View towards Europeans

Looking forwards...

So, after a solid performance at the March Olympic trials I was looking forward to getting some good training done, however just two weeks later we were informed that a selection of the lower ranked athletes who went to Olympic trials had to also do April trials.  The April trials this year have been for European, World Universities and U23 World selection and we had been led to believe that if you did Olympic trials then you would be exempt from April.  Two weeks before April trials we were told this was no longer the case, so we started doing some prep to get ready to race again. 

My Leander teammate, Kristina Stiller, and I were ranked at the top of the female scullers that were entered to race and we knew it would be really competitive between the two of us but we also wanted to put as large a margin between us and the rest of the field as possible. Unfortunately a week before the trials I started coming down with a chest infection that kept me off training for 10 days and another week until I was back to full training.  Although I was really disappointed not to be able to race, I knew that Tina would fly the pink (Leander Club) flag for both of us and she did, winning the trials by a healthy seven seconds in tough, slow conditions.

Based on our strong performances at Olympic trials, and Tina at April, we have been asked to train and race this summer in a double with, if we progress as expected, a view to racing at the European Championships in Varese, Italy in September of this year.  This is great news for both of us because it gives us so much time to spend in the boat together and we have a real plan for the summer racing season. With such a long season ahead and being set in a boat early on it helps that we both get on well!

Now that I am over my illness training has been going well and Tina and I are enjoying having the luxury of time in the boat together so we can sort out our blade angles, technical focuses and play about with the order of where we sit in the boat. Although I love my Rihoy empacher single scull, it is nice to have some company in the boat after a long winter in my single!


The London Marathon

So last weekend I went to London to support friend and fellow Guernsey athlete Lee Merrien in his bid to run the Olympic 'A' qualification time for the marathon. Lee had a brilliant run, and in windy conditions managed to run a personal best time and finish as the top British man. Despite this he was a little over 90 seconds away from the qualification time and so missed out on Olympic selection. I am devastated for Lee, as he deserved a spot, he has worked his arse off (and every other little bit of fat!) and Olympic selection means the world to any athlete. A rower and photographer friend of mine, Nick Middleton was supporting his brother and managed to get some good photos of Lee which I will share when I manage to get my paws on them.


Support

We have had some brilliant support from various companies who are keen to help us on our route to the European Championships.
 
HUNTER BOOTS
Hunter Boots have given us both a pair of GORGEOUS Navy Brit wellies which we have been wearing with love and pride! Aren't they amazing?! We have always been very impressed with the Hunter wellies, and this British inspired pair seemed made for us! I am living in mine at the moment with all the showers we have been having.

HEADSWEATS
We have gotten some great hats and a visor from Headsweats, which we look forward to racing in. Tina has already raced in her visor and it was a great success by all accounts! My cat loves getting inside things, so my new visor was an obvious target for him :)

I can't work out how to rotate this photo on here, so please excuse the head turning.


BUFFWEAR
We also got in contact with Buff, looking for a buff each to protect our necks/heads from the wind chill; I had been coveting one for a while.  The team at Buff have been unbelievable and replied to us very quickly, stating that they would like to provide us with not just one buff each but many!  Offering that we become brand ambassadors for them! This is very exciting, and we are testing out their new range of (brand new, unlaunched) technical kit for 2012, which I can reveal is AMAZING. The range of buffs on offer is beyond extensive and we are very lucky to have been given almost one of every kind so you will be seeing a lot of these :)

FAITH IN NATURE
Tina and I were thinking about the season and it looks like we will be very busy racing, both home and internationally so being girls, we wanted to make sure that we didn't look all raced out by the end of the season!  We place a lot of faith in nature as we push our body to the limit time and time again. We rely on it to recover, repair and grow so we felt that the Faith in Nature brand with naturally sourced ingredients and no artificial colours or perfumes in it would best reflect our attitude to training our bodies.  We are looking forward to using their deodorants, moisturiser and face wipes over the coming racing season.

Thank you so much to everyone who is contributing to our season, we are excited about racing and will keep you updated.

As always, Man Group, Guernsey Sports Commission's Rising Stars programme and Jeremy Rihoy at Rihoy and Sons are my main supporters, along with my parents of course!

New blog for the double is to be launched soon. I will let you know when it goes live so you can follow our progress directly there!

