From Rowing to Running with Victoria Thornley

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Tribathlon podcast finding out how ordinary people do extraordinary things.

Rowing is painful for very, very intensely painful for minutes whereas ultras are like uncomfortable for hours.

That was medal winning Olympian Victoria Thornley and this episode is from rowing to Running. Claire Fudge, welcome back to the Tri Rattle podcast. How is the training going for the ARC 50?

Ah, well all I can say is sort of feet, I don't, I don't know about you but it's, it's kind of the same as, as long distance endurance like Ironman training, but different. I don't know what your thoughts are.

Yeah, I think it's, yeah, running in through obviously when I was down in Cornwall, which I know you've got to look forward to this coming weekend, but I was doing lots of running on sort of the sand duney bit, the, the dunes of death I think they're called. Yeah, that sounds inspiring, doesn't it? And a lot along the sort of rocky coastal path and a slipping bit and it is, it's exhausting on your, on different parts of your, your feet and your legs. But yeah, but I actually, in many ways I really enjoy it because it takes the pressure off, feeling like you've got to run super hard all the time, you know, walking up the hills and things like that. I quite like that bit.

Yeah. No, and actually having run on the kind of Dorset coast over Christmas as well, it's, it's really nice to have sort of different views and space and your mind actually is busy the whole time, isn't it? Because you've got so much to look out for in terms of not, you know, falling on your behind the whole time because it's so blooming slippery but also like nice views and then rocks and things. So it does keep your mind really busy which is really nice.

And even the odd dolphin you can look out for that. That's how I keep my children entertained on walks is keep spotting dolphins and you can have a Percy Pig if you spot one, so.

Oh great. That's a really good like race nutrition plan as well, isn't it? How do you pack those as well?

Percy pigs for every time you spot a dolphin. Excellent. We'll do that. So one of the things I was intrigued to get your thoughts on is over Christmas I got one of these Aurora rings. And the reason I quite, I like the idea of it is because, you know with garmins and things like that, they're very good at tracking activity and you can use training peaks to look at um, lots of different things including whether you're fatigued. But clearly one of the most important parts of recovery is sleep. So I really kind of, I'm only just, you know, a couple of weeks into using it, but really starting to embrace the concept of taking this data to help me with my recovery. So what are your thoughts on, do you know anything? Do you know much about this or.

Yes, I've looked into a couple of different kind of methods actually of tracking things like sleep and also recovery because there's lots of different ways to do that. And you know, as you know a lot of it, a lot of them are based on your heart rate, no matter which ones you use. And there is, there is actually some very basic but new research into which ones are better than others in terms of tracking. And really the, the kind of conclusion of where things are at the moment is none of them are really, really good. But if you have something, it's being consistent and sticking with that, I guess. But I think like, like all of these things, if you're collecting data, you know, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? And what do you do about it? I guess so. I don't know. For you, like having started using it, has it got to learn, like, learn to get to know you a little bit? Is that how it works?

It has, yeah. So it takes at least a couple of weeks to learn you, which, which will learn more about you, which is, I'm probably only just getting towards that time now, but it's starting to. So what it will do is it will pick up my normal temperature, body temperature, and then it will tell me if that was to change significantly. It will kind of tell you that and say, well, okay, or at least I think it will, it'll say, right, you might want to be, you know, you might, might be just coming down with something. You might want to ease off your training because, you know, you're not 100%. It's, it's actually, I think it's pretty accurate in terms of measuring the sleep quality so far. When I look at it, it's kind of telling me what I would have known if I thought about it. But it's then having that consistent data, isn't it? Like, you know, you might have one bad night's sleep, but are you thinking about the fact that, you know, you've actually had four bad night sleep in the last six days and whether you're sleeping deeply, the amount of REM sleep and the influence of things like alcohol on that, on the quality of sleep? So I Think actually it can be a really good tool and I think, I think you could probably do some of what it does with your garment, but I wouldn't want to sleep in my garden with my watch on. So actually this is a really good way of kind of keeping track and trying to see sort of longer term trends. So I think it's going to be really interesting. But I am in the early stages. But one thing that actually I was listening back to the Mark Bryant podcast, which is the guy that was terminal to triathlon, and I asked him about the Aurora ring and he was saying that when he read James Nestor's book about breath, he tried the whole mouth taping thing and that by using the Aurora ring he could tell that that was deteriorating the quality of his sleep by mouth taping. Now, he said at the time he did have a cold, so he was going to go back and try it. But it's like it's experiments like that you can go. Actually that's quite useful. But anyway, I think there's, I mean, I know Sid said that she didn't get on so well with the whoop band, which I think is similar.

I'm not sure they all work on similar principles in terms of, you know, what you're looking at data wise. And you know, I think the other thing is to also, as athletes, and this is something I always say, we know our bodies really well and there is a point, you know, whether you're tracking heart rate, power, whatever it might be, there is a point where we have to as athletes say, well, did it feel like that or how do I feel? You know, because I think that's important because you can track sleep, can't you? And you're absolutely right, you know, on Garmin and things, you've got similar kind of idea of SpO2 that you're tracking and heart rate and kind of movement in bed and things like that. But you know, if it says you've only had five, five hours sleep and you feel amazing, then that's also okay. Yeah, I think it's also being kind of actually perhaps if you feel like you really want to train, then maybe you can go out there and really train. So I think there's also an element of us being clever as athletes and listening to our body as well. But I think it's, I think you're right. I think going through the learning process of it, you know, may well help you be more clever on your own with, you know, when you're not wearing it as well.

What I'm liking about the app so far is that it's starting to pop up with insights, but it's a real learning journey in the sense that, you know, I've had certain things pop up. Tell me about heart rate variability and then it'll. Then there'll be like three paragraphs on the important, you know, how to. What to look for in heart rate variability and then there's a number of videos explaining different things, whether it's mindfulness or so there's quite. Actually, it's not so much. It's not like when you look at the Garmin data and you go, wow, that's a lot of data. What do I do with it? It's more about, well, here's a small amount of data, but these are the learning points from it and it's really three key scores and then the charts based on those.

Yeah, that's really nice, isn't it? Because it's takeaway and you can kind of digest it and kind of take something from it, can't you?

Which is really good.

It is. And it's actually what Inkas Nova we're talking a lot about in that it's not about taking more and more data, it's about presenting it back to you with us. Tangible advice that you can go, right, okay. Actually, you know, if I keep running that way I'm going to get injured or whatever.

So anyway, see how you get on with it. So week by week, what you're learning.

Yeah, absolutely. And quite what it makes of running for 12 or 13 or 14 hours on the ark is going to be. That's going to be interesting.

Yeah, I think it'll be interesting to know what it says the next day, won't it?

Yeah.

I'm going to see if we're going to get a record low score on.

It or maybe you had the most amazing sleep and it says you're ready, ready to go.

Who knows?

Well, we'll find out. Right now let's dive into the amazing interview with Victoria Thorney. Victoria Thornley competed in rowing at the 2012, 2016 and 2020 Olympics, winning a silver medal for Team GB with Catherine Granger in the Women's Double Skulls in Rio. While she narrowly missed out on a medal in Tokyo, 21, finishing fourth in the single skulls. She also won bronze and silver medals at the World Championships and gold, silver and bronze medals at the European Championships in an incredibly illustrious career. She's now retired from rowing, but is embracing the ultra running world. Not the obvious choice for a lady that is 6 foot 3 inches tall. So I wanted to chat to her about the highs and lows of each Games, how she learned to calm her nerves on the start line over training syndrome, which affected her really badly, and about the Sporting Giants campaign that took her from being a show jumper to an Olympic rower. So I know you're going to take loads of great wisdom from this interview with Victoria Thornley. Today's show is brought to you by Precision Hydration, who help athletes personalise their hydration and their fueling strategies so they can perform at their best. They help some incredible athletes, including former podcast guest EMMA PALLENT BROWN pH, have tested my sweat and given me amazing advice in terms of the electrolyte strategies that I need to take to race at my best. They've also got their quick carb calculator to tell you how you can fuel at the right amount per hour, not just get the electrolytes right. So you can find out all about their online sweat test and their quick card calculator@precision hydration.com and remember, if you use Tribe Athlon 15, the discount code Tribathlon15, you can get 15% off your first order. So, Victoria, welcome to the Tribe Athlon podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Really looking forward to chatting. All things, well, rowing and ultra running and maybe a few other topics thrown in as well. So to kick things off, I always like to kind of understand your story and for those people that don't know that much about your story, you know, how did you, you know, what was your first sort of forays into sport? How did you end up getting into rowing and tell us about your successes along the way.

