Blofeld eat your heart out

Words: Sholto Carnegie

PHOTOGRAPHY HARRY BRIGHTMORE

This year the GB Rowing men’s squad were challenged by a grueling Sierra Nevada double header. It’s an infamous high-altitude camp in Spain that generations of British oarsmen have endured.

In early December, we packed up the ergs and braced ourselves for a two-and-a-bit week stint of land training in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Back home and rested on New Year’s Eve the clocks flickered to 2024 and the long-awaited Olympic year lay ahead of me! But any pie-in-the-sky thoughts concerning the exciting bits that (I hope) are just around the corner come summer, were thoroughly burst as I mentally prepared for the second edition of the Sierra Nevada camp.

What the outside world sees via social media is vastly different from the lived experience. Don’t get me wrong the sunsets up here are incredible and training alongside top athletes from a multitude of different sports is cool, but this is no holiday. It’s a tough, tough camp and just completing it is a success in and of itself.

Above Great Britain’s men’s squad train on the ergs at altitude in Sierra Nevada, Spain.

So, what’s it like to be on camp at Sierra Nevada? Most sessions are spent in the gym lifting weights or on the ergo. The erg sessions fall into two categories, long ones which build up base miles or shorter, high-intensity sessions which help develop power. After each high-intensity session the athletes are ranked, from top to bottom across the whole squad. What’s most important to me though is improving against myself, I try to better my own scores from previous years.