THE SPORT OF ROWING guard Champion and a mentor of mine and Bryan’s, ended up verifying this stuff.”8187 Kaehler: “I’ve been working with Mike and the team the past year [2007] on strength and conditioning, and that’s pretty much what we spend a tremendous amount of time on. As a therapist and a strength and conditioning specialist, I see these injuries on the back end and I see why they happen. “Core conditioning’s a big factor in per- formance and injury prevention, and it gives you a bit of an extra edge because a lot of guys don’t have that natural strength inter- nally, so you want to make sure you’re cov- ering all of that.”8188 J.R.: “Bryan brought up core strength to Mike, and he said, ‘Bryan, why don’t you and J.R. lead the stretching with the core strength.’ “Well, we started doing the exercises, and some of the other guys did, some didn’t. Then when we got out to San Diego to train during the Olympic year, as a team we start- ed doing a lot of core stabilization work with the strength coaches out there, using a medi- cine ball, doing different things, trying to build up the girdle area. “The results took hold after the World Championships in 2003, and if you compare 2003 and 2004, you can see it made a huge difference.”8189 The Sprack Back Bryan: “The layback of Mike Sprack- len’s Canadian crew8190 reinforced our life- guard rowing. At first it was like, ‘What are they doing?’ At Lucerne in 2002 they got way up on us and we rowed them down in the second half. “And the same thing happened at Open- ing Day in Seattle in early 2003. We didn’t 8187 Read, op. cit. 8188 Kaehler, personal conversation, 2008 8189 Read, op. cit. 8190 See Chapter 151. think they could row their technique and sustain it for 2,000 meters. We’d catch them whenever we wanted. “But when it counted at the 2002 Worlds, we didn’t catch them. At the 2003 Worlds, we didn’t catch them again, even though we got a little closer, and so we had to accept that they were doing something that we had to take seriously. “For J.R. and me, it started in practice after the 2003 Worlds. It started as a joke in a way, a step beyond our lifeguard rowing. We were doing four times 3,000m pieces in pairs at 24, 26, 28 at the Olympic Training Center on Otay Lake, and we would exag- gerate the layback, laying down as far as we could, even hitting the rigger in the back, just screwing around, but we could see how it was working. At low cadence you can swing like that and sustain it, and it definite- ly helped. “If you watch the Canadians racing in ‘02 or ‘03 or even ‘04, they were not swing- ing back that much, but if you look at us and the way all the other crews had been rowing in previous years, we were not swinging enough. “When you talk about length, I always think about how much time I’m spending in the water. When I am on the drive, I am thinking how long I can keep my blade ac- celerating in the water before I have to take it out.”8191 Teti: “I never use the term ‘layback.’ It’s a passive word. The phrase I prefer is ‘body swing’ or ‘active body swing.’”8192 Mike Spracklen: “On arriving in Ath- ens for the 2004 Olympic Games, I was walking towards James Tomkins8193 from Australia in the boat house area. ‘I see you have brought a lot of Canadian crews’, he said. ‘Only three,’ I replied, referring to the 8191 Volpenhein, op. cit. 8192 Teti, op. cit., 2004 8193 See Chapter 131. 2294