Yeah, that sounds great. So thank you very much for having me on the podcast. Yes, I guess my first love in life was horses. So since I could, like, remember I loved horses and I started riding when I was, I was lucky enough to get my own horse when I was eight, after I'd proved to my mum and dad that I would do all the mucking out and look after it, look after him properly. Not just wanted to do the riding, but, yeah, I was obsessed with horses and, you know, long story short, I basically decided to specialize. After doing some pony club and things like that and doing different disciplines, I decided to specialize, if you like, in show jumping. And we ended up buying and selling horses as I, as I improved over the years and went, you know, won a few national championships, went to some of the big, you know, showjamming events, Olympia Horse of the Year show, competed At Hicksed, that kind of thing, so. And that was something I did alongside my mum and dad. You know, they kind of came along for the ride and supported me and took me around the country, sometimes abroad to compete. And I. Basically, my dreams when I was a little girl came true in terms of having my own horses and competing them at that level, all alongside school. But it was just an amazing time of my life. I. I probably stopped properly show jumping when I was about 17 just because of family things and I wanted to concentrate on my A levels and it was never going to be something that I wanted to do forever in terms of. It was kind of for when I was younger and I always wanted to keep riding horses, but, yeah, it was never going to be a long career for me. But it was an amazing part of my childhood, especially to create that bond with my mum and dad as well. Um, and then I did my A levels and was. I tried actually to get into a bit of modeling and I took a gap year before going to university and I'd been scouted as a model when I was like 14. I think it was the closed show live back then. Mum was like, you have to do your A levels and exams before you even think about doing anything like that, you know, rightly so. And she was wise in that. So that was something that I thought that was going to be my career after. After school, essentially, I was going to take a gap year to see if it would actually kick off and then if not, I had my university place to go to in. In London to study business management. So I did a bit of modelling and I was doing quite a lot around the Manchester kind of northwest northwest area. That's. That's where I'm. Well, originally from North Wales, but we were living around that area then and. But it was never really going to kick off properly. I actually went to quite a lot of agencies down in London and they said that I was too tall. So I stand at just over 6 foot 3. I think most models, not. Not many are over 6 foot. There are. There are some, but they were like, yeah, you're basically too tall tall for this. And I thought, well, I thought that was what I was going to use my height for. You know, I've been tall, you know, my whole life. Always heads above everybody else at school. And so it was kind of a big blow to be like, okay, I feel like I was born this tall to do it, to use it for something. So I went in the gap here. There was this kind of nationwide campaign called Sporting Giants. It was the first one of its kind, a talent ID search set up by UK Sport, and it was after we won the bid for the London 2012 Olympics. This is the beginning of 2007 and it was kicked off by Steve Redgrave. And they're basically looking for people of a certain height, women over 5 foot 11 and men over 6 foot 3 for three. Three sports in particular. Handball, volleyball and rowing. And I saw the advert in the paper. My mum saw the advert in the paper and said, oh, this looks really interesting. You're the height they want the guys to be. So I never saw myself as an athlete when I was with the horses. Obviously I was very competitive, but I saw the horse as the athlete and I was, you know, just. I was the trainer of the horse, essentially, and we did it together, but I wasn't. I wasn't fit in any way. You know, I used to like the party lifestyle a little bit when I was. After I finished the horses and through my gap year and whatever. So, yeah, I definitely didn't see myself as ever being an athlete, but I always dreamt about going to the Olympics on my horse, if anything, rather than in any other capacity. So, yes, I actually applied for this, this Sporting Giants campaign. So, you know, this looks like an awesome opportunity and I thought I would. I could. I could see myself playing volleyball on a beach. Sounds quite nice. Um. And I never even thought you had to be tall for rowing. I didn't think. I didn't. I literally didn't know anything about rowing. I'd heard of C. Very grave. And that's pretty much as far as it went. So I didn't even know rowing was. It was helpful to be tall, but they actually asked me to go and get tested for rowing, so. So, yes, that's how I got into rowing, essentially. I went to the first round of testing. Um, I was seeing a personal trainer at the time, but it was mainly to look a certain way for rowing. It wasn't necessarily for a physical kind of fitness thing. Sorry, to look a certain way for the modeling side of things. And then I said, oh, I'm going for this, this testing. So he did some more specific kind of rowing strength training for me. So I went to the first round of testing and I wasn't very fit or strong or anything like that. And, you know, being doing well in the weight gym has always been a struggle for me, being. Being the height I am and just naturally I'm not massively powerful. But I went along to the testing and we had to do physical tests as well as, like, measuring, you know, height and kind of height and arm span was a big thing. So with rowing, ideally, you want your arm span to be greater than your height. Obviously, there's lots of people who are successful in the sport without that, but that was one of the parameters they were looking for. Obviously, I had the height. We did an arm leg bike, it's called a Schwinn bike, I think. And you have to go up every, you know, every minute, take the power and the cadence up. And that was a miserable test. It was really, really hard. And then you basically got cut off once you hit a certain. When you couldn't step up. We did some strength testing on your legs and push and pull with your arms. And then we did four minutes on the Ergo, the indoor rowing machine. I think it was at rate 24, and basically go as hard as you could for three or four minutes. And my scores were average at best. Um, but I remember who turned out to be my first coach was watching me do the Ergo, and he wrote on my piece of paper as, like, feedback like, that I'd push myself really hard and obviously was happy to hurt myself, essentially. And that's obviously in rowing, that's what they're looking for. It's a lot, you know, the nature of the sport. It's tough training and they can train people to be, you know, stronger or stronger and fitter, but sometimes you can't train that mental capacity to hurt yourself. And so they saw that in me, I guess. And even though, yeah, I wasn't the best on the physical parameters, they asked me to go along to the second round of testing. So in the first round, they'd tested about 3,000 people, and then they whittled it down, literally to, I think about 60 or 70. Then we went to it for a weekend assessment, weekend. And we first went in a boat and that was the first time I went in a boat. And the first time I've many times that I fell in. So they put you out as single to start with, which, if you've ever seen a rowing boat, especially a single skull, they're very, very narrow. You know, they're basically as narrow as probably narrower than your hips or similar kind of width. So, yeah, I tip straight in. So that was my first experience in a rowing boat. But again, we did some more testing and, like, extra bits of testing and to see where we were, and we had a couple of interviews as well, just to see where our lives were at that point. And because people were in different periods of their life, I was in my gap here. I just started university at this point. Other people had a full time job because some people were in their 20s, but so they wanted to see did you really want to do this? Did you want to commit to moving anywhere in the country to go and be under what's called a world class dark coach, which. So the spirit sporting giants was to basically get talent into the World Class Start program. And the World Class Start is a fast track trying to fast track athletes from, you know, novice or very inexperienced into the British team using kind of areas and clubs around the UK with world Class Start coaches in. So I was absolutely committed. I said, you know, I've gone to university because I kind of don't know what else to do. And that's what you do when you're, you know, 18, 19. But this is something that sounds like right on my street, you know, in terms of it was, it was competitive. I had the opportunity to potentially go to the Olympic Games if, if, if I had what it takes. And I just thought, well, this is a now or never opportunity. Um, so yeah, then they, then they, we, I went away for a week or two and then we got the feedback and they said they wanted to put me on the program and that I was to move to Bath to start to start training essentially. And that's where my, where my coach was. So I was at university in London. I'd been there for a month. I remember having the conversation with mum and dad on the phone and say I've been selected to go on this program means I'm going to have to leave university. Well, you know, rowing's now or never. You know, the Olympics is in under five years time. So yeah, it's now or never. You can study at any time in your life, which is absolutely right. So, so basically packed up my bags after a month at university and moved to Bath and moved in with who's now my best friend, Gemma. We'd only met once before, but we moved in together because we both were moving there and didn't know anybody and basically a month later started training essentially for the Olympic Games. But it's weird to say that because the only time I'd been in a boat I'd fallen in and I barely could run probably longer than 15 minutes on a treadmill before being absolutely knackered. So it wasn't fit or strong or skilled in a boat in any way. And the Olympics was under, in under five years when I started. It was Five, four years and eight months ago. So I remember having lots of conversations with the coach thinking I just don't see how I'm going to get from where I am. So that. And he's just said to take it one day at a time, one week at a time.

It must have been amazing to have that very right from the start to have that very, you know, very single folk laser focused goal of. Right. This is all a five year plan to get to London 2012.

Yeah. And something I've always needed in my life is a real, is a real goal. And even when I was in my gap year the modeling wasn't kicking off properly and I was just really. I had itchy feet. I wasn't happy because I didn't have something to really get my teeth stuck into. That was, was solid and I knew where I was going. I always need to know where I'm going and what I'm doing to be happy within myself. So this was like everything I've ever dreamed of, you know, in terms of. It was so. It was so singular focused and that was all my life was about then. And I'm just, like I said, very much all or nothing. I went from being, trying to be super slim to being a model to thinking I need to put weight on, I need to get stronger, I need to put muscle on because this is what rowing, this is what I need from rowing. So I ended up just eating an obscene amount of calories just to try and deal with the training. Even though the training wasn't much at that point but for my body it was, it was a lot. I think we went the first six weeks without even having a day off. So it was completely different to the lifestyle I've been living. But I just, yeah, I remember ringing my mum up and being like, I can't put weight on and like, because I was trying to put weight on and I couldn't and it's, it's crazy now to think that but I was, yeah, I was so. I was so obsessed with it so early on which yeah was kind of. It was only going to go one way that way and do for a long time.

I guess it's really interesting that they were more in there, they were more focused on your mental performance than your physical performance. Is that because it's easier to train the physical side than the mental side?

Yeah, I would say so. I think when I started I had the capacity to push myself physically and I was always mentally quite, I think through the horses as much as it wasn't I wasn't necessarily having to do physical exertion when I was riding. There was an element of strength and things and, you know, body awareness and everything like that. But I didn't have to be necessarily really, really fit to ride. Um, but I had built up a resilience in terms of, you know, when I get thrown off that the horse will stamp on me, those kind of things. Like I was, I was quite hardened to just, you know, being in pain at times or whatever that might be. So that was something I'd built up through my younger years and I think it was, it was kind of innate in me that I was happy to. Whenever I did anything, I always wanted to do to the best of my ability. So I push myself in what aspect? Whatever aspect that would be. But I think when I started rowing, yes, I had the aspect to push, the ability to push myself. But that is definitely something that you get better at. You know, you find new limits and you find actually that that hurt, that you can go way harder and. But that's something that you definitely get better at. But I think you have to have a certain element of it to begin with. And there was lots of people who were physically more talented than me by a long way, but they didn't have it mentally to one go through the day to day, you know, sometimes really boring, but you know, mind numbing training of what it takes to do rowing and also to push themselves when it, you know, when it really mattered. And some people just didn't have that ability or just didn't want to do it and therefore they wouldn't get to the top, the top level, but even though they were physically more capable.

That's really interesting. And over the course of this podcast, if I put my foot in it and expose my total lack of knowledge with regards to rowing, I apologize. But it's been interesting for me interviewing lots of particularly triathletes that have and ultra runners that have started in rowing. I think I'm right in saying that Anna Troop was one of them that started in rowing or had a spell of rowing and a few others. I think Kerry Sutton, the ultra runner did as well from memory. So it is interesting. But the one that one that stands out most actually is a guy called John McAvoy. I don't know if you know John McAvoy. He was. Yeah, so yes, amazing story, lovely, lovely guy. But I remember obviously the mental side of the boredom of the Ergo, I suspect being incarcerated for however many years actually helped him through that side of it. But he also described his ability to just suffer. You know, that's, that's what I know. That's why he did well when he switched to Ironman and But why he did so well on the Ergos is. And so actually that prompts another question. I remember when John came out of jail and tried to go into rowing as his, as his main sport. He found that yes, he'd got all of the stamina from the Ergo, but he had no technique. Now he was coming to it significantly later than you. But you've already highlighted this. How easy was it to sort of pick up rowing compared to sort of. I'm guessing that some of the people you were rowing with had been rowing for, you know, a few years at that point, whereas you just started out, how easy did you pick it up?

