News

Posted: 17 November 2023

On the morning of Saturday the 4^th of November, 37 athletes from across multiple Scottish Rowing Performance Pathway Programmes took part in a 3000m time trial on the Forth and Clyde Canal.

Athletes from the Scottish Rowing Performance Programme, Junior Academy, Beach Sprints Performance Programme, and U19/U23 GB Trialists gathered at Auchinstarry Marina, Kilsyth. This is the first time a time trial with athletes from all these different Scottish Rowing athlete programmes has taken place, it allowed for the athletes to learn from one another and gain knowledge about the different programmes. Especially for our Junior Academy athletes who are at the beginning of their performance pathway, this event showed them what they can achieve and where they stand amongst the top athletes in the country.

Tom Young, Scottish Rowing’s Lead Performance Pathway Coach, said "I was really excited to see so many of our talented athletes across Scotland come together from several different pathway programmes and put out a dry run of their performance, as many were gearing up for the upcoming GB Trials events. It's a great opportunity for athletes to push themselves against the best Scotland has to offer, and to do so outside the comfort of their home training environments. This is something we have done on smaller scales in previous years, so seeing it grow and benefit more athletes is exactly what we wanted!"

A huge thank you to the coaches and volunteers who assisted during the day for the running of the event, with their help the athletes were able to receive timings from each 1km interval down the course. As well as getting times, each crew got a short video clip of their rowing as they came through the first 750m which will be used to do some video analysis in the future. Being able to get video, especially during pieces, is beneficial for the coaches and athletes to analyse together to understand which areas require more work. A special thanks goes to those who drove trailers and assisted in ensuring that each athlete’s boat made it to the event.

The time trial took place as part of the second Junior Academy camp. The young athletes from the academy stayed on into the afternoon to work with sportscotland’s Institute of Sport, Peter Bonner, on the importance of warming up and University of Edinburgh’s, Matilda Mayne, on imagery. They then worked with the Scottish Rowing coaching team on some video analysis before heading back out to the water for a technical session. The Junior Academy continued on the Sunday, where, back at the Scottish Rowing Centre, they worked on some ergometer drills, physical preparation in the gym and fine-tuning daily/race day routines. The Junior Academy will meet again at the start of 2024 as part of the Scottish Rowing Land Camp which is taking place at the Oriam facility based on the Heriot Watt University campus. Until then we wish all of our young athlete’s luck for the events they are competing in for the remainder of the year!