we did back then can still induce a cold sweat – it really was brutal. At the end of my first year as a fully-fledged rower I was in the ‘A’ crew. Our coach was a student from Edinburgh University. He had some interesting ideas, this guy. Somehow he’d got his hands on some old East German Olympic rowing squad training programmes from the 1980s. He modified them very slightly for us. But only very slightly.
He was certainly committed. We had to be, too, or we’d be out. We trained before and after school, often five or six days a week, and through the summer holidays. It was highly structured, regimented even, but he put a lot into it, and so did we.
Our coach had some good ideas, but he was inflexible. His training ethos could be summed up in three words: push, push and push. To elaborate: keep working harder, don’t listen to your body. We were pushing ourselves to the limit and beyond, and at least one of us was always ill with a cold, a chest infection, or run down. I remember one session when two of us were throwing up over the side of the boat, not through exertion but because we were ill. From the towpath, we heard our coach shout: ‘OK, you back to normal now? Off you go again.’ And it was about three degrees Celsius. As I say, brutal.
Now, you may well be putting the words ‘East’, ‘German’, ‘Olympic’ and ‘1980s’ together, and coming to some fairly alarming conclusions. And yes, as we would all subsequently find out, many East German Olympic athletes were subject to state-organized doping programmes. While not wishing to condemn the East German rowers of the 1980s as doping cheats – I don’t know if they were; and many of them, in any case, were apparently oblivious to what they were given – this information could possibly shed some interesting new light on the training programme we were attempting to follow in our rowing days. Quite apart from the fact that they might or might not have been on drugs, they were grown men. We were 16-year-old boys. But the real problem for me was not so much the rowing training programme; it was doing the rowing training plus my cycling training; plus the fact that we all still had seven hours’ school, five days a week. I remember one Sunday when I took part in an 80-mile road race in the morning, then went, still in my cycling kit, straight to rowing training. Since rowing was a team sport, the schedule was sacrosanct – if you couldn’t make the session, you weren’t in the team.
Despite my misgivings about the severity of the programme – on top of my cycling training – the discipline of doing this training, of being part of such a committed team (rowers and coach alike), and the routine and suffering, were all, I think, good for me in the long run. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that. And there were certainly times when I felt that it might kill me.
It was as a pair with Grant, my best mate, that I enjoyed the highlight of my rowing career: winning a silver medal in the British schools’ championship, held in Strathclyde Park, near Glasgow. In 1993 I also won two Scottish gold medals, in the coxless pairs and coxed fours, and I represented Scotland in the Home Countries International.
But in some ways a more memorable race saw me form part of an eight, when we took on our rival Edinburgh school, Heriot’s. The eight was made up of our top four (our only four, in fact), plus their ‘C’ crew, who were happy to join us. They felt they were as good if not better than their peers in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews, and were only too delighted to have a chance to prove it. Their ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews joined forces, meanwhile, to make up the other eight. There were a lot of personal niggles, little battles to be decided and scores to be settled on that day, partly because our boat clubs sat side by side on the Union Canal, and partly because of the historic rivalry between the two schools. I was pretty oblivious to this, to be honest, but there were some guys who virtually lived at the boathouse, with lots of time, and ample opportunity, for feuds to form and fester. It all gave the contest an unmistakable edge.
As the race got under way they immediately, and with worrying ease, pulled a length ahead. They had been heavily fancied, not least by themselves … but then, with about 750 metres to go, we began pulling them back. In rowing you find that crews can build up incredible momentum; or hit reverse gear. When the tide turned, so to speak, we kept pulling them back, pulling them back, pulling them back, and eventually rowed through them – as the rowing parlance goes – as we came to the finish. We celebrated as if it had been the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. That was in 1994, and it proved to be my final outing in a boat. But what a way to bow out!
I rowed for about three years, finally packing it in because my cycling was getting more serious. Having also moved on from mountain biking, I had now ‘retired’ from five sports, which is not bad for an 18-year-old. It either shows my versatility and willingness to try new things, or suggests that I was very fickle. I loved sport, but I suppose I was still playing the field, looking for ‘the one’ I would be happy to settle down with … but enough of the romantic analogies.
I loved keeping busy, always being on the go – it had been a way of life from when I was seven, and riding BMX races – although some of my teachers were concerned about how my out-of-school interests would fit in with my work, and exams. One report card from 1993 says: ‘I hope he will heed his tutor’s comments and not neglect academic work in favour of all the other demands on his time.’ One of my teachers had said: ‘It is important that Chris does not spread himself too thin, i.e. that he balances the demands of his extracurricular interests with the academic demands of his school subjects.’
By now, my cycling ‘career’ had taken me away from the hills of the Pentlands and down two more conventional paths, one covered in tarmac, the other in wood: road racing – encompassing time trials and mass-start road races – and track racing.
I was a member of the Dunedin Cycling Club, a longestablished Edinburgh club whose colours were (I thought at the time) a stylish, eye-catching combination of bright red and garish yellow. It was a club that catered for everyone, from dedicated club cyclists to aspiring racers. At the helm was Ray Harris, the club coach, and his wife Doreen, who did as much as Ray to help the club run smoothly. Together they would officiate at club 10- and 25-mile time trials, their stopwatches around their necks, clipboards in hand, but Ray’s speciality was coaching, in which he was way ahead of his time. Ray was into ‘numbers’ and tests, whereas many others were decidedly old school, still basing all their thoughts on tried and tested principles.
On the road – which was by far the biggest area of the sport – that meant miles, miles and more miles. Typically, winters would be spent doing ‘club runs’ on a Saturday and Sunday; maybe 50 miles with a group of anything from a few to 20-plus on the Saturday, then around 70 miles on the Sunday, traditionally with a café stop. These rides would maybe average around 18–20mph, interspersed with a couple of sprints using 30mph road signs as imaginary finish lines. Midweek, club riders would do what they could, fitting their training around work, university or school. Most would do sessions on a ‘turbo trainer’, a contraption to which you attached your bike, having first removed the front wheel. The back wheel sits on a roller connected to a flywheel, meaning that as you pedal harder, the resistance increases. These lent themselves to shorter, more intense training – mainly because of the boredom of not going anywhere. To alleviate that, I used to listen to music. There were stories of others setting their turbo trainers up in front of a TV, and watching old videos of the Tour de France, or something similarly inspirational, as they pedalled away, going nowhere.
It could have been my winter turbo sessions that did as much as anything to convey to my family how serious I was becoming about my cycling training. Though my dad understood it, having accompanied me to BMX and mountain bike races for the best part of 10 years, my mum, though always very supportive, appeared quite bemused by it at times. As I have said, she was a nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, working night shifts in the world-renowned sleep medicine department, and she would frequently pass me on her way out in the evenings. Invariably I’d be sweating and wheezing, and in a generally pretty horrendous state.
The reason for
