When coaching for Masters events, I often remind people that winning doesn’t matter. It’s not the main point of what they are doing.

What does matter is staying in the game: being a contender. Getting fit enough to qualify for an event and to be competitive; avoiding and if necessary dealing with injury; maintaining and refining technical skills; learning how to compensate for a gradual reduction in strength and stamina as you move up the age-group ladder; experimenting with different rigging configurations in pursuit of small incremental gains; keeping up with the technology of performance analysis. And of course the simple pleasure of propelling yourself efficiently and stylishly on the water.

All of these processes can be enjoyable in themselves, and I for one find them more and more relevant as time goes by.

So winning doesn’t really matter much in Masters rowing. But I have to admit that every so often, it does feel good to win. On 10th June at the British Rowing Masters Championships at Nottingham, as much to my own surprise as to others’, I took the gold in the over-54 single sculls category – and it felt very good.

To do this I had to overtake Guy Pooley, the serial gold-medallist who has beaten me up every time we met for as long as I can remember. He had sculled for Great Britain at the Barcelona Olympics, was in the British eight for the Atlanta Olympics, and I think was a multiple boat race winner (for Cambridge University). He was, and still is, good. Very good. The last time I had raced him, at Henley Masters, I got ahead by a couple of lengths and he still, easily, overtook me in the final half. This time he got ahead of me at the start. This looked like an insuperable obstacle. But then, finding myself drawing level with about 200m to go, I remembered that nobody is invincible, and somehow sprinted ahead to win by a margin of 0.98 of a second.

The result was made sweeter by the fact that I was in my modest off-the-shelf Nelo, while Guy was in his magnificent (but twice-the-price) Empacher Carbon / Kevlar honeycomb.

Was there a secret ingredient? Breathing and heartrate control come into it, these being key elements of an approach I’ve been working on which involves saving energy for the sprint by avoiding maximum effort in the early stages. Luck, of course, also played its usual unpredictable part.

But luck, of course, is one thing which can never be controlled. So if you’re serious about being competitive, then some serious preparation is called for. This means planning ahead with the help of a support team.

My Support Team

My own team for the Nottingham event came from several different directions, and they were brilliant.

Awareness Practice – in which special attention is paid to a constant awareness of your technique and of possible areas of improvement – was provided in 6 months of bi-weekly coaching sessions in London by Tim Male

Effectiveness training – in which metric data is used to create an optimised fitness-training program and a mechanical-efficiency strategy on the water – came from Oxford-based John Hale, who is in my view one of the best-informed experts in this specialist field, whether on a bike or in a boat.

For Team Training I owe huge thanks to Salvatore Chiocca and John Hickling for being such competitive and reliable training partners at Putney Town RC.

Also Kosta Kolimechkov at Twickenham RC for his help with keeping my back straight at his Osteopathy clinic in Richmond.; and for taking the video from the finishing line – see below.

And Claire Slater-Gallon and Demet Karabork at “Get Strong Physio” in Kew for helping with the rehabilitation of my damaged left shoulder.

A repeat performance?

Could I repeat the performance? Henley is coming up and I’m looking forward to it, but I’m not optimistic as my training for this has been minimal due to other commitments. It will be interesting to see how much difference this makes.

After Henley I’m off to Bergerac for a few weeks to work with a series of Masters-oriented visitors on the smooth, uncrowded waters of the Dordogne. Most of them are, I have to say, incurably focussed on winning; but they’ve also been strikingly successful in this , so I can’t argue with that. We all expect to make good progress.

If you like the idea of coming to France yourself, get in touch and we’ll have a look at the calendar to see what’s available.

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It’s all about Preparation

Preparation is going to be my key word for 2023, and will be the subject of my next post. When that will be I can’t predict, so please follow this blog and you’ll be hearing from me. Warning: I have a lot to say on the subject…

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