Female Surf Rowing Photos By, Shelby Hayden Craig

WEIGHTING GAME

“We have three beach training sessions each week. This weekend we have a carnival, so we’ll just have two. We have a weights session each week as well.

“The main point of our weights training is to work towards our fitness goal. The focus of one training block might be our endurance muscles, in which case we’ll do light weights at high repetition. We might go three or four weeks working with really light weights and a lot of sets in a two-hour session. In our heavy weights sessions, which focus on strength, there’s a lot of leg work and a lot of back work using squats, benchpresses or lunges. There’s a lot

of seated rows and isolating our shoulder muscles, too.

“We also incorporate a circuit into our gym work; say, 15 reps at seven different ‘stations’. Then we’ll sit on the ‘erg’ rowing machine for five minutes, then go back and do it all again – three times all up. We might do some hill sprints afterwards, which gives us an excuse to get off the beach. It’s really broken up ‒ a lot of interval training.

“Apart from all that, we’ll have another separate 45-minute session on the erg. We might do, say, a pyramid of distance: 500m, 1000m, 1500m and then come back down. Or we’ll do two minutes on a hard setting, two minutes on a light setting, 10-15 times.”

ADDICTIVE

“I love surf rowing; it’s a bit addictive. Sometimes we get to carnivals, or it’s a really bad day, and nothing really works out; some days it just doesn’t happen. Some days our gear is broken, someone doesn’t turn up, or turned up too late, or the surf’s crap. And you wonder, ‘Why am I doing this again?’ And the next day you’re back in the boat ... and back on the beach!

“It’s almost a habit you develop. It’s a big community thing, too. I enjoy all the people I row with. There are a lot of people I’ve rowed with in the past who’ve said, ‘I don’t know how you still do it.’ But they didn’t have a good experience, they didn’t have friends to row with or they just didn’t put themselves into the club enough.”

ROWING FOR LIFE

“This is my last year in the under-23s division. I’m thinking about having a year off. After this, there’s no age divisions; it’s just open ladies from here for me. I might have a year off and see what it’s like having a life across summer; once you row, that’s it. I don’t do anything over summer except row. I looked at my calendar the other day and I saw only two weekends off between December and April.”

‒ James Smith