Olympic Rowing Trials

Dorney Lake, site for the rowing at the 2012 London Olympic Games, was abuzz this weekend with the invitation only GB Rowing Team's Senior Final Trials.  The full race reports can be read here.

The original line up for the women's singles, which I was competing in, had 14 competitors.  However, on the morning of the first race one of the girls, Ro Bradbury was pulled out due to injury, leaving 13 starting.  The conditions were kind to us; earlier in the week with gusts of up to 44mph and the lake unrowable I think everyone had been praying for calmer conditions.  A moderate tailwind on Saturday morning helped us down the course for the 1900m time trial.  I was 9th in the time trial, but with one more athlete dropping out after the time trial there were the requisite 12 athletes for the A/B semi finals, no cuts needing to be made.  The races were drawn and I was in the first of the two semi finals late Saturday afternoon. 

Arguably, I was in the harder of the two semi finals, my semi having four current GB senior squad members, and the other semi only having two.  Unsurprisingly the four highly experienced senior girls, three of them world champions, dropped me off the start and I felt like I was in another time trial. There was no side by side racing for me, having myself dropped the sixth athlete, Sanjana, off the start.  Nevertheless it was another good opportunity to run a 2k race, working through my process goals and executing my race plan.

I finished fifth, putting me into the B final for the following morning.  The finals always step up another level, and everybody raises their game.  I knew it was going to be a tough race, all the way to the line. 

For interested parties, here is the view of the women's singles B final as seen from my boat:

I got a good start, in third place by the 500m mark, but although just in touch, Vicky Thornley was a clear leader and Tina Stiller close behind. Next to me, Georgie Hazell got a good start and I was glad to have someone close to me to push off. I worked through my race plan, and could feel myself drawing Tina back in, the gap between second and third place was at the 1km mark, over two seconds, but by 500m there was less than a second between us. I pushed into 2nd place with 400m to go and kept fighting, to stave off the attack from Vicki Meyer-Laker who surged through to claim third place.  Vicky Thornley was the well deserved winner of the B final, 8 seconds ahead of me.

I was met off the landing stage by some of my Guernsey supporters, Dave Warr of the Guernsey Sports Commission, Jeremy Rihoy who was meeting the boat he bought me for the first time, and my Dad! :)

A relaxed pub roast lunch, followed by a decadent eton mess finished off a brilliant morning.  Now, two days off before it's back to the hard grind.  Rowing has a habit of continually getting in the way of everything though...even ruining my lie in this morning. With no alarm set and a peaceful house I still woke at 06.15, bright as a button and ready for the day! Aching legs and chesty racing cough aside I am determined to enjoy the 48 hours respite. Once I've finished this blog that is! :)

Trials Preparation camp

Last month, February, my rowing club, Leander Club, took their select group of lightweight men and heavyweight women GB triallists to Banyoles, in Spain, for a 12 day training camp. 

My housemate Rhiannon had three days earlier returned from a training camp there, and coinciding with the cold snap in the UK, reported sub zero temperatures, gale like winds so strong that they were kept off the lake some days and general cold dreariness. In preparation for our camp there I packed lots of warm kit, woolly socks, winter coats and, in case of a swimming pool/hot tub/ice bath, a bikini! 

Lucky I did pack that bikini for as soon as we arrived we realised that the weather was on our side. 18 degrees Celsius the first afternoon, and it continued to be cloudless, bright blue skies with very little wind the entire time. Notwithstanding my rowing kit, my most worn item of clothing was certainly my bikini. Any time we had off was spent on the upstairs roof, reading and basking in the sun. We were intent on boosting our vitamin D stores!

Tina Stiller, Rachel Gamble-Flint, Me

This camp was in preparation for all of our upcoming Olympic Trials, 10-11th March. The training was tough, as expected, but the great weather made it so much more enjoyable!  We work on a three day cycle when we are on training camp.  This means we have two consecutive days of three sessions a day, and the following day is a two session day with the afternoon off.  That afternoon off is always a source of great excitement, and much looked forward to.  We usually plan the afternoon around food and sunbathing. Telling ourselves that, after two heavy training days and a half day, we really need some help to recover in the form of a coffee shop crawl to try out all the different hot chocolates and pastries that the area has to offer!

