It's not you, it's me.

As you may have gathered from my last post paddling has been pretty difficult. We had hoped to make some big gains and be comfortably settled into the boat by now and putting some mileage in, but we have still been fighting with it to a degree. It's taken a while but I have now got something straight in my head which I am hoping will be a bit of  a turning point for us. The boat feels a lot different with Ad in it, much more so than when Jamie and I paddled together and in my mind I always thought that is what it should feel like again. Jamie and I were in a heavy, stable boat, we both weighed approximately the same andwere a fairly lighweight crew and therefore there was hardly any movement, even when we were giving it some beans. The bottom line is, it is never going to feel like that for Adam and I in the mystere and pretending otherwise is dillusional. It moves a lot more, it's less forgiving of mistakes and it is taking a lot of concentration for us at the moment to paddle it well.

I simply have to get used to the movement that we are generating and relax more. I am getting really tense when we cross the river, for absolutely no reason; I just get extremely twitchy> I am absolutely fine in the Laance which is as stable as the mystere, but get me in the mystere and I get the shakes. It's all in my head and I need to find a way to overcome it as it's holding us back. Tuesday's paddle was a case in point. We had a solid paddle up to Kingston with a stretch at halfway. As we paddled back under Kingston bridge we had a bad patch, followed by a good patch at Kingston Rowing club and then as we made the turn to come back to the club my stroke went to worms and all I could think about was 'Don't go in the water'. It was actually almost paralysing and as we made it back with 100 metres to go, still with my stroke all over the place I ended up shouting at the top of my voice a rather fruity expletive. I was seriously hacked off at my own performance and I need to overcome it. I'm just not quite sure how.

The following day was a turbo session; 2 x 20 minutes which hurt. A lot. But at least I can't fall off a turbo.