Everyone loves an underdog...

Everyone loves an underdog… why? Maybe it’s the surprise upset of the favourites falling to a lesser team, or that everyone hates seeing the same people winning every time… or maybe it’s that love of witnessing a group of individuals overcome all odds and realize the potential within themselves that they can play with the big boys… and win.

The best way to train is competitively. Girls aren’t as naturally competitive as guys are, and so they have to be put into competitive situations more frequently and there’s nothing better to watch than a group of athletes fight and grit their teeth against another until one pops. John and myself have allocated 2 sessions a week to competitive training on the water and we did one of the first proper ones today. We had an amazing outing. It was difficult, but the girls fought through it and every one of them got something out of it. What helps is that John and I are blatantly biased on the water with our crews. We often scream out for our crew against the others and it definitely helps the athletes get over the taunts and comments that they’ll experience in a race.

I wasn’t going to include my 4th crew in the pieces that the 1sts and 2nds/3rds were doing and was happy to let them paddle steady around the lake for 6 or 7 laps, but I decided to include them at the last minute to add another crew into the racing mix. They complained and moaned, but got on with it. John lined them up about a length clear in front of the 2nds/3rds who were a length ahead of my 1st crew.

Two TR pieces later, they had held back the charge of the faster crews admirably, but they were buggered and asked that they be allowed not to finish the session. I did feel a bit bad lining them up again after shrugging off their complaints and we did another 3 or 4 pieces where they didn’t really hold off the other crews, but they kept up the intensity. They were beaten convincingly in the last interval and I could see them give in as my 1st crew got contact with their stern.

I didn’t shout or scream at them, nor was I even disappointed. They had performed really well against crews that were substantially stronger and quicker than they were. They had had a great outing and were glad that I had made them finish… they will definitely be faster for it and I think that they learned something: that they only need to succeed as an underdog once to rattle the nerves of a faster crew, even if it was one or two pieces out of six or seven. They’ll have bragging rights for eternity (almost), and the boost it gives to the crew is immense… they begin to see that potential within themselves and they’ll push harder for that feeling again… because the experience is far, far better when you win when you're expected not to.

Everybody loves an underdog… I definitely do.