Despite being out of the boat for a few days due to a recurrent neck injury, I returned from the camp much fitter than when I had gone out and ready to do the last stretch of preparations for the trials on home water.

Trials Invitation and a fat cat

The 2012 season has gone well for me so far.  Incredibly I seem to have cocooned myself from the usual sniffly January colds that make the rounds and have gotten through this first month injury free with some good training under my belt.  We did a 5k ergo on Saturday as part of the trials process, and although it was a personal best it is still a way off the senior girls.

I also got an email through last week to say that my performances this season have exempted me from the GB February Trials and given me a direct invitation to the Invitation-Only GB Rowing Team Trials in March, more commonly known within the rowing circles as the Olympic Trials!  This is pretty exciting and I am looking forward to getting out and racing in my lovely new JW Rihoy sponsored single.

Almost two weeks ago now I came home for a couple days to attend the Guernsey Sports Commission's annual awards evening.  It was a brilliant evening, congratulations to all involved and of course the award winners!  As one of the Rising Stars athletes I was asked to take part in a question and answer section on stage, midway through the award presentations.  Despite being fairly used to being interviewed I was really nervous about it.  I usually don't have an audience of a few hundred people!  Luckily the crowd was friendly and Dave Warr who questioned me was very good at putting me at ease.  Still, I'm positive I will not take up a career in public speaking.  Video can be seen here www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tSmgv_I0fw Dan, Sky Cycling Physio, on first, then I come in half way through.

At home my cat Simba continues to be a terror around the house.  He had been stealing food from the neighbours cats by getting into their houses by any means possible; cat flaps, windows, doors.  A neighbour brought him back to us one day, very upset because he had gotten in and eaten 3/4 of her freshly baked victoria sponge cake! He is a big cat anyway but with all the food stealing he had grown very fat.

So, he has now been house bound for a month in an attempt to slim him down.  Yesterday morning I awoke to find this in the kitchen:

In case you can't quite tell, that IS his diet cat food scattered all over the kitchen, not just some funky decorative tiles we have recently laid. Nightmare!

Happy New Year 2012

Happy New Year all!

Rowing news is sparse at the moment and training continues to be gruelling, although I did have a lovely Christmas with a couple fewer sessions than normal.

Because normal people don't frequent the gym over the Christmas period the gyms typically shut for a few days. I am very fortunate to be able to use the Fitness Factory whilst I am at home, and they do wonderful things for me like allow me to take the ergo (rowing machine) outside where it is cooler. Therefore I did a couple good ergo sessions in the car park hoping that nobody would swing round the corner too quickly and take me out!  I was also able to borrow a weights bar from Christmas eve until the 27th, when the gym re opened. Here Suki is just checking out the space that I swept up on the pergola for my weights circuit!

Despite being unable to go out on the river whilst I am at home in Guernsey, I am able to go for some incredibly picturesque runs.  It's one of my favourite ways to see the island as you can see so much of it in a short space of time. Much more than if you were walking anyway.  On Boxing Day I did my usual run, a 10k loop taking 40mins along the cliffs and then back along the lanes.  City runners, you must be jealous of this!!...

Christmas was a lovely relaxed family affair this year.  We had the obligatory Christmas Day walk and when we arrived at the top of Petit Port I somehow managed to convince the family that it would be a good idea to walk down to the beach and back. For those who don't know, there are 294 steps (I counted) down to the beach from the cliff path :) shaky legs when we reached the bottom!

As usual I got lots of thoughtful Christmas presents, but probably most useful was the amazon kindle. I know, I know it is much nicer to hold a real book, sniff the pages and bend the cover but at the speed I read and the amount of clothes I pack when I go away I just don't have space for lots of books! The kindle will be most useful when away on training camps or holidays but I am enjoying getting through a few books on it already.

I spent my New Years and a couple days before and after in the Lake District.  I've never been to that part of England before and although it rained straight through for four days we had an amazing time. Lots of walking in the rain and board games by the fire. Perfect!

Since I have been back at training in Henley the wind has been abominable so we have been on the ergos quite a lot, which is actually good preparation for our 5km ergo trial at the end of the month.  I'd forgotten how mind numbingly boring long ergos are. 12km yesterday, 16km today and 18km tomorrow. Better update the music on my ipod!

