Munich World Cup

Estevao Pape — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:07:43 +0000

I think the last report I sent was just after the nationals so a bit has happened from then to now. A quick synopsis. Trials happened in early March, I went head to head with Rob Waddell again and won the first race by just over 3sec. After seeing this and my result at the nationals the selectors decided they had seen enough and the rest of the week involved training and preparing for some time trials to prove I was going fast enough. I was selected in the single at the end of the week, Dick Tonks appointed coach and I had Emma Twigg, The Men’s Pair and Woman’s Quad as my training partners for the year. It was a little strange as out of the group that went to the Olympics in 2004 and Gifu in 2005 only Eric and myself remain, so a lot of young faces and new team mates. The team is of reasonable size with 22 athletes being selected and both the woman and lightweights out number the 5 heavy weight men selected which is a bit of a change.

Winter training has gone well, the younger ones are certainly full of enthusiasm and I have enjoyed training more than I have for a number of years, with the boat going really well. Since trials training has been the priority but I have also had a number of other commitments to keep me busy. In March I went to England for the week to meet up with the worlds top 8 scullers and we rowed an 8+ together in the Head of the River Race. Was a lot of fun and amazing how well the boat came together with 8 people all doing different things. In the 5 days we had together we seemed to come to a pretty good compromise putting rivalry aside, got the boat going well and won the race by 4 seconds, this completes a clean sweep for me, winning all the heads races on the Thames at least once.

The rest of the winter I did a fair amount of travel around the country speaking at various events including the West End 125th Jubilee, which was a great evening catching up with all the club mates past and present. There were a few tough weeks as I tried to fit training in around my commitments. My body has held up fairly well so far, although I’m older my body in the most part has held up well with only a few little niggles (some very weird) along the way. We have moved into our new high performance centre at Karapiro, it is a great facility and has everything we need on one site, it is much more pleasant place to train and nice to finally have our own gym and be able to enjoy hanging out between sessions in the athletes room.

We have now finished winter training and are back in Europe for some more summer training, was about time too as was just getting cold at home and we have arrived in Munich to beautiful sunny warm weather. The world cup starts tomorrow so it will be our first chance to see where we are all placed coming from New Zealand. The first few days were a little tough as I picked up a skin infection on my scalp before I left NZ (told you there has been some weird things happening) this meant I was unable to touch or put pressure on one side of my head for the last 5 days which has meant a lot of pain and added with jet lag, not much sleep. Thankfully the worst is now behind me and im back to sleeping well, it hasn’t affected my training and I am feeling confident that I am in good shape and happy with my boat speed. By Sunday I will know for sure if that is good enough compared to my main competitors or if I have a lot of work to do to catch them by the Worlds in August.

Our program from here is to race the world cup Friday, Saturday and Sunday my races are around 11am Friday and Saturday and 10:30am Sunday (that’s European time so 9pm and 8:30pm respectively in NZ). The final races will be shown on Sky TV on Sunday night in NZ and Eurosport around Europe. To follow the heats and semis you can go to www.worldrowing.com look under results and live race viewer and you can watch the animated boats race in real time. The finals will be streamed free online, look at the links from the webpage if you cant get to see a TV.

After this weekend we train here for a few days then I head for Amsterdam to race in the Holland Beker regatta next weekend, it is then straight to the UK to Race at the Henley royal regatta 2-5th July, followed by the 3rd World cup in Lucerne the following weekend 10-12th July. So a lot of racing in the next few weeks to get me back up to speed and into race mode. After all that we will have a 6 week training camp in Switzerland and Poland before racing at the World Champs 23-30th August in Poznan. So the fun times are ahead and will be in touch with results as they go.

Mahe

Laststroke » taca do mundi

Munich World Cup

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