Yeah, good question. I mean I definitely fell in a lot. So when you normally people get into rowing through, you know, school or university and you'll start out in eights or quads so you'll be in a, in a bigger boat with more people and generally it's a lot more stable. So you. It's hard to capsize a quad or an eight. People do it, but it is hard. But we started out in singles because that's what the world class start program is all about, building up your ability and skills in a single, which is technically more challenging, especially when you're a novice because it's unbalanced, everything like that. And also it's really good for your. Good for building up fitness quickly. So we started out in singles so I fell in a lot. I started rowing in November and I fell in constantly throughout that winter. You know, some sessions I'd go, you know, a few sessions out falling in and then you try and take my blades off the water a little bit more and then I'd fall in again or whatever it might be. So yes, I did fall in a lot, but I think, I think I picked up reasonably quickly the technical side of it. We did a lot of skills based on things on world class style as well. So just general boat boat skills that you might think seem a bit ridiculous now, but like just moving your hands on the blades a lot, you know, doing 360 turns, stuff that's not relevant in, you know, a row, a 2000 meter rowing race. But how quickly can you turn the boat in 360 and then like dipping from side to side. So we call them rigger dip. So it's like the riggers that are outside of the boat trying to hit the water with them on each side. So just being aware of your body in the boat and the movements of the boat when you put your body in certain positions. And I think those things just gave you a bit more of, a bit more of a understanding of the boat and how it worked with the water and how it worked with your body. So I think those things help elevate your ability to pick up, increases the speed to which you pick up, the technique of things. And also I have to bring it down to my coach as well. I had a great coach who is now in the British rowing team, has been since London or yes, since 2011 and coached the men's quad this year in Tokyo that won an amazing silver medal and made history. The first men's quad to win an Olympic medal. And he's a great coach in general, but a great development coach. So he really broke it down into sizable chunks for me. And the way he taught me the technique of rowing was, was really doing the basics well first and that was, and that was key. So yes, I think I had probably a natural ability to row quite well, quite early, but it was a lot down to how I applied myself and how he coached me straight from the off as well. I think how you are coached from the beginning is really important. So try to pick up, not pick up too many bad habits early on, I think is really important. But the thing with the technical side of rowing, I mean, it's never perfect. Trying to string a 2000 meter race together with every stroke, you know, 240 to 260 strokes. Being perfect is, is, it's kind of elusive. You know, you never, you're never going to be a hundred percent happy with it because you know, even though you might technically feel like you're really, really there when fatigue sets in, there's always going to be elements of your technique that start to come, come away. So that's why I think rowing so addictive. It's got all the elements, it's the, the technical side of it, but the physical side and how you hold onto your technique when you're, you know, physically absolutely in the pin. That's, that's why I think it's, it's kind of addictive because it's never, it's never going to be perfect.

And of course you've got the conditions around you as well, haven't you? Well, do you think that coming into it from a riding background helped in any way? Because clearly there's a, there's a massive unknown quantity sat underneath you when you're riding.

Yeah, I think I wasn't aware of it at the time when I was riding because I just was riding my horse. But it developed a body awareness, I think that I just probably took for granted, but was definitely important, especially being tall. It sounds, I mean, I think generally when I was younger I was just very. I was just not in charge of my own limbs. Like I was very. I would say I was definitely gangly. Right. I had very long arms and legs and not much stringing them all together and so learning to, you know, move with a horse as well definitely gave me a body awareness that I probably didn't appreciate until later on. So, yes, I definitely think that helps with the rowing and then just the discipline and stuff of training my horses alongside school and all that. I think then played a really good part in how I trained and how I committed to the rowing side of things.

Brilliant. And so London 2012, this massive goal. Tell me about the highs and the lows of London 2012.

Oh, wow. I mean there was a lot going into it. I made the team. I made my first British team, untrained three team in 2009. So 18 months after I started, she was in a women's eight and we managed to, we managed to win the unto three World Championships, which was crazy in a very short amount of time. But it was great because I rode with a lot of girls who really experienced. So my, you know, my understanding of the sport and my rate of learning was massively accelerated through that period. And then I trialed and managed to get myself into the senior team in 2010 and was in the women's eight that year and stayed in the women's eight for those three years, 2010, 2011, and then obviously for the Olympics in 2012. In 2010, it was my first World Championships and I think we finished fifth. And I was absolutely devastated. Like devastated. And it's kind of crazy now to think, you know, I ended up in my. After two and a half years of rowing, ended up at senior World Championships in the women's eight and I was devastated to finish fifth. But that's kind of tells you a bit about my. I get on my aspirations and high expectations of myself. But then the next year in 2011, we had an amazing year in the women's eight. We really came together as a crew and we actually. That was qualifying year for London. So it was a big year at the World Championships that year. We had to finish top five to qualify boat. We ended up coming away with a bronze medal. And the Americans were the formidable boat in that event for years. And at that point they were as well. And we were the closest we've ever been to them in that World Championship. So we were like, this is a really good year pre Olympics. We're in a really good place here. And that was my first World Championship medal, my first major medal, and then I didn't have another one until 2015, 2016. So that was an amazing year and really rewarding because we all work together as a crew. And then leading into London, we had lots of ups and downs and lots of injuries, illnesses, and I ended up doing quite well in the sculling side of things. So the eight is sweet rowing, so that's one or. And then sculling is two or so different disciplines. I ended up doing quite well in the singles trials, which was sculling, so ended up doing some in the first part of the season in the Olympic year in the women's quad. And then there was changes in personnel again and I was put back into the eight. So the eight didn't have that continuation of the. You know, we'd had a really good 2011 and we didn't have that in the 20 in the 2012 season. And there was lots of. Yeah, people were injured and ill, so we didn't create that momentum. And in an eight, it's so crucial that everybody's on the same page on that start line. Everyone knows exactly how that first stroke is going to feel on the second stroke and there on in. And we didn't have that. And then. So we went to the Olympic Games under prepared for a lot of different reasons. Some out of our control, some, you know, some not. Sometimes we just didn't manage things as well as we could have done. And we raced the Olympics and came fifth, and it was a massive, massive blow compared to where we had been the year before. We just didn't feel like we'd delivered what we were capable of for various reasons, and that was really hard to take. But I'll never forget my. My parents, obviously it was. And London was an incredible game. Like now I can look back and be proud of what I achieved in terms of a very small amount of time. You know, straight the Women's Day at the world, at the Olympic Games, at a home Olympic Games, under five years after starting the sport, like, that's pretty cool. But at the time, obviously my aspirations had changed massively and, you know, it was a medal or nothing, but realistically, I wasn't a medal standard at that Point. But then, you know, there were some girls in my boat who were. So it was one of those with an 8. It's. It's hard to kind of get the. It was about working together as a team and we didn't do that quite as well in 2012. And I was, Yeah, I was devastated with the result and obviously all my family came to watch and it was an amazing, like, atmosphere. The Doherty Roar, they called it. It was 30,000 people there and you could. 2,000 meters away at the start and you could hear the cheer for Great Britain when they called over the Star. And it was. It was like goosebumps kind of thing. It was just amazing. You know, I'm. Well, I never experienced a crowd like it again, but it was just, it was just. It was always bittersweet because it was an amazing crowd, but we just weren't having a great regatta, so you really couldn't embrace it as much as you would. I would have liked to. And my parents all came and watched. And then because it was just down the road from my house, essentially after my Olympic final, my now husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, drove me home. He just won a bronze medal a couple of days before, which turned out that was his last game, so he went to Beijing. But as well, he drove me home. And my parents were wanting to get the champagne out and everything. And it was weird going from just racing my Olympic final to being in my house like a few hours later. And they were like, you just been in the Olympic final? I'm like, why are we celebrating? I've just come fifth. And. And they were like, nobody's amazing. And it was, you know, they were right to think that because, you know, I was in an Olympic final. But for me it was like, you're mad. Like, why? We're not celebrating coming fifth. But, yeah, so it was. Now, I think I'm just. I was so lucky to have been in a home Olympic Games because there's so many people who never have the opportunity to do that. And. But it was at the time, it was. Yeah, I wasn't in the best of moods, put it that way.

And I think I'm right in saying that you put your foot down after that, didn't you? And you didn't want to be in the. In the eights. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. Rio Olympiad was an interesting one. So after London, it was right, okay, I want to be on the podium in Rio and what, what do I need to do personally to make, you know, put myself in a Different position. And after the eight, as much as it had been an amazing learning for me, rowing with that many amazing athletes and being very young in my career, I learned so much from those, but I wanted to have more control over my destiny. So when an 8 is going well, it's really powerful and it's amazing, but when it's not, you've only got only one eighth of the boat and you can only control it in so many ways. So I really wanted to do a smaller boat and to have more control over the. Over what was happening and feel like I had more influence over the result. So the next year, we did our trials and everything, and I did some trialing for the pair and the double. So I was able to sweep and scull quite easily at that point and switch between the two, because I'd done both and been quite good at both. But the coach, for various reasons, didn't want me in either of those boats, even though I'd done well enough at the trials. We won't get into that year in too much depth. But then he's.

So.

