I started out at John O’Gaunt when I got into my secondary school, LRGS. I’d never really heard much about rowing when I did and I think it just seemed interesting and new to me at the time. Before that most of my sporting time was shared around between kayaking, athletics and running.
My first session saw me put in a training single, a giant version of the fine boats you see in the races and it had floats on the side to keep it stable. After a half session paddling about in this I had to swap into a single without floats due to the limited number of boats at the time. It was a steep learning curve to say the least but it worked!
The sessions back then were every Sunday and I remember having to leave church early to go rowing. Soon enough I’d been reeled in by the sport and had competed in my first regatta, an awesome experience I highly recommend regardless of age or ability. From then on the training increased as did my fitness and my success rate. Then exams hit and progress began to slow, something I definitely regret as you can always fit in training regardless of how busy you may think you are.
Throughout my summers, later on at school, I spent a lot of mornings in the gym with friends trying to increase our scrawny body types to slightly better builds. I’m still trying even now, weighing in at just about 71kg, I’m definitely lightweight. Rowing at school and for the club over the years saw me do a bit of coaching for both and so when the opportunity to go to New Zealand to coach at a school there arose, I jumped on it. Using the job as an excuse to go to a country I’d been wanting to visit for a long time.
So now here I am in New Zealand, a resident of St Paul’s Collegiate School and amongst other things, I’m a rowing coach here for a year. I’m half way through that year and it honestly doesn’t feel like it. The time has flown by with regattas, training camps and countless training sessions for the kids alongside my own training with Waikato Rowing Club. It’s got to be said, when I came out here I expected to do a lot of travelling in my free time. Yet despite this I’ve somehow ended up joining up to one of the local clubs, WRC, and now my time is taken up by training harder than I ever trained back home just so I can keep up with the rest of the squad when we go out in singles. Getting up early each morning to go train at Lake Karapiro with the sun rising throughout the session is an awesome experience and whilst I haven’t travelled about the country as much as I’d have hoped, I don’t regret it.
With Christmas only a few days away now, I’m looking forward to enjoying it the kiwi way, bbq’s on the beach, whilst also watching what I eat as the NZ club champs are just around the corner and I’ve a lot of catching up to do…
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