Camps really test your strength, and I’m not just talking about physical strength.
Here we are, as I said in an earlier note, focusing only on rowing. As such, when I get off the water from a good row I am happy, and carry that mood into the afternoon or evening. However, if I have a bad row, or a frustrating row, I also carry that into the afternoon or evening. There is a compounding effect that can swing the benefit of a camp for days.
One can argue though that a really good athlete can get the most out of any situation. For me that means that I have to get as much out of rowing the single here as I can, no matter if the other guys are miles ahead of me in the singles, pairs, doubles, fours or quads.
If the single is the boat I am training in then there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get the best training effect out of it…one man…one boat…get it done.
That has been the attitude that I have tried to have here – “embrace the single, learn as much as I can”. Two days ago I flipped the single three times to learn as much as I can, then yesterday was such a windy day. Sitting there the wind was pushing me 1.5 metres per second. That was faster then I was moving when I was rowing into the head wind. A little laughable, but again – I tried to get as much out of it as I could. I know that I was rowing really short, so I tried to row longer. My forearms were so tight from all the tension that I carried dragging my oars along the top of the water, so I tried to get my oars off the water.
Although flipping my boat in calm water metres from the dock didn’t feel totally applicable to me in the really rough water, I know it was because I didn’t just try to survive…I thought about what I was doing a little bit more. Granted – I did just try to survive at points too.
But I got the miles in – my fitness will benefit – I will benefit – I didn’t give up. With my boat halfway full of water Mike had us all spin at the dam here on Lake Natoma and do a portion of our long pyramid ladder, 4 minutes with the tail wind and then 3 minutes into the head again. It wasn’t mandatory, other boats went in, but little moments like that make us stronger, braver and somehow turns a 2K race at the end of the season into something very simple.
In 2003 the final in the 8+ at the worlds had a huge head wind pick up in the last few minutes of the warm-up. Because of training like last night not a man in the boat flinched and our fearless cox got us better prepared in the warm-up for the wind than the other 5 crews – presumably because we won that race.
I had a sense of pride knowing that I survived the conditions last night, even if it was really ugly most of the time. But my frustration has been building because I am not getting markedly better in the single. My fitness is coming back faster then my speed is increasing in the boat. That pisses me off. I carried that into the evening along with my tiredness and negativity. But this is all part of camp, and I forgot about that last night, and went to bed wanting to destroy something.
This morning Morgan Jarvis and I rowed a pair together. We jumped into the boat last minute – I had already taken my sculls to the dock – the boat was not perfect for us but I was rowing again, not sculling. My shoes were so small, but I squeezed into them because I just wanted to row the boat so much. We went out and sorted through a few style differences, and had a great time. The workout was 10 by 90 seconds, and we did okay. We weren’t setting world records, but we got stuck in and that is what matters most. I was getting good training in, we were working well together to try to raise our game, and once in a while we picked off a boat or two.
As you can probably tell from my writing I am in a much better mood than I have been in for a few days – and that will carry into the single or back into the pair this afternoon – whichever boat the coaches need me to row. I am glad to be here at camp, I don’t want to get in the way of the guys who are fighting for seats for the first World Cup, and I also want to get the most out of this camp for me so that when I return to Victoria I get REALLY STUCK IN and ready to crack into the top boat when the boys return from Bled.
Dave
PS. I have the videos from flipping on the desktop of this computer, but have to process them a bit now. There may be a few words I don’t want younger audiences hearing as I hit the freezing cold water! Stay tuned…
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