He wanted to put me back in the eight and I was like, absolutely not. Because the whole point is, right now I want to be getting better as an individual to make sure that I'm in a better place come Rio. And if I go in an eight, I'm not going to learn as much as I would in a smaller boat. So I want to. At that point, the only other option was the single, and I've always loved the single skull, but it was very. Well, it was a very hard event, and at that point, I was never going to be good enough to be meddling, but I knew that just going and racing a season in the single would be really, really great for my personal development. So I basically said to him, I'm either doing a single or I'm going back to my club and doing a season just there, doing kind of Henley and Club racing. Because that's how important I thought it was for me at that point to move on physically, mentally, all those elements, there's no hiding in the single. I've really learned my strengths and weaknesses, and I thought that was really important for me for that year, early on in the Olympics, Olympiad, so I was able to go to a World cup in the single, which is an earlier there. We do, like three World Cups before the World Championships, and they're kind of like building up races for the World Championships to figure out which boats are going well or not. And then you tweak some of the combinations according to how you go in the World Cups. And I actually ended up coming fourth and doing a lot better than everybody as well as myself predicted. So. So the coach was kind of between a rock and a hard place. I inevitably ended up going to the World Championships in the single, even though he wasn't particularly happy about me doing that, wanted me in the eight. But it was an amazing year because I was really happy that I'd stuck to my guns and committed to doing that because I learned a massive amount. I ended up finishing seventh. So I won the small final, it's called the B final. And it was just, yeah, a really eye opening experience. I physically moved on a lot. Doing the single for a whole season, doing the big training camps, doing it in a single, everything takes, you know, it's all done on mileage, so the single, everything takes a lot longer. Um, so I, you know, had a really good training base and I just learned so much more about myself and the mental side of things. I really kind of turned a corner in terms of how to manage the stress of racing and the pressures of racing in that year as well. So it was a really important year in my development. So I was really glad that I did a. I did that. And then in 2014 I was meant to be and spent a bit of the season in a double with a girl called Fran Horton, who's an incredible athlete, she's won multiple Olympic medals. But then she unfortunately got injured halfway through the season. So I ended up going to the world Championships again in my single, but that wasn't the plan initially and ended up finishing eighth that year. So I'd gone back a position but again, a really important year in my individual development. But at that point I was getting a bit sick of not even being in the final and I wanted to get back into the, into the medals and. But I did love that time in the single for sure. And then 2015 came around and that's when Catherine Dame, Catherine Granger came back into the team after having won that incredible medal, gold medal in, in London. And I remember the first day she came back, it was obviously rumors she was coming back. When we were at the World Championships in 2014, there's rumors she's going to come back and she'd be there. We, after our break and we went back to the training base to start the 2015 season and got into the gym and she was there stretching and I was like, welcome back. And then that was all that was said and we just cracked on like she'd not been away. And then obviously at that point, I was like, you know, I want to be in a boat with Catherine, but the winter's all about individual performances, so you're just trying to go as fast as you can. And I was definitely a scholar by that point. So it was all about the singles trials and making sure that I was. Was winning them. And, you know, Catherine was building back into the team, building back her fitness. And we ended up being in the double, that double that season we finished. I always forget it was fifth or sixth. I think it was fifth, sixth that year. And the World Championships was obviously way off. What each of us had, you know, our standards, but we call it. The main thing is you qualify the boat for the Olympic Games. And it was a very competitive. The doubles event that year was really, really competitive. There was about eight or nine boats that are all very similar. Similar speed. So all the racing was really intense, but great because it was. You really had to fight for it, and you really had to figure out in the race how to tactically. Tactically move on the other boats. But very disappointing year for us.

Was it intimidating getting in the boat with Catherine, given all of her previous.

Yeah, it was, in a way, but I tried to tell myself it wasn't, and so tried to bring the best of me and remember that, you know, I was still. I was worthy to be in that boat. Like, we both trialed. We both were the two top scholars, so we were in that boat together. But, yeah, it was. It was daunting at times, and sometimes I have to, like, pinch myself, but I was just like, what an opportunity. I've got to learn from, like, the best rower, you know, best British female row, you know, of all time. And this is like, such a huge opportunity. And I. It was. It was awesome. But if I'm honest, the boat didn't feel great for quite a long time. We weren't a natural fit at all. We had quite different technical models that we both. So we have. Having to bring those together was the most challenging part of our partnership. And it took a long time to actually find the speed, and we didn't actually find it until the Olympic Games in Rio. But, yeah, I learned a huge amount. And just. Her standards are so high, but she does it in a way that she brings you with her in terms of. She has these high standards. Obviously, I've got high standards, but she's really. She's a really an amazing team player as well as someone who is like, you know, so unbelievably focused in what she does, but she just does it in a very. A very inclusive way. Yeah, she's. She's definitely a people person, so she's very. She's very easy to roll with in terms of that. She's very easy to get on with. You can be very open and honest with her, but, yeah, you don't. You know, you better bring your A game, otherwise she won't be happy as well. I always planned on doing that, and she was so. Yeah, I love that about her. I love that she was so personable, but also had these really, really high standards. So she was just a great person to row with.

Brilliant. And so I'll ask you the same question. What were the highs and lows of Rio?

Well, 2016 was probably, along with 2021, the hardest year of my career up to that point. It was by far the hardest. We started this winter season, and Anna Watkins, who had been Catherine's partner in London, had had two children and come back in the Olympic year to try and trial for Rio. So there was a doubles project, which included, over the winter, me, Catherine, Anna, Anna, a girl called Mel Wilson, who was one of the top scholars in the team at the time. And the four of us were trying to basically find a really quick double. And we obviously were doing, like, the individual trials, but also doing a lot on the training camps in doubles over that winter. But no combination was actually going that fast. And at this point, my whole thing from London to Rio was, I want to win a medal in Rio. And it didn't matter in that year. It didn't matter what boat it was in. It was just about winning a medal. I've been. I've got a tracksuit, I'm an Olympian, I want to go and win a medal. And that was the priority. And so over that winter, it was questioning, right? Well, I don't think this. I'm not sure this double is going to. We're going to find the speed that we need to. To be in a medal position come, come Rio. And all of us were pretty much on the same page with that. So we had lots of meetings with the chief coach, who is also our personal coach, about, you know, what's the realistic kind of goal for this boat? Because right now we're not seeing the speed that we need to. So it was back in the February time I put my hand up and said, I think I want to switch back over to Sweep, because the 8 project was going really well at that point. A really strong group of girls in there and So I was one go trial for that because I think that had a better opportunity to win a medal at that point in time. So yeah, I put my hand up at that point and it was very much like, no, we're sticking with the double, you're sticking to sculling. So I, I stuck with it and we ended up going, did some trials, ended up going to the European Championships in the May. Catherine and I had come out as the top scholars so we were in the double at that point. But we had a really not a very good regatta and again we just didn't see the speed there. So we both at that point were like, I think an 8. The 8 is a good opportunity for us both to trial, to go in that and the eight had done well, they'd won the Europeans and that obviously didn't go down very well with everybody involved. Our coach didn't want him to keep going on with the double but he was also quite involved with the 8. The 8 obviously didn't want us coming in and interrupting their project. So the athletes weren't particularly happy with us either. So it didn't make for a particularly good environment. But at the end of the day it's Olympic, you know, it's elite sport, it's about the best people in the best boats. And sometimes, yes, I had some friends in the eight but sometimes you have to just go past that and be like, it's about, you know, I'm going to look out for myself in terms of what's my best opportunity. So it wasn't, it wasn't easy and there was a lot of trying to manage relationships and things along that side and our coach really didn't want us to do the double. Really wanted, didn't want us to try for the eight so made it very difficult. But I essentially had to refuse to row in the double to give him to like force his hand to give me an opportunity to seat race for the eight. Um, so it was very, very stressful because not many people liked me at that point and I was being quite stubborn and bloody minded and what I wanted to do. But I just was really believed that I was, you know, I won the trials, I was the top, one of the top athletes in the team. I deserves the opportunity to be in the best opportunity for a medal and you know, I had, I had form in a sweet boat as well. So Catherine, I ended up, long story short, ended up racing, doing some seat racing for the eight. We narrowly missed out. They didn't seat races against everybody so that's another story entirely. But we narrowly missed out half a second each, I think, in our, in our seat races for the eight. But it wasn't the easiest set of seat racing because a lot of the girls, you know, understandably didn't want to even be doing that seat racing. They were like eight fast, you know, and I can completely see that their side now be exactly the same. Don't come in and disrupt our, our project. It's going well. Um, so that, that didn't make for the easiest seat racing experience. Um, so. Yeah. And then so basically the 8 project, right? Well, that's. You're not, you're not in that. You, you know, you missed out by half a second over 15 minutes of racing or whatever. So very, very tight. The double is the only option going forwards. At that point, the Olympic team had actually been announced as well, and Catherine and I hadn't been announced in it, which was quite a bit of a story at the time because two of the best athletes in the team hadn't been announced in the team. So at that point, to be honest, I'd been through so many ups and downs that season. Emotionally, physically, physically, and I was in a great place. But emotionally I was absolutely, just absolutely spent. I'm not sure if I had any more to give. There'd been a lot of arguments, a lot of difficult conversations, a lot of tears, and I was. I'm not sure I've got enough to give to go to, you know, to go in the double and give what it takes, what that boat needs. And actually the day after that, seat racing and finding out that I hadn't gotten the 8 was the first day in my whole career. I just didn't turn up to training. I still did my training, but I did it at my club and I didn't go to Caversham or training base because I wasn't sure whether I wanted to carry on. Honestly, I was thinking about literally packing it in because I just thought, I'm just not sure I can do this anymore. I put my heart and soul into these last four years and I'm in a. Feel like I'm in a worse position than I should be. And a lot of water had gone into the bridge at that point. I remember going for a long walk in the woods at the back of my house and thinking, you know, do I? Can I find the energy to put in the next two months into this project that it deserves that the energy that Catherine deserves me to put into it as well? And can I? Can I? You Know, I had a lot of, I'd be really kind of fallen out with the coach as well, who's going to be our coach for the Olympics. Can I work, can we work together and make this a productive project? So I had, you know, I had that walk and I thought, you know, you know what, I can't, I can't leave this not knowing what happens if, you know, I don't, if I don't go to Rio, I won't know. But I was, I was honestly really scared of coming away with a bad result again and how that would, how I would live with that and going forwards and it would just be, yeah, I couldn't do, I felt like I couldn't deal with another disappointment in the result and. But then if I didn't go, I would never know. So inevitably it was okay, I'm not, I'm not someone to leave something undone, so. But I had to really dig deep and be like, okay, this has to be a fresh start. We all have to put everything to one side. And Catherine, I and our coach, who obviously we'd had some difficult conversations with, we need to move past it and put it behind us. And it was, I think we had 50 or 60 days, the 50 day plan, from the time we got back into the double to the final of the Olympics and what were we going to do in that time? And amazingly, it was actually the most, one of the most rewarding times in my career and most enjoyable because there was, there was no other options. It was about this boat and let's, let's figure out how to get this boat quick. You know, we're two very, very good athletes individually, but we need to figure out how to row better together to make this boat go well. And there'd been glimpses of some real speed at points, but it just wasn't consistent. So we knew there was something there, but it was what it was. We needed to find the consistency, seeing it over a 2000 meter race and it took us all the way up to the Olympic regatta to find that. Um, but we went in probably ranked 6 or 7th, um, and we surprised everybody, not necessarily ourselves actually. I think at that point we could really feel that it was clicking. And yes, we hadn't raced anybody else in the world, um, for a while, so we didn't know how we compared against them, but we knew we were better and we were faster. And then we had a great regatta. We raced our heat against the pole issue with one of the favourites who ended up winning. We came second to Them, but we were competitive in the times against other heats and the other boats again, we were second in the semi final. So we were into the Olympic final, which was a big thing in itself because as that event had been really competitive. So just to make the final was a big. Was a big, A big achievement. And then I remember the night before the Olympic final, I just said, I know, I don't know where we're going to come tomorrow, but I know something special is going to happen. And I know we're going to deliver our best, our best race. And that is one thing that you can guarantee of Catherine. She, The Olympic final, she delivers every time. And no matter how big the pressure is, she's, you know, she's ready for it. And that's when I, because I was in the bow seat, so I was. I'm, you know, boats effectively go backwards if you like, and I'm the first one to cross the finish line. So I'm following her. She's in the stroke seat and just her body language and everything, I just was like, wow, this is, this is the Catherine Granger that people talk about. Like, I just sensed it when we, when we took our first stroke in the Olympic final. And I was like, okay, right, I'm just going to hold on and try and try and keep up kind of thing. And it was. We just had the most amazing race. I mean, the conditions were terrible, especially at the start line. I think we actually caught a bit of a crap very early on, and we're very much down early on, but we were leading 500, leading at a thousand, leading at 1500. And I mean, I think I remember thinking about halfway in the race because I was doing the race calls. Wow, we're leading this race. Oh, wow, this is the Olympic final. And then straight back to, okay, what are we doing to keep leaving this race? What are we, you know, it was. It was immense. And we had, we had our best race. And, you know, unfortunately, the Polish managed to just pip us at the end and come through us in the last 200 meters. But we had the best race of our career by. Not of our career, that project, by far. And it was so rewarding to put all that, you know, bullshit basically behind us and just go out and race and show what we were both capable of as individuals and capable as a crew. And it was, yeah, it was an incredible race. And we cross the line in silver medal. And honestly, I couldn't. I couldn't quite believe it. It took a long time for it to sink in because of where we'd been. Just a matter of, you know, weeks beforehand, not even thinking I was going to go to the Olympic Games. And then, yeah, to finish with a silver medal was absolutely incredible. And I remember them putting the medal around my neck on the podium. And I'd not been on many podiums at all at that point, and I'd never been on Olympic podium, so. But the weight of the medal, the medals were amazing in Rio. Like, really heavy, massive medals. And I just remember the weight of it going down my neck, around my neck. I thought, that is the weight of everything it's taken to get to that point. And it was a really, like, poignant moment for me and something I always remember. Always remember that feeling of the. Of it going around my. Around my neck. So fantastic.

