2 days to go till Poland

Since the last blog we have done some amazing pieces on the water, breaking all our personal bests! On Friday we had to do 2 x 1000m, with the first 250m flat out, the middle 500 capped at a 24 stroke rate and then the last 250m flat out. After the first one I was hurting…then we had to do a second one! I think that all of us wanted to throw up after the second one. But the times were amazing and the first 1000 was even close in overall time to our best ever. Not bad considering the rate was capped during the middle of the piece! This bodes well for racing in Poland! We had done so well that we were given the afternoon off from rowing and just had to do a pool session. So once that was done we were off to do some exploring of the local area.

I must say again that the buildings amaze me with how long they have lasted. It certainly shows me that the way things were built hundreds of years ago certainly were built better than anything now-a-days! We headed just down the road from our hotel to the local municipal buildings of Biandronno (which is the town our hotel is situated in). Here we found the Post Office and local town square fountain, so had a look around. We then walked down the road (sticking as close to the side buildings as possible, as there is no footpath) and stopped at a couple of buildings that had intrigued me every day that we passed by them. They looked like buildings that would have been used as housing a long time ago but were now used as out buildings as there were newer homes attached. But amazing structures!

We then had a look at the local church. As today was the Feast of the Assumption, I assumed that the church would be in use, but it wasn’t and the door was wide open, so we decided to have a look inside. It was absolutely beautiful with such an ornate ceiling with the most magnificent paintings. No one was around and the silence was deafening. A few minutes later we were asked to leave by a local woman who came in. We didn’t understand why but we assume it was because Lisa and I both had sleeveless shirts on, while Matt had open toed shoes. But we had our pictures and were quite willing to make a quick exit.

We then headed to the town of Gavirate which is the town the rowing club is located. Due to the fact that it was a public holiday, we were only able to find one café open, so stopped there to have a coffee. It was time to start heading back to the hotel, but Matt decided to take us on a tour of the area going through towns with names of Monate, Ispra and Brebbia. He was trying to find a building he had seen during his morning bike ride, but got us lost so we headed back to the hotel!

After dinner we were told that we could sleep in the following morning, do another pool session and we would row in the afternoon. It was nice not to have to get up and get going right away. We all met and had a leisurely breakfast. We met at the pool at 9:30 a.m., did our pool session and then I just sat in the sun reading a book. God it has been a long time since I just sat and read a book!

After lunch we headed to the course, where I must say it was extremely hot! It got up to 35 degrees, not one bit of wind and the water looked like glass. The humidity was so high that within 5 minutes we were all sweating so much we were soaked! We were told to just do a steady state row and we also did some drills, then got off the water. Tomorrow is another testing day with short race pieces.

We had a team dinner tonight where Ray Ebert (team manager), Andrew Matheson and Noel Donaldson all spoke to us about the upcoming days and then introduced our Olympic Gold Medallist David Crawshay to speak to us.

David is always awe-inspiring to listen to and this night was no different. He talked to all of us about having confidence in ourselves, our crew and coach, and to believe in our abilities. I know that I left that dinner believing in our crew more than I ever have!