THE SPORT OF ROWING was, if he needed to be slightly further forward or me slightly further back, that sort of thing. Our bodies are a slightly different shape, like my back has always been very straight and his back is naturally curved. We spent a lot of time trying to change that, but you can’t. That’s just body makeup.”7662 Due to early emphasis on legs and late arm break, Mark Hunter’s force curve shows a Kernschlag bias. Nevertheless, it is smooth and near-parabolic. It is during the lovely surging suspension in the middle of each stroke that the British double moves on its opponents. Hunter: “We never talked about legs. People tend to think too much about working their legs. We were trained more to think of and use our glutes. These are the muscles that never seem to fatigue, like your back and your glutes, where when you’re racing, these [gesturing to his quads] go out very quickly, these fill up very quickly. So in order to take it to a different place of thinking where to collect it from when you put the blade in, we actually thought about our gluts more than thinking of using our legs.”7663 Purchase actually changed a great deal from his single sculling technique when he joined Hunter in the double. His footstretcher was lowered, and prior to entry he compressed a bit further, both up the slide and with his body angle. He swung his back earlier so the legs did not dominate the back early quite so much, and he nearly doubled his layback in order to complement Hunter’s strong surge to the release. Hunter: “We did all the adjustments, got all the data. We knew what worked, and when we went to the first World Cup, we knew that we were there. We still tinkered a little bit, but they were minute things, not drastic changes, stuff moving forward for 7662 Hunter, op. cit. 7663 Hunter, op. cit. Author Mark Hunter the stage we were at, not stuff that would change things dramatically. That never works. “The biggest example of that, I think, is the Canadian Men’s Eight in 2004, when they lost to the Americans by only a small margin in the heat and then went and got absolutely torn apart in the final because they tried to change too much. I spoke to one of the guys in the eight, and he said instead of them trying to go half a canvas faster, they tried to go a length faster, and they just self-destructed by doing that.7664 2008 World Cup Hunter: “We came back after Christmas, and started training at winter camp, but Zac wasn’t well, wasn’t feeling too good. He had to take two months out of the boat, so he missed all the singles trials and everything, and when we got back together three weeks before the first World Cup in Munich, we didn’t even know if we were going to go until the day we left because we didn’t know how he was going to respond to the training we had done. 7664 See Chapter 151. 2130