Absolutely brilliant. I've got to ask, how did the eights get on at Rio?

They won silver as well, so everyone was happy.

So you were all friends at the end of it?

Yeah.

Excellent. That's good news.

And then.

So then between Rio and Tokyo, you then had a bout of overtraining syndrome, I think, didn't you? Which actually is another similarity between John McAvoy, because I seem to remember he's. So there must be a recurring theme here with rowers. How did that manifest itself? How did you kind of identify that you were suffering from that and how did you have to deal with it?

Yeah, that was very difficult point. In the middle of that Olympia, I didn't. It was in 2018, so I'd decided to carry on to Tokyo, but I was. I wanted to do the single skull, and that was my only goal, was to go to the Olympics in the single. So I started the 2017 year, had a new coach who I'd always admired, Paul Reedy, always. He'd been coaching the lightweight women's team up until that point. So we. But when I was going back, I said, I really want him to coach me. And luckily he wanted to coach me. And that's how we. We started our kind of partnership and our little team. 2017 was a great year. I won the European Championships and then got a silver medal at the World Championships. And the single has always been my dream, and I never. But I never realized, for me, the ultimate was to win the Olympics in the single, but I wasn't sure I was ever good enough to be competitive at the top level in that event. But the, you know, the silver at Rio gave me the confidence to give it a go. And my first season was. Was great. Had a really, really great season and then 2018. So I'd. I'd missed part of the winter in the first part of the winter in 2017, so I'd taken an extended break. I. After Rio, I needed time to recover from everything. Um, so I didn't start back training until the January. So I only essentially got the second half of the winter, which is the right thing to do. But I was like, now 2018, I was like, okay, so I missed the first half of the winter in 2017. I still came away with a silver medal. So. Right. I just need to train really hard this winter and like, like I do every winter, but. And you know, I'm really aiming for the. For the gold next year. And so I really buried my head deep, deep into my training and was loving it because I love, I love training. My coach loved me, like, keeping pushing. I want more training and more mileage. Give me more, give me more. And I felt really great that season. Up until about February, I did a personal best on my 5K, ergo test. And then February, I got ill. And touch wood, I very, very rarely get ill. So I was very annoyed that I managed to pick up a cold that turned into a chest infection again at that point. I never actually had a chest infection before, so I was still trying to push through the training of it until luckily my husband was like, what are you doing? Because he used to suffer quite a lot with illnesses like, you can't train through a chest infection. You just have to rest. And I'm like, okay. That wasn't really aware even very long time at that point. But I didn't. Didn't really respect it enough. Anyway, I got back over that. But then I felt like I was trying to do catch up. You can never catch up with training that you miss. You just got to accept it's two weeks of, you know, have gone by and. And so I got back into training, but I still just wasn't right. But I kept pushing through it, kept pushing through it, pushing more, training on, and was selected to race a single again that season. We had trials every April. So did the trials and one, but not as convincingly as I should have done. And then we had a big block of training before the first regatta, which would have been in the May time. And I was just. I kind of was. My coach, like, you do look really tired. And I'm like, I am tired. You know, we're coming off, we're going to taper soon for that race and we'll be fine. But I just put myself in Such a big hole that the taper didn't make any difference. Basically just made me more tired because often when you've been training hard and then you have a rest and a bit of a taper, you feel worse for it. And I raced the first regatta and finished fifth, but absolutely had to bury myself just to finish fifth. And I was like, okay, I've done a lot of training this winter and I should be faster than this and what's going on? And I was tearing my technique apart. Okay, like looking at the video over and over, like, is it technique? Like what, you know, what, where is this underperformance coming from? And fundamentally it was just, I was exhausted and my body had nothing. And you know, in a single, it's only you. So if, if you're not on fire, the boat's, you know, it's just not moving. But I kind of was still my body was, was telling me in different ways and I wasn't really listening to it until I raced them. Henley race, another World cup, which I didn't do very well in Henley Regatta when I lost in the semi final to a good scholar, but somebody who I shouldn't be beating, who shouldn't be beating me. I remember being in the, my rowing club, Leander Club after that race and just being on the floor and in tears and I was like, I just could not fathom why, where, where my speed had gone. And it was at that point that I had some. My body was telling me I wasn't right in terms of my periods were irregular and things like that. So it was stuff that I think at that point I probably was like, when that started happening, I was like, okay, this definitely something. My body's really telling me something's not right. Obviously my hormones are all over the place and my body was struggling. So I finally went to our team doctor and she's like, vicki, why haven't you come to me earlier? Like, you've obviously been struggling for a long time and your body is really not right. And so at that point they were like, okay, so we're quite close to the Europeans. You're going to have to sit at the Europeans and just take a bit of a rest and take the training right down and hopefully your body will recover in a couple of weeks. And I did that and my body didn't feel any better. If anything, it felt worse. My scores were getting worse. So I just think I put myself in such a, such a hole that obviously there's a peaks and troughs of training. Right? You have to be tired and then you come out of it. But I just dug, dug, dug so deep that I couldn't come out of it. So that basically was the end of my season, 2018. And I was told by the doctor, right, you need to have a month off. And that was a month off. She meant no training. And I was like, what? Like, I couldn't comprehend not doing any training for a month. I'm like, I'm going to get so unfit. And she's like, yes, but there's no option. Like, you. You know, you. You've taken two weeks to do a lot lighter training and you're in anything, you've got worse. And I. And I did feel absolutely like every. It felt like every cell of my body was tired. Like, it was that kind of, you know, really debilitating fatigue. So I had no option. If I was gonna. If I wanted to get back for 2019, which was Olympic qualifying year, I had to. I had to take a month off, which was mentally very difficult. I remember my husband saying, you know, you think of it as a training camp in recovery, because you have to. If you. If you're going to struggle to do it, you need to think of it in a way that you understand. So that's the way I understood it. And so I just did. Rested for a month, essentially spent. Went on holiday, spent some time with my family and friends that we don't normally get to do. Made sure I was eating a lot, so I put on a bit of weight, which I felt uncomfortable with at the time, but it was what my body needed. And my body did recover, but it did take a month. And then. And then the. Probably the worst part of it was building back up then, because it was like, yes, you can start training, but training is not. It wasn't training. It was 30 minutes of, like, very low intensity on a bike, like turning your legs over for a week and then putting it to 45 minutes and adding a bit of weights in and then building up so. So slowly. Um, but, yeah, so it took me a long time to get. To get back to being able to train properly.

Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? A month does feel like a very, very long time. And I know that I'm no good at taking a month off. I kind of do try and take two weeks off off a year, but that's about it. But I was just. I was just interested because I was reading Bradley Wiggins, his book just recently, and they, as professional cyclists, historically, kind of before Team sky, tried to Sort of go about it in a very more scientific way. Pretty much it was the norm for cyclists to take almost two months off at the end of the season.

And. And.

But even after Team sky had kind of revamped it, Bradley was still taking five weeks off at the end of a season before, you know, not getting on a bike for five weeks, I was like, I can't imagine me doing that, let alone, you know, I just thought it was incredible. So I'm going to ask you that same question again about Tokyo. All the highs and lows of Tokyo.