Fullers Head of the River Fours

Last weekend I raced on the Tideway, Chiswick to Putney, for Fours Head.  I raced in elite quads, for Leander with (Stroke - Bow) Tina Stiller, Victoria Meyer-Laker, Polly Swann and myself.  I was steering, this was a first for me on the tideway and very nerveracking! The river is very wide and the stream is about 10m wide I've heard, and makes a big difference to your speed.  The instructions for getting the right 'line' are daunting to say the least, especially when you are taking 30+ strokes a minute and not facing the way you are heading!  All credit for my steering the fastest line goes to Rhiannon Jones, lovely housemate and fantastic cox, thank you for painstakingly teaching me the course.

Unfortunately we had to race for a time only, not a placing, because from the original entry I was the only consistent member of the crew due to illnesses and injuries in the original line up.  This meant a 75% crew change, when you are only allowed a 50% crew change.  However, this did not affect our starting position or the way we raced.  Despite a good racing line, it was not our best race and felt decidedly 'unracy' due in part to some injuries within the boat.  In addition, we had only had a few outings together, coming together on the Tuesday before racing on Saturday.  With this in mind we were very pleased with the results; our time put us second in the elite quads category behind another Leander boat stroked by Anna Watkins, the fastest female rower in the country and part of the gold medal winning GB double.  We beat on time a few other crews, including last years winner, Nottingham. 

We have a hard couple of weeks training now and then a 2k ergo test at the end of the month.  Outside of rowing I am looking forward to a visit from my parents and brother this weekend and am glad they will be able to watch me in concert with the Reading Symphony Orchestra!

Europeans, rest, a new season and new boat!

Europeans

Racing in Bulgaria was tough.  International competition is always stiff, but as a GB development crew against some other countries' top senior boats we knew the gold standard was high!

The European Championships happened this year in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 16-18th of September.  We had six crews in our event, so we had a race for lanes on the Friday and the Final on the Sunday.  Our season as a crew had been very mixed, with the actual crew only coming together for the first time 10 days before we raced.  The race for lanes was therefore a great opportunity for us to race the full race distance together as a crew for the first time.  Crews all use the race for lanes for a different purpose.  Some go out to race as hard as they can, to try out their race plan.  Some race to a certain point and then settle onto a more relaxed pace.  Some hardly race it at all and want to save themselves for the final.  Some go out to win the race to ensure the best lane in the final.  The lake and conditions in Plovdiv were pretty fair so no advantage was found by having the 'better' lanes.  We used the race to cement the crew and run through our race plan.  It was a case of laying ourselves on the line and seeing what we could do, and then being able to make changes for the final.

The final was dictated by the Romanians who showed their dominance from the outset.  We fought hard to overturn the Russians who had beaten us in the race for lanes, but could do nothing to impact on the Ukranians and Belarussians.

It was a heartbreaking result, because we were aiming for the podium.  It had been a very long season with some dark times for the whole crew.  Large groups of women are never easy to manage, especially when they are physically and emotionally exhausted!  However, for me personally, it has been invaluable to get the opportunity to spend a whole season in a decent sweep boat, and this result gives us more drive and ambition to achieve greater things next year.


After this last race of the season we had a two week break.  As the only break in the year that we get from training, I tried to make the most of it!  I spent a few days after racing travelling in Bulgaria with my parents, then 5 days in Morocco with some rowing friends from the european team, a couple days at home in Guernsey and then a day or so back in Caversham before training started!

In Morocco we felt a million miles away from the pressure of training, it was an amazing holiday.  So relaxing and with such good company!

So at the beginning of October we started training for the new 2011-2012 season.  I have moved to Leander Club which is a really exciting new direction for me this season.  I am also completely over the moon about my new boat!!  I am extremely lucky to have been bought a brand new top of the range boat by J W Rihoy.  My old boat was 8 years old and really starting to show its age.  This new boat will take me through the next Olympiad and will give me the best possible chance in pursuing my Olympic dreams.

My start to the season has been disrupted by a cold, brought on by the sudden change in temperature I think.  It was the height of summer on the first day of training and mid winter by the third day!  I am still on a recovery programme and am trying to kick it so that I can put in a performance at GB October Trials next weekend.  Wish me luck!