Unlikely Stress Relief

Winter’s almost over and it’s about that time of year again when I find myself pulling on a splash-jacket at 5am and craving a cup of coffee. In a serendipitous kind of way I’m looking forward to the season… I’m almost never happy when I’m cold and tired, but I can do more than tolerate it if I’m cold and tired in a coaches’ launch. And so I get out of bed, pull on my warmest jackets, grab a cup of coffee and some oats and head off to the ergo room or boat house.

Rowers and coaches (who were rowers once, believe it or not) are creatures of habit. Not many are fully coherent most mornings, but we get the job done by going through a routine etched into us by too many sessions and complaining coaches.

I’m more dependant on routine than I think, and this only became apparent to me when I recently read Matt Pinsent’s ‘A Lifetime in a Race’. When racing at the Sydney & Athens Olympics, he mentions that the doldrums of his routine were pretty much what kept him sane through all of the pressure and anxiety… it gave him stuff to do to keep from sitting around all day worrying.

The Junior World Champs in 2005 was such a time for me, and while it doesn’t even begin to compare with Pinsent’s degree of stress, it nevertheless was the most important point of my coaching career thus far. My pair collided with a cement pole at the 500m mark on the way up to the AB semi-final and snapped an oar. The regatta officials were awesome and rescheduled the race for later that day, but the girls were distraught… this was nothing short of a disaster. It was time for some major damage-control and calming down. There was nothing left to do but settle back into a routine and carry on.

So I sent the girls back to the hotel to relax for a few hours and got back to work resetting the boat and finding spare oars. I did everything exactly as I had done the previous four mornings we had been there: cleaned the boat, checked the settings, took a walk up to the media tent to take a look at the weather for the day and grabbed a bite to eat before the girls returned to start their warm-up. By now this had become mind-numbing, but it took my mind off of the stress and gave me and my athletes something to do to stop worrying and thinking ‘what if’.

The semi was probably our best race of the weekend, missing out on the top final by just over a half a length from Ukraine, and it was that stupid, tedious routine that got me through the rough patch.