Oh, wow. I mean, Tokyo itself was. Was crazy. But I think some key things going into that was getting fit again in 2019 before the World Championships. And I was way behind the curve that. That season we first started racing. I was way behind the speed where I needed to be, and I was like, you know, I'm not even going to qualify this boat at this point. So I had to do. I had to figure out how to get my fitness back very quickly that season and managed to qualify the boat in 2019, finishing fourth at the World Championships, having started at the Europeans as seventh at the beginning of that year. So had climbed the ranks quickly, but just about in time. So. But that was a year that the chief coach at the time, who was Jurgen Grobler, who'd just taken over the women's team as well as coaching the men's team, was questioning whether he thought I was quick enough to go to the single in Tokyo. So leading into the World Championships in 2019, it was like, okay, I need to. I want to do well for me, but I also need to prove to him that he can back me to be a medal contender for Tokyo. So I managed to do that in the World Championships in 2019 and qualify the boat, the single, for the Olympics, which is the first time it'd been done in 20 years. So that was a big thing at the time for me. And then it was like, okay, now we're building into 2020. You know, this is. This is it. I'm. You know, I've proved that I'm good enough to go to the Olympics. And single. This has been my dream for. For my whole running career, really. And this is what, three years of training in the single with my coach, Paul Reedy. We created a really good relationship. Right now it's Olympic year, let's go kind of thing. And then, obviously, Covid happened and the whole world shut down, and then the Olympics were postponed. We got sent home from training just after our Olympic trials. We'd all been selected and for the, for the start of the season anyway, the Olympic season. And then it was, right, go home, not sure how long this is going to last. And then we were at home then, obviously for the rest of the, of the season, essentially. And the Olympics were postponed, I think maybe a week after we'd gone back, back home from the training base. And so we were just training out of. Training out of garages, gardens, kitchens, whatever. And when the, when the Olympics were postponed, I kind of had mixed emotions, really. I, I was obviously disappointed, but then I also saw it as, okay, well, it's an opportunity in a way. Like, I hadn't had the best winter that season. Actually. I wasn't happy with my Olympic winter's training. So I was like, okay, well, this is an opportunity to do my Olympic winter again. And, you know, actually this might be a good opportunity for me. And it's an extra because I knew Tokyo was going to be my last year, last Olympics. It was like, oh, it's an extra year to row, so it could be worse. Um, and yeah, so it was the lockdown, was I actually the training aspect, I didn't mind it because I was used to training on my office. I was trained in a big team, but I fundamentally was in the boat on my own most of the time. So I didn't find the training at home on my own hard. Really. I kind of quite enjoyed it. It was very much. It was just going. It was like training camp for months and it was kind of like quite nice. It just really back to the basics of just, just training, recovering, spending time with my husband as well. Right. We just, we have big chunks of time apart, so we actually had the, you know, the longest period that we'd ever had back to back days together for three months or something. It was in total or four months. And so it was nice to spend time with him at home. So. And the weather was lovely. So we got out. I got out on my bike. So normally I don't train on the roads in Olympic year because for the risk of falling off and breaking something, which was funny because then in, in lockdown, the weather was really good in that first lockdown, if you remember. And so I was enjoying going out on my bike again because, oh, the Olympics have been postponed. If something happens, I've got a year to recover or, you know, fix something. And then inevitably what did happen was I got hit by a bike, a van, and come off my bike and broke my elbow in the May.

Quite a fundamental part of A rower's physique.

Yes. Yeah. And elbows are notoriously not very easy to rehab either. Getting full extension back can be quite challenging. So it wasn't great that I came off and broke my elbow. I think my. My physio and strength and conditioning coach, because my upper body is something I always struggle to keep mass on and also to keep strong. So she was like, now you can't even load your upper body for two months. You know, what am I going to do? How am I going to build you back? So I think they were tearing their hair out a bit, but I was quite relaxed about it, if I'm surprisingly. Um. But yeah, so got that all fixed and. But then spent the rest of the season. It wasn't really a season, right. So we didn't race or anything, but we were training up until the end of July, I think, and then we were going to have a break before we went back for the next Olympic season. Take two. Um, so I spent the rest of that seven weeks on the. What bike, doing lots of hours there. Um, but made some great gains physically, actually, even though I couldn't use my body at all. And then we had our break and then we started the 2021 season. But obviously through that whole 2021 season, Covid made it very difficult with training because you're never sure when the next lockdown was going to happen. Would we be able to still train at our base? Like if we weren't training at Caversham, we wouldn't be able to be out on the water and, you know, as much as you can keep. Rowing is a sport that actually quite in lockdown. Unlike the swimmers. For example, you can recreate rowing on the indoor rowing machine quite easily. It's not obviously the same as the boat, but it's still the patterning of the rowing stroke, whereas swimming, you know, if you can't get a pool, you can't recreate it. So we were quite lucky in that respect. But, you know, time out on the boat was. Was really. It would impact our speed. So we. It was really important we got back in the boat. But 2021, it was winter season, was good up to a point, and then I had a bit of a virus over Christmas and that led into the January camp, which is a really important winter camp, and I couldn't train properly out there. I was just struggling. My heart rate, my training heart rate was just high and there was nothing came back on my bloods. But I just, I knew I was fighting something because my body, you know, and it's just reactive to just walking upstairs. Your heart rate will be reactive.

Do you use the heart rate as, as a measure as to, you know, whether you're unwell or what other thing, how else do you use heart rate?

Yeah, I never used, it was only, probably from 2015 onwards I used heart rate and training and it's definitely something that as a team we've used more. This, this last Olympiad in Tokyo, everyone, most, most people would use a heart rate and the physiologist would really encourage you to use heart rate because we, we take lactate lactates for our kind of low level work and it's always like, we want to be under, under two minimals for our kind of steady state stuff, but we can't. It's hard to have lactates all the time. And so heart rate is something that you can measure constantly. So yes, we do use heart rate in training, but it's only been, you know, in the last five or six years I probably have used it properly. So yeah, resting heart rate and also training heart rate is really important if you're not feeling right and it's quite a good measure of things. So, yeah, so, yeah, I just wasn't really right in January. So it was, again at that point I was really questioning everything because again, there was fresh doubts then over the Olympics happening again and I wasn't feeling great like emotionally, physically, mentally. I was pretty, pretty tired in that January. It had been a long four and a half years and you know, Olympiad four years is pretty exhausting and adding an extra year onto that when you're later in your career. I was really struggling with motivation and I, I was questioning whether I even wanted to, wanted to commit again. I remember being on that training camp and not being able to train properly and calling my mum up and just even doesn't matter how old you get, you're always call your mum right when you're having bad times. But I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. And she's like, okay, that's fine. And obviously he's like, of course I do, obviously I do. But I just, but I genuinely was really in a bad place and I just wanted to come home from that camp because if I can't train probably on a training camp, it's the worst place to be because you just sat in your hotel room doing minimal training and you just like, you know, just. And seeing everyone else doing the training, it's really mentally difficult. But you know, me and my coach worked well Together that and worked through it. And, you know, we talked about, okay, if the Olympics are cancelled, what, you know, what are we going to deem as a successful year? So we thought about the what ifs as well. And that for me, that was quite important. Some people didn't want to talk about what if it was cancelled, but for me it was actually, it helped me mentally to be like, what if? So we talked about what we'd potentially target if the Olympics were canceled, but luckily they weren't. But there was doubts for a long time. And that 20, 21 season, I think I started reasonably well in the regattas, but we only had two regattas before the Olympics, so not that much time to test, test my speed. But, you know, all the girls I was racing, most of them I'd raced before in, in one year or the other, and some of them for the whole Olympiad. So yeah, it was, it was a very, it was a hard year to keep motivation high, especially in the winter, because it was, you know, Covid was making. I think it's like, what do you. It's very interesting. It made me realize how much I got from being around my friends and family and how much energy they gave me. So when rowing was really kicking my ass, I would, I would go to them. And I think when you didn't have the ability to do that, it found was. Made me realize how much I relied on them to give me energy and then leading the closer we got to the Olympics. The whole time there was so much, you know, you were worried about getting Covid all the time, because if you got it, especially three months out of the Olympics, you have to have a negative PCR to go to the Games. And there'd been people who'd had Covid over that winter. And then PCR test was still positive two to three months later. So, you know, three months out from the Games, you're thinking, if I get Covid now, it could be games over. You're having to be so careful. And it was exhausting because I'm not that kind of person that's really like worried about that kind of thing. And I, you know, I just, and it was just very frustrating to have to be super, super careful all the time and not spending time indoors with people. And my husband as well, obviously we're living together and he felt like he was going to work, he works in medical devices. He was going to hospitals and going and just getting on with his job. But he was feeling like he doesn't want to bring it home to me. And it was just added a whole new level of stress that was just Olympic year is stressful enough, but you put Covid on top of that and it made it more stressful. Um, and then we went on training camps. I any you didn't want any form of potential contact. So great thing about being single, you don't have to have contact with anybody else. But that meant that, you know, literally I was in a room on my own. I would eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner on my own, like around everybody, but socially distanced. And so it was quite isolating and.

Quite a lonely experience.

Yeah, and just you look forward to having like those breakfasts with your teammates and just chatting around the table after you've come in. You know, I love the rowing on my own, but you want to have that kind of team experience as well just in between training sessions. And I wasn't able to have that. So that made the single quite a lot more isolating than the best of times. But I had a great camp, couple of camps leading into the Games and I was feeling confident going to the Games. But I also was very aware that the, the field was massively deep and There was probably 10 scholars that were capable of being in the final, the final of six. So I knew the semi final was going to be the biggest race, like, yeah, the biggest race of Mike, you know, that Olympiad to date really, because just to get in the final, you know, the semi is the worst race in a way because it's all or nothing. If you don't, if you're not in the final, you can't win a medal. So, you know, the semi is, yeah, it's the most stressful one and the most nerve wracking. And I knew it would be like that. Um, but I went in confident in my speed but, but was very much trying. You know, me and my coach talked about what success looked like at the Games for us and I remember we talked about, you know, result wise trying to differentiate between performance and results. So performance is how, you know, he wanted me to go there and show everything I was capable of as an athlete and my whole, my whole overall performance to be what I was, what I was capable of. But the result for both of us was a medal. That was what our idea of success was purely in result terms. And I went to the, got to the games and the heat and the heat and the. So I had, it was an eight day regatta and single you have, you have four races because there's 30 odd entries. So you have a heat quarter final Semi, final and final. Um, and there was obviously issues with the weather as well, so things, the timetable was moved around. So I ended up having racing my quarterfinal and then was only meant to have two days to race the semifinal, which I knew the two days would be torture because waiting two days to race the biggest, biggest race and the most nerve wracking race is torturous. Ended up being three days. Um, and then we, we didn't have a day between the semi and the final. So it was going to be a 23 hour turnaround between semi and final.

Anyway.

So those three days, I remember being on the phone to my husband and actually just crying, but just because the nerves and the stress was like overwhelming. And I was very aware that I knew how to control the thoughts, I knew how to get myself in the right place on the start line, but that I couldn't do that every single hour for those three days. So there was times where it would just be overwhelming because it meant so much like what me and my coach had been through to get to that point in this project, the ups and downs we'd had, the times we'd really had to fight back and things like that. It meant so much and it was. And I could tell he was nervous as well, my coach. Like, he was behaving slightly differently to how he normally does and he's pretty normally very, very calm, which is great for me because I'm a bit of a hothead at times. But I could tell that it was getting to him as well. So we had a couple of conversations that are a bit more edgy than we normally would, which I was like, you know, you can't, you can't lose it. Because I'm trying to, you know, if you lose it, I'm not sure I can hold it together kind of thing. So, yeah, three days of absolute torture. Um, it's the first thing that you think about before you get to last thing you think about for your. The first thing you think about when you wake up that race and playing it over in your mind, but being aware that all that is wasted energy. So trying to, you know, trying to kind of manage that those kind of, those thoughts were. It's exhausting. So it came to the morning of the semifinal and I was able to get myself mentally in a really good place. I'd done a lot of mindfulness work, meditation stuff in those five years actually leading into Rio as well, which really helped me get into a. Because I always wanted to be on the start line and be very present in the moment and have that sense of, you know, when I start, it's just a sense of flow. And I've done this before and I know I can, you know, I know I can physically deliver, I know I can technically deliver. But what gets in the way at that level is your head. It's always in the mind. It gets in the way of performance.

