THE SPORT OF ROWING week, through ten months of the year and you’re at the first regatta and you face your competition, you actually walk, talk, look and feel like a World Champion. Maybe that’s a tenth of a second, and maybe that’s the difference. “I thought I already had the conditioning and the technique, but thanks to Mike, I was finally ready to win psychologically, if that statement means anything. It wasn’t until the Spracklen era that I could say, ‘I know I can win this race. I am a World Champion!’ “It was a completely different mindset for me.”7808 Spracklen: “This principle had nothing to do with strutting around pretending to be World Champions but more a personal feeling of satisfaction from doing things well.”7809 Honebein: “I don’t remember what year it was, but one memory that I have is that there was a period when whoever Mike put with me in the pair, it didn’t matter. We won. I was just on one of those rolls where I could do nothing wrong. The boat would just go. Not dominating, but just winning by enough. Sometimes whoever I rowed with we’d get out in a lead, and we’d stick and finish the piece ahead. Other times we’d be behind, in the last minute and a half or two minutes we’d pull out and win by just a few seats or something like that. “After practice one day, Mike called me into his office, and I sat down, and he started accusing me of not training hard enough, not doing the things I needed to do. Sure I was winning, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t pushing myself enough. “He and I got into a pretty heated argument about it. How could he accuse me of not training hard when I was winning every piece? 7808 Klepacki, op. cit. 7809 Spracklen, op. cit. “So the next day, I went out there, and whereas I had been winning races by a few seats, I shot out and won by lengths and lengths of open water. We finished the first round of pieces, and I was sitting there and looking at him thinking, ‘♣Ω©Җ you, Mike!’ “I was sitting in the boat talking to myself, and suddenly I realized, ‘God, that son of a gun just got me!’ “I wasn’t showing him. He was showing me, which in my mind was just ingenious. “That day changed the way that I approached any practice. I had been training down to the pairs that were behind me. His goal was for my partner and me to train up to our own potential and for the other boats to rise to our level. “Ultimately, he saw and brought out a lot in me. “In the end, I realized he was playing mind games with us all of the time. There were some people he would have to yell at. Others he would merely prod along. He read people really well.”7810 Spracklen: “The body is designed to resist stress by growing stronger, by becoming more efficient and by sending out signals of discomfort before stress becomes too intense. But no improvement is possible without an increase in load, and the role of the coach is not only to prepare a progressive training programme that stresses the athlete but to help them complete it. Sometimes that meant gentle persuasion or sometimes a more aggressive push. Whilst the latter can be distasteful, some athletes needed help. I would have been doing them no favours by not pushing when it would help them to get better. “Success is dependent on three factors, 1) the athletic physique, with which they were born, 2) the way they are prepared and 3) their motivation to win. In the USA team 7810 Honebein, op. cit. 2176
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