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Preparing for the World Rowing Championships

It’s Gen Horton here. If you haven’t already heard, I recently joined Sykes’ Customer Relations team. I’m also a member of the Australian Rowing team and I thought you might be interested to hear what I’ve been up to of late.

Gen HortonAfter finishing up in Bulgaria at the U23 World championships, we had a few days to recuperate before getting straight back into the grind out in Penrith, NSW. We had a nice surprise to see a new addition at the river - a giant green shed which we’ll soon be able to call our new home!

As our training schedule around racing can be uncertain and, at times, all over the place, it was great to finally get back into a familiar routine again with some long rows up the Nepean gorge to find some more Zen.

The next few weeks were a blur between training, eating, sleeping and constant trips to the newly opened Gelato Messina store. Being in the middle of winter, we were starting to miss the heat and the Italian lifestyle that comes with training at the European Training Centre (ETC). So an evening walk to get a few scoops of gelato each night was what helped us get through one of our heaviest training blocks of the year.

As we began to wind-up our preparations for the World Championships, we started to hear more and more about a storm brewing off the east coast of the USA, but despite this, we kept moving and continued preparing to fly out in a few days’ time. It wasn’t until we had taken our boats apart and packed up our suitcases that a last-minute decision was made to delay our departure by a few days. Although many of us were more than ready to leave Penrith, it was much more preferable to be able to continue training in Australia, especially since at that time, Hurricane Irma was ravaging Florida as residents fled.

With the clean-up underway in Florida, our flights were again delayed, and while we waited for the green light to depart to the US, we continued with our training and had an extended pre-departure camp in Penrith, with both the Men’s and Women’s Australian teams coming together.

I write this now as we finally sit on the plane en route to Orlando FL, before travelling an hour to the small town of Deland where we will be based for a week to adjust to the climate. It will be the first time that I’ve shared rowing waters with alligators and dugongs, so things will be different for us there! More to come.

- Gen


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