February Trials

On the 9^th February GB hopefuls made the journey to Boston in Lincolnshire.  The next stage of the trials process was held over 5000m in 1x.  This was a great opportunity for me to show what I had learnt on training camp in January.  I had a good start and held onto a good pace down the course, my plan was to start taking it up for the finish at the 1k to go mark and start adding some more pace on the boat with a final 500m push for home.  The last 1k did not go as planned as my left forearm started to become very painful.  The last 500m I had to concentrate more on being able to turn my blade then winding in to the finish line.

 

Despite this I feel I put in a good performance and showed an improvement on time since our December testing.  I finished in 17^th position and with only 14 places for the first World Cup in Sydney I will not be venturing to sunnier climes this time. 

 

Final trials will be held at the end of April when selection will be made for the second World Cup in Eton, GB.  I hope to find some more boat speed as I keep engraining the technical improvements I made on the camp.  

 

For now the focus is on Women’s Eights Head or the River Race on the 9^th March in London.

Training Camp

The first trials were held on November 24^th over 2000m on the rowing machine.  The water trial was cancelled due to high winds and was run over 4000m at the GB squad base in Caversham, Reading on the 8^th December.  From my performance at these trials I was invited to join the women and lightweight team on their winter camp in Avis, Portugal.  We flew out on the 5^th January to Lisbon then had a nice 2 hour trip with a crazy bus driver.

 

On arrival at Avis we checked in and had lunch then we got ready to kick of the camp.  We carried all the boats down the hill to the boat racks and rigged up ready for our session.  We just had one session for the day after a long days travelling. 

Camp went in 3 day cycles so on day 1 and 2 we would have two morning sessions and a session late afternoon.  Day 3 was the day we all waited for when we would do pieces and a technical session followed by an afternoon off.  Down time was mainly spent napping, reading or watching films along with visits to see the physio. 

For the first 2 cycles I was in a 4x coached by Robin Williams who coached the gold medal winning W2- to their victory at the London Olympics last summer.  I really liked Robin’s style of coaching and he was very good at simplifying technique and each session he would do some video analysis.  This enabled us to see how we had changed our technique and what still needed improving.  The following two cycles I moved into a 2x with the head coach Paul Thompson.  Paul coached the W2x to Olympic glory in London which saw Katherine Grainger finally getting the Gold to add to her Silver collection.  The final cycle was land based on day 1 due to odd numbers with injury then on day 2 due to the weather.  Day 3 was time to come home and although we should have done our pieces and technical session in the morning we ended up having to get an earlier flight home as our original one was cancelled due to snow at Heathrow Airport.

I really enjoyed being on camp with some amazing athletes and it has given me a lot to take back to training in Nottingham.  I’m also really grateful to the physio for holding me together through the camp with a fair amount of tapeing.  Our next water assessment is on Saturday 9^th February in the lovely Boston over the 5000m course.