Teeny weeny steps

In the old days, when I did a lot more coxing than rowing, I used to find that asking a chap to take a 'small tap' (i.e. a very tiny stroke, just to straighten the boat up a bit) seemed to strike them deep inside at some inner manliness centre, and they would invariably feel driven to take a larger tap than they would otherwise - just to demonstrate that their 'small' tap was actually quite powerful, so boy! think what their whole stroke could do.

Testosterone so strong you could put it in your pipe and smoke it.

If you are a rower reading this and you do that, don't. Just stop it. It's annoying. It means that the whole crew then has to sit and wait whilst the relevant pair decides which of them is most manly with their tapping, and time is wasted.

One of the ways of getting round this was to ask for a 'teeny weeny tap'. This always seems to be so excruciatingly embarrassing for most of the people concerned that they don't want to hear it again, so just perform a nice, gentle tap, exactly as I want them to. Thus, 'teeny weeny' has become a favourite of mine in many of the things I do - ask for a small change in the boat and you won't get it (or you'll get a massive one); ask for a 'teeny weeny' change and you'll get what you want.

'Teeny weeny' is useful in general life too. Sometimes I have to remind myself that 'teeny weeny' change or effort is not just the biggest I can do but the best too. Yesterday was a good example of this. I really wasn't feeling great - very tired, as if I didn't know how to move my limbs any more, and with a very high resting heart rate, which I get a lot when my POTS is bad, and which is tiring in itself. By the end of the evening, I was really breathless and had really bad pains in my arms and legs. None of this helped me to feel keen to train, but taking a 'teeny weeny' approach helped.

Before my teeny weeny training session I watched two of the boys from my old club complete a 2k erg test. This is something of a standard in rowing. It's very straightforward: you set up the erg to count you down from 2000m, then see how long it takes you to get down to 0. As a very rough guide, international men will manage it in under 6 minutes, club male rowers and international female rowers under 7 (sometimes significantly so), and so on. Lightweights take a bit longer, as do older (Masters or veteran) rowers. The two boys doing their tests yesterday achieved 6:21.8 and 7:02.0. I have done one 2k test, by myself for 'fun', and it was awful, so I won't tell you the result. Luckily, adaptive rowers tend to race over 1k (especially on the erg) which is much more manageable!

A sight to inspire a quickening of the pulse in any rower...

My role at the test was to 'cox' or coach it - to encourage and inspire, but also to spot potential technical weaknesses before they became severe and to get the rower focused on technique again. Coxing a 2k is quite a difficult thing to do: for you, it's not really very tiring, but for the poor rower it is just about the most exhausting thing you can think of. It was quite nice for me to be around people that erg well again, and to practise spotting technical points (not that there were many; these boys were pretty good!). It also made me feel a bit better about joining them on their cool down erg - I was feeling rough, but they were also knackered so we'd all be weak together!

So, this is how I ended up doing a 20 minute erg with a heart rate at c.140bpm before even starting... Needless to say, I felt pretty weak throughout, but I had one target and that was to finish above 4km: that is, to average just over 1km every 5 minutes. This isn't really a difficult target, but it felt the best I could do. In the end, I managed 4367m. It wasn't great, but it was a teeny weeny step. Just like my session on the water, it was a session designed to prove not only physically that I could still achieve things whilst feeling terrible, but also to prove that mentally. I felt afterwards that I'd done the right session - light, but still achieving something. Teeny weeny steps indeed.

We don't need to tell him how teeny weeny he is - he's happy not knowing.