A long way away from sitting on a beach with a cocktail in hand!
Wednesday, May 4th, 2016
As a team we train most of the time in the UK, but several times in a year we will venture off to other countries for training camps. My friends and family joke most of the time about these brilliant free “holidays” but believe you me, we are a long way away from sitting on a beach with a cocktail in hand.
Instead you’ll find us on a large stretch of water, in a gym or in the dining room, because we go on training camps to eat, sleep and row. They afford us the time to immerse ourselves completely in training, and when we aren’t training we are solely working on how to recover for the next session.
They are very tough physically, but also mentally. You want to be the athlete that can make it through camp, tick off all of the sessions and pushed yourself to the limit along the way.
So why do we go abroad? Mainly the weather, better water, less wind, rain, ice and snow! It is also useful to get a change of scenery, we’re used to spinning around on a lake only 2km long, so to go out and row for up to 12km in one go is brilliant. Importantly distancing ourselves from our normal lives means we can’t get distracted, no doctors appointments, last minute family gatherings, packages we forgot to pick up or food shops. We can commit fully to making our boat go faster.
I relish the opportunity we’re given to go away and focus on one thing. It is almost like watching sport when I was younger and thinking how incredible it must be to be able to go out and be paid to play sport. It is some of the hardest and most grueling stuff we’ll do, but the miles we put in on these camps could be the difference between winning and losing.
Let’s see what the difference is at the up coming European Championships in Brandenburg, Germany next week!
