Sun, seats and over-knowledgeable coaches

Although we may have been back from training camp for a couple of weeks now, during the cold, windy and often rainy Ely mornings we've often looked back fondly at the warmth, dryness and relative unearliness of the sessions we had on training camp. Now we've also got round to writing about it as the next stage of our trialling adventure.

Training camp is a massive learning curve: you learn  about rowing, you learn more about yourself and you also learn often a little bit too much about some of the other squad members. 11 days together all living in the same hostel and pretty much spending 24/7 together, can lead to plenty of in jokes (donde este moustache anyone??) and the coaches hearing far too many conversations they probably wish they hadn't (and we probably wish they hadn't either).

This year we left Souston behind and headed south to Banyoles in Spain in search of better food and weather. Banyoles has a beautiful lake surrounded by wooded hills, snow capped mountains in the distance, sun and our coach assured us no wind (we discovered otherwise, although thankfully only for one day and nothing compared to Ely's apocalyptic head winds). All in all it was perfect for us to get lots of good water time, working on technique and speed without other commitments of normal uni life hanging over us.

Not a bad place to row

Our search for better food wasn't as successful though, with a chef who deemed making our meals "more interesting" was of more importance than nutritional content. Bananas in lettuce, green unidentifiable sludge and the game of where's the carbohydrate in this meal, definitely made mealtimes more interesting; so I suppose he achieved his objective in some ways, returning home to our own cooking and "uninteresting" diets featuring carb, carb, more carb and protein has been a relief though.

Our training camp falls at a time of year close to crew selection. Everyone knows that camp is a great chance to prove to the coaches which crew you should be in, show them the changes you can make and to seat race yourself into your crew. This is a strange situation in many ways to be in, but it's testimony to the strength of friendships within in the squad and the friendly atmosphere that we can leave our  rivalries for seats on the water and not let them affect our friendships and the fun we have off it. This leave us free to have evenings together playing cards, watching films and "working" which may have once or twice turned into youtube watching sessions, one of our personal favorites being this one (we are training to be vets after all):

It goes without saying there were also lots of rowing videos watched too. Thankfully this year however, we were saved from the resurrection of the videos taken of us at the start of our first year of trialling (we like to think we've come a long way since those days).

A little different to Nottingham's weather conditions

We're now back in Cambridge, back in lectures with the additional excitement of lambing shifts at the university farm this term (at least we're good at being awake early in the mornings, past 10pm may be more of an issue). We've already had a trip away to Nottingham and were treated to some traditional Holme Pierrepont weather the perfect antithesis to the beautiful Banyoles sunset of a few weeks ago. We've got a couple more sparring weekends to look forward to ahead of The Henley Boat Races which are now only 58 days away!