a call into Ben to get the access codes.  Now I can stay erging!  Great news.

I’ve spent most of the day working at the OGS office again.  There are many BC Public Service in their blue jackets around.  Rumon Carter is covering it all for the Province on-line and took this picture.  

It’s so hard to have to look up for each screech as someone new jumps off the zip-line tower. 

Tonight I am heading over to a private dinner for the athletes involved with the Coca Cola, Clean Air Champions and Project Blue Sky Athletes’ Village environmental activation.  It is being hosted by Rob Safrata, Alpine Skiing from the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics.

Although the games are only 1 day away from starting, my day count is really set at 18.  There are only 18 more days until I start my 2010 campaign!

Dave

Vancouver, February 10, 2010

What a great day it was.  I came over on the 9 AM ferry in the Live Smart Hybrid Prius.  Met a torch bearer on the ferry who was so excited to run.  She seemed to be bouncing along on the boat – so cool. 

Once we got to the mainland I picked up my VANOC accreditation, aka ‘bus pass’ and headed downtown to my office across Hornby from Robson Square. 

The office is no larger than my cubical back in Victoria – the only two differences: this one has two huge windows that allow me to watch the entire Zip-Line in Robson Square, and I share it with 6 other people!  

If there was a triage for Olympic planning, we are in it.  There are about ten offices stacked just as full here in the OGS Ops Centre (Olympic Games Secretariat).  You can tell people are getting IT done!  Right now this office is running around the clock.

Scott and I had a late dinner together at Joey’s (aka Russia House), but the Russians hadn’t come yet…by the way, the zip-line is a huge distraction…and then we left for the VISA Olympian Reunion Centre.  It was great to see so many people. Most of the Canadian Olympians from past games had just walked in the dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremonies.  By all accounts it was a great show and worth watching. 

The Great One was even there…

Dave

Movember Update

Three day's growth.

Against Rachel’s wishes and my better judgement I have decided to grow a moustache for the month of November, er, uh, I mean Movember.  I will provide a link here to the crazy fools who started this to raise awareness about prostate cancer – which, by the way, both my paternal and maternal grandfathers have had.

Track my progress on the site.  I know one of you (Kelly) wants nightly updates – but let’s preserve my dignity to some degree.  No one likes watching paint dry.

Dave

Climate Action? What’s the Rush?

Expanding Lake

(Preamble) Sooner or later I will mainly blog about rowing.  It’ll be about how many KM we did, a particularly hard workout, maybe even gripe about a teammate or a coach.  All of you out there who are not rowers: cut off the RSS feed before I get to that point.  But for now I will blog about what I want to!

(Today’s blog) Today is Blog Action Day on Climate Change.  Well, what’s the rush about climate change?  Sure the clock is tck-ing, Tcktcktck, I hear it too.  But I also hear individual stories of carbon reduction heroics all the time, and have you ever seen any good come from just one person?  Isn’t it the big corporate polluters that need to change to really make a difference?  Can’t I keep buying my veggies from Mexico and my fruit from California?  Hell, ‘we’ even seem to know what our collective carbon upper limit is - 350 parts per million - or else we’ll face certain doom.  You know, not getting-a-needle doom either; the type of doom found in the bible or RR Tolkien.

I get the sense that what we’re doing is heading out for a night of drinking with a 24 pack of beer knowing that we’ll die, no questions asked, of blood-alcohol poisoning after only 12.  But we drink them all anyway.  Only we won’t be able to drive the porcelain bus to recover – unless NASA crashes a few more rockets into the moon and finds serious proof of H2O in a hurry.

Nah.  Forget all this talk about climate change.  Life is good right now.  I can drive to the corner store, to the kid’s school, hell, I can even use the car to rock my newborn to sleep at night.  It’ll be his problem to face by the time things really heat up.  Besides, I remember when the BC chapter of the Sierra Club came out with its map of my hometown under the influence.  They called it “Is Victoria Going Under?“.  If I read that map correctly, the melting of the polar caps will actually help my Olympic training.  See, right now Elk Lake is too small for all the guys who want to row for Canada.  If we melted the caps enough then Elk Lake could actually become partially salt water and it’d be large enough to fit us all.  The fued between rowers, power boats and fishermen would finally come to an end.  The water ski boats could go use the part of the lake that is currently called the Blenkinsop Valley, while the fishermen could move over to what’s being used by Mattick’s Farm and the golf course (temporarily).  You never know, they might even be happier catching fish from the ocean rather than ones that are stocked.