I was going to ask you about this. What Is there a specific process that you go through when you're on the start line? And do you want to just quickly describe what that process is? Because I dare say it's useful in other scenarios rather than just the start line.

Yeah. So like I said, I've done a lot of meditation and mindfulness practice. So in a lot of that, um, especially leading into regattas, it's all about putting myself on the start line in my practice and so having the sensations, the sights, the set, the smells, the, the feelings that I have on the start line. But making my go to is always to feel how my feet felt in the shoes. So a way of bringing your mind, you know, adrenaline makes your mind go to crazy places and not helpful places. And so it was about bringing my mind to the present moment. And if I'm, if I'm in the present moment, I know that I can deliver my best race. Um, so it was all about getting there. So I'd done a lot of that practice over the years and obviously in lots of races as well. At that point I'd had big races leading into that, that I'd stepped up and, and delivered my best performance when I really needed it. And that was all down to that. The ability to control my mindset on the start line, um, and leading into the race. And I always write a day plan out so, because especially when, when you're nervous as well, you forget the most basic stuff like your socks or your stroke coach or something like that. Something that you have literally every day you go out training, but you'll forget it on race day because your head's away with the fairies or whatever that I'd write out literally by minute to minute what I would do at each point leading into the race. And so by my warmup, my meditation practice, my warm up on the water and then how, how it would go. Um, and so that's how I, that's how I would do every single race day. And I've done that over many, many years. It was very practiced. Um, but obviously when you, when you, the bigger, the bigger the race, the more they come, those, it comes under a Real strain and it's really that how robust that kind of system is. But I trusted my. I had a real. What was really great for me in the last couple of years in the single. I had a real trust in myself that I was able. When the big races came, yes, sometimes the nerves were all consuming and not very pleasant, even though I remember saying to myself, you're going to miss this when you don't have it anymore. Even though it's time, you are really going to miss it. Um, but I trusted myself that if I did the right processes, I'd always, always done. I would, I would start and finish the race in the. And be able to deliver what I knew I was capable of, which is the main, the main thing. Um, so I, yeah, I got into that place for the semi. It was. It was hard to get to get there, but I got there and was able. The semi final the. Was actually the best singles race I've ever done. And that was awesome because I had to bring that race because I was up against. There was five of us in that final that were capable. It was basically like a world championship final because five girls in that race were capable of being in the final. The conditions were tough, which made it a bit easier for me in terms of a couple of the girls weren't doing as well with the conditions as I was. But I had to beat the American scholar who had never beaten before to make it to the. To the final. I ended up coming. You just had to come top three. But I ended up. And that was the priority. Just do what you need to do to come top three. Don't do anything crazy. Just do what you need to do to be top three. But I knew it would take my best race to be able to do that. And I ended up managing to just overhaul the Austrian to get second. And it was. The relief was unbelievable to be right. I'm in the Olympic final. This is, you know, this is what I've done it for, to be in the final, to have the chance to race for a medal in the single skull in the boat I dreamed of and the boat I fought really hard to stay in these last five years. It was. Yeah, it was an amazing feeling to get into that, into that final and. And then the final was 23 hours later. And the, the relief and the high of racing that semi, it was really hard to come down. You know, you wanted to come down quickly so you could recover, but it was after a race that big, with that much pressure, it's really hard to Come, come down in that amount of time and as much as I was fit, so my recovery was going to be, I knew I couldn't be any fitter to recover quick, quicker. I always know my top end power is something I struggle with and that takes me longer than some people to recover fully. So the more. I didn't sleep great the night before the Olympic final and to be fair, like I said, very well for our Olympic final. So in Rio, so it's not always, it's not always an Olympic final, you sleep badly before. But that one, I didn't have the best sleep and we were in the village as well and there's lots of noises and stuff outside. So. But the morning, I woke up in the morning feeling I'm pretty tired. But you've got to, you know, this is Olympic final day, so pull your socks up. And you're just going to have to ignore the fact that you're a bit tired because everyone's a bit tired because everyone raced their semi final yesterday too. So, um, yeah, but it was very much like, yes, slap yourself around the face like this. Game time. You know, this is, this is, this is the one that I've wanted to race for years. Like, this is it. Um, and I had an amazing final in the race in the final. It wasn't as good as. It wasn't quite as good as the semi final and I definitely didn't have the same out and out power out the start that I had in the semi and I was very aware I probably had to come down onto pace a little bit earlier than I would have liked to in that race in the final because, just. Because managing your energies over the whole race is important in any boat, but definitely the single. Um, but one thing I, my coach said going into it, you're going to have to have the biggest sprint of your life. And I was, I was going into the. And the sprinting was definitely not my forte. I'm more of a diesel engine rather than like a petrol V8, so I, but I was going in, we were going in the, into the race to get a bronze medal. We were racing for the bronze medal and I knew it was the Austrian scholar that I, I would be racing for that medal. And I was in the lane next to her, so I was very much focused on her. The actual whole field was tighter in the end in the final than I thought it would be. So. But I was very much engaged in racing her and she went out hard like she did in the semi final, but I was very Confident. Right. I'm going to reel her back in in the second half and I did to a point. I think I drew up level and then she had a little bit extra at the end and she basically beat me by the same amount as I beat her the day before war. Yeah, so she got, she got the medal and I came away with, with fourth.

That is fourth the worst place to come away with.

No, fifth is worse, sixth is worse. People can say fourth is fourth and silver but actually that's, that's the thing where I think later in my career I got round to thinking about the difference between result and performance and I think that's really important because especially in a sport where it's, you know, you can't slow anyone else down. Yes, you can tactically race slightly differently to get upper hand potentially, but it's about making how quick you can be A to B and my performance. I raced the two best races of my career within 48, within 24 hours of each other in the semi and the final at the Olympic Games under the biggest pressure. And I showed everybody what I was capable of and everything that I had built up to that 14 years from when I started rowing to that, that Olympic regatta, I, everything I'd learned, I actually, I was able to put in place and, and, and race to, to the best of my ability. Which you know what, I'm very grateful to be able to step away from rowing now and say that's what I was able to do at the last, in my last two races. And yes, it was a fourth place but it was the best finish of a British scholar at the Olympic Games. So I'm proud of that. And yeah, I'm just proud of the performance and the result. Yes, it was hard to take in a way, but I couldn't have done any more. And my coach says the same as well. So we're both completely on the same page about that, which is a great thing as well.

Yeah, no, brilliant. And you're absolutely right, you can control your performance, you can't control the result because you can't control what's around you, can you? So let's switch to ultra running. I know you've done, we haven't talked about running at all yet, but I know you've done your first 50 miler and so what are, what are your, given that you're quite goal orientated, what are your goals in the. Now that you've switched to ultra running and how have you found adapting from rowing to running?

Yeah, so I've always Loved, loved running but didn't do much of it with rowing. And I've read a lot of ultra books. I've always been quite, quite interested in ultra sports and the mentality of doing stuff for crazy amounts of hours. And I've met Anna Troupe a few years ago and realized that she was into running. So I caught up with her for a coffee when I got back from Tokyo and said I want to do a bit of running, I want to try an ultra. Ultras that kind of appeal to me in terms of it's completely. Rowing is painful for very, very intensely painful for minutes whereas ultras are uncomfortable for hours. So I was very interested in the mindset change and how you, you know. The longest training session I think I'd ever done was seven hours on a bike outdoors. On a what bike but going beyond that I'd never done it. So this ultra, it was actually 47 miles but it took me well I wasn't, I wasn't quick but it took me just over nine hours. So but comprehending well rowers especially not very good on our feet. You know we sit, we sit down a lot of when we're rowing and then also we sit down in between rowing to rest our legs. So the idea of standing on my feet for nine hours is mind boggling to me let alone running. So it's very, completely different to what I was used to. But Anna was great because she gave me advice in terms of how to go about it. She said, you know, your ego is going to tell you you can run for 75 kilometers, 47 miles but fundamentally yes, you've got a great engine from rowing but your running chassis, you know, is not there. And she's absolutely right. But I've done quite a lot, I've done a few long runs so I've done a few 20 milers, 22 miles leading into it but no back to back big days because I'd just get niggles if I did that understandably because I hadn't done much running and I was trying to do some, some long runs. So she gave me good, good advice to do like a run walk strategy because she said if you try and run the whole thing inevitably you'll blow and have to walk and then feel like you know, you failed. Whereas if you go in doing a run walk strategy it's in your plan and therefore it will be, hopefully it will be more enjoyable and rewarding. So I went in with an eight minute run. I say run shuffle, two minute walk strategy and I literally did that. Every. Basically the whole way through until the last 2k, which I managed to shuffle the whole way to the finish line. But it was amazing because it was really well. It paced it really well. And mentally it was quite nice to have that plan of like, you know, you had to. I was on that. In the walking. That's when I ate.

And then.

