A lot of students target the Olympic Games after their final Boat Race but that is not in my plans when I graduate this summer.
It’s not really for me.
This will be my third year on the Tideway and it will be the conclusion to a long rowing career.
I’ll definitely miss many aspects of it but afterwards I need to get myself a job.
I’ve got no plans to continue with international rowing. Rowing in the UK is different to rowing in America, where I’m from, and over there no one really cares about the sport.
You can make a career out of rowing here but it doesn’t work like that in the States, where rowing is self funded.
In America you don’t get crowds much bigger than 100 spectators, so The Boat Race can be a bit of a culture shock.
It takes some getting used to but that is not the only aspect that is different.
We’re used to flat water and straight racing, which is the opposite of The Boat Race. The Thames is not the most forgiving course and there are plenty of bends to navigate.
We moved down to our residency in Putney yesterday and we will be here for the rest of the week now.
We stay at one of the alumni’s houses — there are two of us in each room and it’s a nice environment.
The son is a professional chef so we get some phenomenal home-cooked meals. It’s mainly things like pasta — just standard fare but it’s all very well done.
There’s even a resident dog — Enzo the Springer. He’s a firecracker of a dog that belongs to our hosts. I really like animals — they have a bit of a calming influence.
Our accommodation is not too far from the river and we’ll be training for a few hours per day in the build-up to Sunday.
The training levels will taper off over the week and we won’t be doing anything too crazy. We’ll be out on the Tideway course but the intense exercise will be short and sharp. When we’re not training we’ll just be chilling out.
It is important to stay relaxed and we know Oxford will be a strong opposition. There has been a lot of talk about their experience but it’s not at all intimidating that some of their guys have been in the Olympics.
They’re very good rowers but where they’ve been before makes very little difference.
This race is going to be the culmination of seven years of rowing for me.
It’s been a trial by fire and now I’m about to leave it. It’s the end of everything that I’m going to do in this sport, which is sad, but there’s certainly no better event in rowing than The Boat Race.
It’s been an enormous part of my life and it’s sad to see it drawing to a close however I can’t really imagine a better group of guys to do it with.
