Well that's it - Munich World Championships has come and gone and that is end of the 2007 season. I find myself in a quandary to say how I feel about the result of this year.
Never in my life have I trained so hard. 2007 is the Olympic qualifying year and quite rightly our chief coach tweaked and notched up the training programme to another level. In a way as rowers we are very similar to Formula 1 cars. If you want the car to go faster you have to increase the strength of the engine. Our bodies are the engines for the rowing boat, and the only way to increase the strength of our engines is to train harder and add more mileage. This all has to be applied in the right balance just like the engine of a car, and that is where our coach comes in. He helps decide what the correct amount of mileage is, how often we should being doing weights, when we should increase the training load and when we should back off.
At the start of the racing season all the work really could not have gone much better. Starting off at the first World Cup in Linz Austria, we racked another win against all the previous years' medallists from the World Championships. You would consider this a great start. This was followed by the decision to try something new and race in an eight at the second World Cup in Amsterdam. A new venture but something fun to try, and as a result another win. Standing on that podium in Amsterdam with eighteen British athletes has got to be one of the best moments in my rowing career. All the training throughout those dark winter months really seemed to feel like they were worth all the blood, sweat, and pain.
Injury then strikes!! Yet again I have been struck by some failing in body, and I am diagnosed with tendonitis in my hamstring behind the knee. As a result I have to miss out the final World Cup in Lucerne. The four race with a substitute and the first disaster strikes. Our four suffers its first loss in three years! The guys do a fantastic job racing with Tom James at very short notice and come in second behind our greatest rivals the Dutch. It was very unpleasant to have to sit at home again and watch the boys in action. Not being able to help in any way, but also reassuring to know that the injury had recovered well enough to still be included in the World Championships in the summer and help to rectify the situation.
Off to our final training camps in the Mountains of Austria, and then a finishing camp at one of the most beautiful lakes in France, Aiguebellete. This was six weeks of very hard and incredibly focussed training. We had a problem to correct, we had lost our first race in three years and we were going to make it right. We all worked together and really pushed each other to get the best out of each other. No TV's, no phones and no girlfriends, just rowing.
Arrival at Munich World Championships and we felt ready. Everything seemed to feel like it should at a World Championships. Training had gone well and all four of us were very fit, but was something missing? The heat and the semi-final were the hardest I had had to compete in for years. I felt myself having to dig deep into the legs like I normally would for a final. Not only that, but suddenly the boat felt very difficult to row. All things that we had ground into place in training throughout the year become very complicated, and the simplicity of stroke was not there.
Looking back now Finals day seems to really have come and gone in a daze. All of us were really pumped for the race and we knew exactly what we were going to do and when we were going to do it. We knew the race would be tight but we were all determined that we should try and dictate the race right from the start therefore making everyone race how we wanted to race. In reality we stuck exactly to our race plan, but we just could not get the boat to respond and produce the speed that we normally had with such ease.
The result is history and I have to say it was a very bitter pill to swallow. Coming fourth after winning all your previous races is a very frustrating and confusing emotion in the immediate moment. You are left with a real feeling of emptiness and not entirely sure what to do with yourself, or for that matter what is going on. I felt like I wanted to turn back the clocks and start the whole thing all over again, but in the real world you can't do that.
On reflection Munich was a very humbling experience and probably the best thing that could happen to the four of us. Next year is the Olympic Games in Beijing. This is a very special event and something that I have missed out on once before. What you don't want when you are sitting on the start line of the Olympic Games is to have any questions unanswered or any stones unturned. Maybe if we had gone a third year without a single loss we would not have forced ourselves to ask the difficult and sometimes tricky questions of each other and ourselves. This loss has certainly brought us together even stronger and given us the motivation to do whatever it takes to make sure that come the 14th of August it is our bow ball that crosses the finish line first.
On a plus side in the real world I managed to find a beautiful woman who actually would agree to marry me. On the 15th of Sept I married Georgina Fleming in Milton Lilbourne Wiltshire. It was a fantastic day and we are both looking forward to the year ahead but also the rest of lives after rowing. I've heard that life after rowing has week-ends and doesn't involve forcing down 6000 calories a day.