So it was. I like the structure of it and I think that comes from the rowing, the structure of how I. How I did the. Managed the. And it broke down the time as well, really well. And I never really got bored. And the great thing was, you know, you chat to people on these long runs as well that I'd heard about. Obviously this is my first experience and everyone was so friendly. So you'd like chat away and then. And then, you know, you separate or whatever, be at an aid station. And then it was only the last couple of hours I actually put my music in. Um, but it worked the strategy really well because I passed a lot of people in the second half, which was obviously, it's really nice to. You know, you're getting really starting to hurt, you're actually starting to pass people. So it's quite rewarding. So it was a really good, good strategy. So I really thank Anna for that because it made the whole thing a lot more like, enjoyable. And I actually loved the whole. The whole way. And I remember being the last like 10k or so. I kind of was a little bit. A bit away with the fairies. I think I was quite. I think it's the euphoria. I found myself like laughing and stuff at myself. I fell over a couple of times because you'd obviously dragging your feet. I just found the whole thing quite hilarious. Which was. Which was. It was an interesting experience. I was very aware of where I was at, but yeah, it was. It was an interesting. Yeah, it was a really interesting experience, but I loved it. It was a great. A great first foray into ultra running and then I have entered another one. But if I'm honest, I'm starting a new job in January and I don't want to get obsessed because I was obsessed with running for so long. I want to try and just enjoy, you know, having a bit more freedom outside of. Outside of sport, having weekends and having, you know, being able to go out and socialize and things like that. So at the moment I don't have a very structured to my training or anything like that. I'm just kind of. I'm still on the indoor row machines. I like to. Keeping that element of Stuff going. I'm still doing some weights, I'm keeping up with the running and obviously as I get closer I'm gonna, I've. I've entered a race in April, um, and if everything goes right leading into that I'll do some more, more specific running training and so hopefully some back to backs going into that. But my goals right now are just to enjoy a different sport. And the, the, the first Ultra was about finishing it. That was success. It wasn't about, you know, I didn't know where I would finish and it was not really about that. And in a way rowing has always been about the, you know, so focused on the performance and the result and everything like that. Whereas this is quite nice to just go and challenge myself and it'd be a completely internal competition about rather than it being an external thing. So that's where I'm at with it at the moment and you know, I might do another one and not really enjoy it and think, oh that's not for me. But I, at the moment I'm enjoying the running. So.

Yeah.

Brilliant. And I think it's brilliant that you embraced the run walk run strategy. I've talked about that quite a lot on the podcast. In fact my. The very first person I interviewed on the podcast was Jeff Galloway, the guy who invented the run walk run strategy in the, in the US running coach back in I think about the 70s, which is why it's also known as Jeffing. So last question for you. You mentioned that you found ultra running books inspiring and you've enjoyed reading them. What books? And it can be rowing, Ultra running can be both. What books have you found really particularly inspiring and what do you find yourself recommending to other people?

Yeah. So one of the first ultra books I won was Dean. Is it Dean Carnazes. There's Ultra. Is it called Ultramarathon man or. It's a long.

Something like that. I haven't actually read that, but I know exactly what you mean. But I haven't read it. So yes, something like that.

That one was really good. That was one of the first ultra running ones I read. And then Rich Rolls. Rich Rolls. Finding Ultra Finding Ultra. Brilliant book, I think. Yeah, his story's super inspiring. So that one was really great. And then the most recent one I've read is the Art of Resilience by Rod Ross Edgeley, the guy who swam around Great Britain. I mean.

Yeah. Also crazy.

Yeah. So that was amazing and I. The resilience piece is something that I'm really interested in about like you know, how people build that resilience and what actually is resilience and how does that look for different people? So I thought that book was really interesting because that's obviously what it's about essentially and just the level he went to in that swim, it's mind boggling. So yeah, just finished that book. That was, that was a really cool one.

Fantastic. Yeah, I love that book. And in terms of rowing, are there any books from the, from the rowing community that you found inspiring?

I've read all, you know, the big names. I've read Sistee's, I've read Matt Pinson's, Tim Foster's got one. And then obviously Catherine's autobiography was, was. Yeah, I read that as soon as it came out and then.

Is there one that stands out for you though?

I think Catherine's. Because she, it's the way she writes. She's a very intelligent woman as well as all her other attributes and so she writes so wonderfully and so I think that would be the one that stands out to me. And yes, she obviously my teammate so I'm going to plug her book.

Slightly biased towards that. Yeah, well, you know, but understandably so Victoria, it's been absolutely brilliant chatting to you. What an amazing career in rowing. I can't wait to see where you end up with the ultra running as well. So many brilliant learning points from your stories and yeah, I wish you every success in the future. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

You can find out more about victoria@victoria thornley.com and also her Twitter and Instagram handles are both Vicky Thornley GB. So what did you make of the interview with Victoria Claire?

Yeah, it was, it was good. I actually, I love her story from the beginning, like where she sort of came from and I think it's really interesting to see how athletes are so competitive and Absolutely, you know, she was so dedicated to being a champion somehow or being a success. And you actually, right from the very beginning you kind of heard that through her kind of starting out with show jumping and what she wanted to achieve and how she kind of moved herself forward really. So that's the real big bit I took away is the kind of just wanting to succeed.

Absolutely. I think she, she was a, she's a very determined. She was always going to succeed at something.

Yeah, yeah.

But it was being given the right opportunity.

Yeah, yeah.

And what else, what else did you pick up from the interview?

So actually a couple, a couple of things. So one of the first things that she was talking about is kind of not being an athlete right at the very beginning. And I actually, that's really interesting to me because essentially, like, if you look at the definition of what an athlete is, an athlete is anyone who's relatively proficient in sport or exercise. And actually, when you're riding a horse, you are an athlete. It's just you're trained in a different way. And she was talking about her connection between. And you asked her a couple of questions, actually, about her kind of having a feel for the water in the boat and that you've got obviously something underneath you and that's the same as, you know, riding a horse. You know, it's all about kind of, you know, learning that kind of relationship. And actually, if you think about it, I was thinking actually if you think about. About anything you do, it's like riding a bike as well, isn't it? You've got to learn how that reacts underneath you as well. And although she's, you know, she's obviously into ultra running, I just thought in my head, I was thinking, you know, that's interesting how. How you also do that from. From riding a bike.

Yeah.

So she might.

We might see her ultra cycling soon.

Who knows? Who knows? But yeah, I think. And we can go off onto a whole different tangent of what you actually learn from like riding a horse as well, because horses themselves are athletes. And it's a really interesting relationship there as well. But yes, so when she sort of first started talking about kind of where she got to with her career in. With sort of show jumping and then the modeling in the middle, I wasn't expecting that. I don't know about you.

No, not at all. But actually with her height, it makes a lot of sense. We were talking just before we started recording about body composition and what she was talking about there. So particularly from a nutritional point of view, what were your takeaways on that?

Yeah, it's really interesting to me because as part of working with an athlete, we often take as kind of our kind of, you know, first measures and across the season, body composition. And with that. So that the method of measuring we use is Isaac, which is like an international standard for measuring your somatotype and your body composition. And we don't do it at the level at which she had her profiling done when she. When they kind of said, yeah, try out rowing. But that was real interest to me because that's when you're taking all of those measurements from a body type, that's how they can kind of put people into categories and say, will you Be good at this because essentially your body makeup is exactly. What if we trained you correctly, exactly what kind of our top performing athletes in rowing, for example, are, which I find, I find fascinating. Bodyconsulting, composition and actually just to kind of, you know, if you look at any sports, you can see like, if you look at like a female gymnast, what they look like. I mean what they look like now is quite different. But they're really muscular, they, they're quite little, they're compact. And then if you look at. So if you take that into the world of running, for example, you know, if you, if you looked at a marathon, like a road marathon runner, they're all like long, lean and linear, you know, and although we can, we can all do these sports, but it's who excels and who gets to that high performing level. So it wasn't a surprise when, you know, with her height from her modeling when rowing kind of came out because her, her limbs must be kind of long levers. So long, long arms, long legs. And she was talking about that, wasn't she, in terms of coordinating them as a child?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting because I've read a number of books like Outliers and, and the Anders Ericsson stuff around peak performance and all that sort of stuff. And there's a lot of research that says, look, people aren't just aren't born gifted. It comes down to not just the 10,000 hours, but the 10,000 hours of purposeful practice. But equally if you've got two people. I always think of basketball as the classic example. You know, I could put in as many hours as somebody that was 6 foot 5 tall. I could put in twice as many hours probably. And I'm probably, I'm never going to play in the NBA because I'm an too short. So you know, it. There is, I think it is absolutely interesting how, yes, you've got to put in the purposeful practice, but you also want to identify the people that are naturally going to be gifted at a particular sport. So mine would be more the jockey side of things as opposed to.

That. And a gymnast actually, somatotype wise, I probably should have been a gymnast. I think.

There'S some research that I can't remember what I was listening to or reading, but research has showed that gymnasts actually end up being shorter as a result of their gymnastics. So if you took two identical twins, one of which did gymnastics and one of which didn't, the gymnast would end up shorter.

I mean, you know, you could go off on a really big tangent here, but it's really interesting actually looking at children who start. So if you look at gymnastics, they, they often start really young, a bit like dancing and how that actually changes, changes you in development as well and growth and. Yeah, it is, it's, it's really interesting. And I guess that's, you know, why the world of sort of measuring not just body composition in terms of muscle mass and fat, but actually, you know, in those larger assessments that they do, like the assessment that Victoria had done, you know, in that profiling, it's really interesting to be able to, to kind of give this kind of, you know, this somatotype, this sort of body type and what that's kind of suited to. And you know, if you take. So we were talking, you know, obviously she's kind of looking at sort of ultra running now and I'm not too sure like in ultra running whether there is a specific type actually. But I guess when you look at things like, like long distance triathlon, for example, you see all the different body types and of course we can all take part in it. But you know, that's, that's one of the great things about triathlon is you can really excel as a swimmer and probably your body type maybe is, is kind of more suited to that. But then you may be also really strong on the bike but not so great at the run and kind of vice versa. And I always find that really interesting when I'm working with athletes to kind of, you know, help them really kind of accept that as well and actually making the most out of your body, like, where can I actually excel?

And it's also interesting how there seems to be waves through the, through triathlon history where, you know, like the swimmers were doing better, then the cyclists were doing better and then the runners were doing better. And you know, you look at some people and go, well, they're really strong at the swimming and really strong running. And yeah, it is interesting how how different, different athletes do better through the different times. But I thought it was a really interesting interview with Victoria and she tells brilliant stories around the kind of trials and tribulations of each of the Olympics. So I really enjoyed chatting to her.

And kind of how hard, how hard cutting the world of top end sport is. You know, when she was talking about her drive to win was so great that it meant that, you know, I think when she was talking about going from the kind of singles, the skulls going down into the eights, you know, how she did disrupt things because ultimately she knew that she could excel in that crew.

Absolutely. Yeah. I thought that was really interesting and it showed. Yeah, it shows how difficult it is to win a medal even when you are one of the top people in your sport. So, no, really interesting. Right, well, good luck with the training. Have a great trip down to Cornwall.

Thank you.

I hope it doesn't put you off actually running the arc 50. I'm sure it won't.

I might come back with more sore feet, but, you know, I think that's fairly trained feet. Maybe. Maybe they'll get used to it by then.

Excellent.

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