With less than ten minutes to go in Blog Action Day on Climate Change, here is my message to all of us: get off your butt and do something.  There’s plenty out there to pick from.  Mine’s www.projectbluesky.ca, what’s yours?

Dave

Social Media and the Olympics

Project Blue Sky

I’ve been following Jeff Lee, Vancouver Sun’s Olympic Reporter: “Inside the Olympics“.  On October 4th Jeff wrote about a critical point the IOC is at in its global marketing, and the fact that they have to get younger people interested in the Olympics now or face grave consequences.  You can read Jeff’s full article called “IOC told to get hip with the digital revolution” by following this link.  It seems to me that the work folks have been doing on Project Blue Sky starts to fill the gap that Jeff wrote about and that Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group warned about. 

Here are my comments to Jeff: 

Jeff:

Really enjoying your Olympic coverage and cheers for recently pointing a spotlight on the relative dearth of Olympic-related social media.

However, I’m happy to point you in the direction of one very cool SoMe initiative already living and breathing on the “Olympic stage”, Project Blue Sky: www.projectbluesky.ca.

Project Blue Sky brings together Canadian athletes and some of BC’s bleeding-edge digital media students in a public engagement campaign to encourage individuals to reduce their personal carbon footprint. Project Blue Sky combines the reach and community of social networking with the energy and motivating influence of prominent Olympic, Paralympic and high-performance athletes to get people thinking about their carbon use. And it lives inside the Olympic umbrella and supports other Olympic-associated carbon-reduction efforts.

This is athlete led. The generation connected through SoMe is also the generation using it to encourage and promote carbon reduction efforts associated to the 2010 Games.

So – to all you in my little network, here is a call to action!  If you are looking for a tangible way to do something for the environment, here it is.  Jump on board and start thinking and acting about your personal carbon footprint.  Head to the project site and start logging and blogging.  Log your carbon reduction efforts and blog about them to encourage others.  The high performance athletes out there – here’s a chance to leverage your ’star power’ for good – sign up as a featured athlete and spread the word to the masses.

On our own we can’t make much of a difference, but added up we can move mountains.

Dave    

2009 Athletes CAN Forum (Richmond)

AthletesCAN

I spent the morning on Friday at the Athletes CAN Forum in Richmond BC.  If you are an athlete trying to make your respective Canadian National Team you owe it to yourself to find out more about Athletes CAN and what they can do for you to support your dream, both on and off the field of play.

That morning I participated in a panel session with Deidra Dionne and Alexandra Orlando entitled “Life as a High Performance Athlete”.  It’s cool to get to stand in front of different groups of people and tell aspects of my Olympic story; to highlight the major successes and the major pitfalls.  That being said, it’s really hard to do it in front of a room full of fellow athletes whose stories are all just as interesting and complicated.  I’m sure that other athletes in the room thought “I could be telling my story too”.  There are so many roads to achieving a dream. 

Dave

IRONMAN: The Definition of Success

Scott Frandsen

How do we judge whether a person is successful or not?  It is easiest to place our individual values on others – after all, our values are the constructs of the glasses we view the world through.  Certain people however, elevate themselves above the individual value-based constructs to be judged more globally as either successful or unsuccessful.  Bill Gates, Jean Chretien and Michael Jordon seem to land in the former, while Bernie Madoff, George W. Bush and Ben Johnson fit the latter.  It is important to note, though, that all 6 personalities were considered extremely successful at one point, and can easily argue that they still are.  So that begs the question…how do we judge success?

In order to enter the realm of success, either in the negative or the positive, one has to take a risk.  It is impossible to move mountains if you don’t get out of bed… 

Scott at Cal

Scott Frandsen is someone who fits into the globally-accepted successful column.  Scott took up rowing as a second sport to golf late in high school.  As a ‘walk-on’ at university he muscled his way on to the best college rowing team in the States at the time.  He was awarded a scholarship only after he proved himself more useful than the full-ride kids.  Then he went on to win a couple of national championships for the school while completing a BS in Business Administration from the University of California.

