English Championships - Gold and Bronze

Last week I went to Manchester for the 2011 English Indoor Rowing Championships. It's my third time at this Championships, having won Silver medals in the 500m race at the 2009 (1 min 23.5s)  and 2010 (1 min 22.9s).

This time, I was in better shape having trained much harder over winter despite having had a two week bronchitis setback in December. My goal for a couple of years now has been to go below 1 min 20 secs which is considered quite a milestone in this event. Usually only about 20 people or so, worldwide, manage it each year.

My competition was stiff - there were two guys who had already gone sub 1:20 this year in the race - Paul Buchanan and Eugeni Trofimov. Realistically, I was racing for a Bronze medal - but you just never know, anything can happen when you are putting your body through maximum exertion and racing on a knife edge!

My plan was to get a good strong start then gradually settle back into a power cruise that would give me a chance of dipping under 1:20 if I managed to hold it together and work hard in the last stretch. I'd done a 10 x 150m session purely focused on this starting strategy to get used to the feeling earlier in the week, this helped me to get it bang on.

When I eased back into the power cruise, Eugeni started ploughing ahead at a very quick pace - too quick for me to think about chasing so off he went. Paul was pretty much on my heels for the first half and then drew neck and neck with me at around 400m. The last 100m were extremely painful but I still managed to hold the pace whilst Paul had some in reserve and started blasting away towards Eugeni. In the last 40m or so, I knew it was going to be very close to 1:20 so I just gave it everything and managed to stop the clock at 1:19.9! I couldn't have paced it any better, or gone any quicker so I'm chuffed to bits to have achieved my target. Winning a Bronze in sub 1:20 has never happened before in this event so I can't complain about that either.

Here's the race. Paul closest, then Eugeni then me in black on the third machine:

After the 500m, I was entered in the Open relay event. This is a 3000m race where the rowers keep swapping over on the machine. Our strategy was to do 10 hard strokes and then fall off whilst the next guy got on and just keep rotating like that until the end. I was with my friend Jon Goodall and the two Russians, Sergei Suvorov and Eugeni Trofimov. We won in a time of 8 mins 18 seconds.

I had a great time, and met some of my old friends and some new that I'd been chatting to on the Concept2 Forum. It was great to meet Paul Buchanan, who won Silver in the 2km event with 6 mins 16 secs, Tied for Gold in the 500m event ahead of me and Gold in the Mixed Relay event.

Jon Goodal and I above

 Paul Buchanan and I above