Avoiding the daily grind in rowing.

Over the last few months many Olympians have started to make their decisions regarding the future in their sport, will they continue till Rio or will they go back to a desk job and spend time with their families. This kind of period is hard and if you haven't won it can be quite a feat to give 4 more years of your life to living the life of a professional rower (will little money in most cases),  as Eric Murry said "Hey, rowing's easy when you're doing well. When you're getting success, the day-to-day grind of it all is worth it.” 

To avoid it becoming a "day to day grind" as Murry put it, you have to, as another rowing Olympian Patrick Loliger Salas put it, "approach each day, and each session, as a chance to make yourself, however slightly, better than you were the day, or the session, before. " By approaching training in this way you are not viewing training as something which should be done(and therefore letting become a grind) but as something which you can do to better yourself. You have the opportunity to either get better or stay the same. Again I cant stress the importance of goal setting (a post to come on this soon).

This guy(Patrick Loliger Salas) came 14th in London and 15th in Beijing 4 years and he only improved by one position in the world. Why would he do that you ask? Why would he put him self through all this? Because he likes the challenge and he enjoys himself.

As Salas says, a hard days training for someone of that standard will mean only a tenth of a second gained in competition but he is willing to pay that price if it means hes getting closer to becoming the best he can be. Everyone should be striving to become the best that you can be. If you do that you could be the best in the world. If not you then who? How do you know until you've tried? "Records were meant to be broken. What is impossible today may not be tomorrow. " (another one of Salas' quotes).

View his video here. (turn on captions as its in Spanish)