Oxford 2003

He went on to finish a Masters of Psychology at Oxford University a few years later.  The letters behind his name are worth a few dollars, mostly paid for through Scott’s grit and talent.  While in England, he also happened to win the most watched, oldest running rowing event in the world, the Oxford/Cambridge “Boat Race”. 

Upon returning to Canada Scott had to prove his valour once again with the national team, and within a year had indirectly knocked me out of a seat in the defending world champion 8+, heading into the Olympics.  His dreams weren’t realized in Athens though, and four years later, kilometre after kilometre of training under his belt, he won an Olympic silver medal in Beijing.  I’m tired just writing about the things he’s accomplished…you’d think he might take a break.  Not Scott!

It’s guys like Scott who continually redefine what success means.  One might think that after a life-long pursuit of excellence in sport, Scott might want to sit back and relax.  You know, maybe get a job in the public service.  Not Scott, no.  Over the last year, between a few injuries and a lot of stress, Scott trained for and competed in triathlons, building up for Ironman Canada.  Last weekend Scott raced and finish Ironman Canada.  In rowing we trained for hours on end, week in and week out, month after month for years – for a 6 minute race.  On Sunday, August 30th, for 10 hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds Scott raced to prove something to himself.  He raced to redefine success one more time.  He raced because life did not end on August 16, 2008 in Beijing China.  Scott looked for the next great thing.  Well done Scott. 

Remember this then, there are two major steps to success: 

1. You MUST take a risk, and
2. You MUST always look for the next challenge.

Food for thought,
Dave

Canada Games Revisited (+16 years)

It was 16 years ago that I competed at my Canada Games in Kamloops, BC. Last week Athletes CAN flew me out to PEI for the 2009 games, and it was like nothing changed…except I was a lot older. Athletes CAN is an organization that, for lack of a better word, acts as a union for amateur athletes in Canada (Moira, Ashley and Danika may cringe when they read the word ‘union’). My official role was as an Athlete Ambassador. What does that mean? Well, I spent four days talking to young athletes who want to be Olympians one day – check that – who want to be Olympic gold medalists for Canada one day. How cool is that!?

I like the Canada Games. They are a great stepping stone for athletes climbing the ranks. The games provide an important and very real experience of being in a multi-sport event. The level of competition may vary from sport to sport and province to province, but the essence of the Olympics are captured and emulated well, so a message to the athletes in PEI: take advantage of the opportunity you have to learn.

What’s so important about the multi-sport experience the Canada Games provide? To perform well athletes need to minimize potential distractions. Most athletes will cut off communications with their parents during the build up to competition (usually a good idea, no offense mom, but you get too nervous). But the little things that are taken for granted at home, like the quality and quantity of food can become a huge issue during competition. You rely on someone else to prepare your food, but that person is also preparing food for hundreds or thousands of other athletes. You won’t get your crusts cut off just the way mom does it. Special orders don’t happen.

Transportation can also become a major detractor from good performances. Every Olympics I’ve participated in the rowing course has been over an hour’s drive away from the village, in good traffic. One of the tennis players from the Canada Games last week told me that she and a number of other players were stuck at their venue until 2 AM one night during competition – “When you hoot with the owl’s at night you can’t soar with the eagles in the morning” is a plaque on the wall of the Conibear Shellhouse. It seems hardly fair though when it’s not your fault. Still, how would you react? How would you let that impact your match the next day? An old rowing coach used to tell us to “roll with the punches”. How true.

The third major opportunity for distractions comes with athlete housing. When you arrive at any games you never know what you’re going to get. You never know how many people you will be sharing your room with, if your bed will be comfy or if the room will be too hot or too cold. In a village you can’t predict if another province (or country) will keep you up all night. So bring your own pillow, blanket and ear plugs.

All these things can impact your performance quicker than you can say “Bob’s your uncle”. But if you can deal with distractions better than your competition then you will have the upper hand. Take that a step further: use your Canada Games experience to prepare for future games, because these distractions happen all the way to the top. If you do that, you will have the upper hand when you face Germany, France and whatever other countries you’ll face.

So who’s going to come out of these games to go on to win Olympic medals? Who from all the other sports will walk into the Olympic stadium beside you? Good luck.