THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT Grobler, speaking of Redgrave: “When we first sat down together in Henley, he listened to all of my ideas and replied, ‘OK Jürgen, I hear where you’re coming from, and I’ll do everything you’re saying, but the key thing for me is winning.’ “In the first year, I introduced him to high altitude training, and again he said ‘Okay I’ll go there with you, but as long as when it comes to the Olympics next year, I win the Gold Medal. We can make mistakes this year. That’s fine by me, but at the Olympics we win Gold.’ “From this point onwards, I knew that our ideas matched up, and I knew that Steve had the potential to win the five Olympic Golds that he ultimately did.”6900 I spoke to Steve Redgrave along the Thames River at Henley during a pause of the 2008 Henley Royal Regatta. Redgrave: “With Mike Spracklen, the training schedules that we had were all about set pieces, especially when you were coming into the race season or even the Head of the River races or whatever. It was all about practicing race pace. “When Jürgen first came over, he did nothing at race pace. It was all about your paddling, long strokes, power, being connected. If you’re doing a technical session, doing an endurance session or doing some set pieces of some sort, it was all about the quality of each individual stroke. “When I used to go out with Mike, he would only tell us the schedule of that session just as we went out. He would say, ‘Today we’re going to do this and this and this.’ With Jürgen it would be planned out for weeks. We’d get a two-week schedule, but he’d have the whole year’s schedule planned out. “I found it bizarre when he came along and recorded everything, but there was 6900 Qtd. by Ornstein, op. cit. always a purpose. He brought in training to percentages. Now we were not looking to go as fast as we possibly could all of the time. We might be working at seventy-five percent of our maximum speed.”6901 “With Jürgen every stroke makes a difference. Come off the water after a training session with Mike Spracklen, and you were absolutely physically exhausted. You couldn’t row another stroke. You never felt that with Jürgen. His way of training was that you always felt you could do more, but you were just mentally bored of just doing boring old strokes, one after the other. “He’s marked the whole of this course [pointing to the HRR course, the reach of the Thames downstream of the Leander boathouse] in 250 meter intervals. He would be cycling along by the side of where we are, and he would be monitoring the boat speed whether we were paddling light, doing steady state or set pieces. “He had marked out 2,000 meters, which we’re at the start of right now [beside Temple Island], and every weekend we’d do three, four, sometimes five 2,000 meter pieces, but none of them at race pace. In the winter, we’d be starting off at 20 for the first 1,000, then 22 and 24 for the next two 500s. “The principle behind that is that every time the rate goes up, you have to go faster. What’s the point of putting the rate up if you’re not going to go any quicker for it? It’s quite amazing when you get into the 30s in the smaller boats, 30, 32, 34, you go up two pips of rate and you don’t go that much faster for it. So you’re thinking, ‘Why do we need to go at 36 when we’re getting the same boat speed at 34 or 32?’ “That’s why you’d see Matthew and me rating lower . . . because it’s more efficient.”6902 Pinsent: “After a while, rowing can become an almost existential search for the 6901 Redgrave, op. cit., p. 172 6902 Redgrave, personal conversation, 2008 1919
