letting yourself down as well, but when you’ve got guys around you who are digging out as well... I would never be the one to fail. “You go through tough places, your
body’s screaming at you. It’s painful, it hurts so much – any rower will tell you that – but I would say to you, you can always do more, you can always do more than your body thinks. It’s screaming but your muscles will never stop, your legs will never stop. It will be your brain that stops before your legs ever do. So assuming you’ve done the training, and we’re so well trained, the line will come before you blow.”
Going turbo This attitude is a consistent theme in Reed’s answers, and is clearly something that drives him on. However, that isn’t to say that he is going at full throttle all of the time. One of the keys to being a successful athlete in a sport which is so geared towards so few races in each Olympiad – three World Championships and an Olympic final – is knowing how to ensure that the peak comes at the right time. This is especially important in an athlete growing older (at 32 now, 35 by the time that Rio comes round), who cannot just “go turbo” all of the time, as he puts it, and expect to recover in the same way as before. With two full Olympiads under his belt, it is clear that Reed knows what he is doing in this regard, and he is happy to admit that he is not putting absolutely everything into training – although, in his terms, this equates to
only putting in “9.5 or 10 with room to go” rather than the standard 11 out of 10. Clearly, his conception of relaxation is somewhat different to most people’s. Reed boils his approach down to a simple strategy: “Know your body, listen to your coach”. This advice is particularly salient given that the coaching team in question is headed by Grobler, whose consistent results attest to his status as one of the greatest rowing coaches ever. Reed is clear on the quality of his relationship with Grobler, so it says a lot about the talent available – as well as the single-minded, unsentimental focus on victory – that he would change the top men’s boat to the coxless fours (from the eight) for the European Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, and then leave Reed out. Even in someone as professional as Reed, some antipathy might be expected. However, he is clear in his trust in the selectors, despite his obvious disappointment. “I’m not at the level to get into
the four, and it would be wrong of me to speculate whether that’s what I want anyway,” he acknowledges. “They dominated the European Championships, and if I were selecting the boats I couldn’t with a clean conscience put me in at the moment. Credit to them: they’re brilliant.”
From dogs to wolves However, Reed has taken the new eight as an opportunity, a challenge. The eight which rowed in Belgrade was “a very late crew”, he says, “cobbled
Normally I can ask my body
anything and it will have the answers. But I had no answers. It was crippling.
ROW360 // Issue 001 17
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116