THE GB WOMEN’S PATH TO THE WORLDS PART SEVEN: ONE EYE TO THE FUTURE…

In July we had 2 girls who were MIA. Deb was missing due to a festival where she was seeing some unknown band (Mumford and Sons! J ) – originally the weekend had been booked for the previous one but then Georgie went and organised the wedding of the year for that weekend!  - and Suzie, who was on board an Icebreaker somewhere in the Artic,  Polar Bear spotting (well actually she was working taking important biological samples of something but I think that’s just her cover story!). So we invited some girls along who had shown an interest in becoming a part of the squad to give us numbers and try to fill the massive holes left by our team mates.

 

On a more serious note, after the Worlds some of the ladies will be taking retirement both temporarily and permanently, so we are looking to build on the team and start training as a squad. We believe in this way we can be even more successful and hopefully attend even more events. So we invited the girls down to train in a boat alongside us to see what we put ourselves through for this fantastic sport.

 

Amid the heat wave it seemed Nottingham was the only place where we had cloud and rain! This was probably a good thing as our first session on Saturday morning was Endurance, Dave Brown Style, and the much loved/hated milk bottle session!! 6 sets of 5x100m sprints, each 100m one more milk bottle would be thrown into the water (tied to rope) to create resistance. The spare person would rotate into the middle and do either squats or the plank!! The newbies had a go at this but then set about working on technique…we don’t blame them, baptism of fire or what!

 

That afternoon we had slalom sessions and were lucky enough to have stand-in coach ETIENNE-OLYMPIC-GOLD-MEDALIST-STOTT!! (and newly wedded husband to George CONGRATULATIONS!). His input was invaluable and it is so good having someone external watching from the bank.

 

 

That evening was spent in the pub having a lovely dinner, can you imagine us cooking for 11 people? Nothing would get decided on and we would all get so hangry (hungry anger) that we would end up having a massive fight! As it was, the pub was so busy and some of the girls waited about an hour for their dinner.

Day 2 we were joined by both our Coach Dave and Etienne! Double Whammy. Once again working on Slalom in the morning. But the big session  was our Head to Head training in the afternoon. Dave set us a one gate course which we had to race down repeatedly, GB boat verses the New Girls, and it shows we invited along some of the right people because we didn’t always win!(clearly I’m not going to show you photographic evidence of that!)  We had some awesome battles and the gate certainly made it anyone’s race.

The weekend was a great success, and although we now won’t see the Newbies until after the worlds, they have had a taste of what it is to train hard for the title of GB Ladies.