In terms of location the canal was ideal for us, the boathouse being just a stone’s throw from the school. There were other advantages, too. Apart from when it iced over, the canal wasn’t much affected by the weather. Whereas the big rivers might arguably have offered more in the way of ‘proper’ rowing, and more room to manoeuvre, they were too choppy to row on when it was wild and windy, as it often can be in Scotland. Plus, on those big tidal rivers there were only certain times when you could row, and I heard, without feeling any envy, stories of other crews having to be out on the river as early as 6 a.m. At least we could row at any time.
We were out on the canal in all conditions. And I loved the whole scene, the social aspect, the camaraderie and the sense of being part of a committed team. You’d go down to the boat club before training and hang around, chatting to the boat manager, who happened to be Grant, the friend who got me into rowing in the first place. That was another thing: you were given responsibilities and jobs; I became club treasurer. George, who was in overall charge of the boathouse, tried to suss you out, I think, and if you passed the test you were trusted with the keys, given jobs to do, that kind of thing. Boat club treasurer was ‘a thankless task’, as was noted in a school report card at the time by one of my teachers, who added: ‘So I thank him now – on paper!’
The teachers were less impressed by one incident, for which I must hold my hands up. We were driving back to Edinburgh after a day’s training at Strathclyde Park when I found myself in possession of a super-soaker pump-action water machine-gun; a real beast of a weapon, which could fire jets of water up to about 30 feet. It was a hot summer’s day, we were hanging out of the windows of our minibus, and as we approached Edinburgh, and slowed down for a roundabout, we began to draw alongside a sports car with its roof down. It was irresistible.
My weapon was loaded and I gave it both barrels: not just a squirt of water, but a proper skoosh. OK, it was immature and it can’t have been pleasant for the driver, but all I can offer in my defence is that there is something in the Scottish psyche that disapproves of ostentatious displays of wealth, or flashiness. Soft-top cars fall into that category.
Monday morning came, however, and there was a letter waiting for me in registration. The head teacher was away, but I was to go and see his deputy, Mr Cowan. I knew it was about the water pistol incident. I had had a phone call the previous evening from George, the rowing man, who’d heard that the driver had complained to the school – well, we weren’t exactly hard to identify, given that the minibus was emblazoned with our school’s name. ‘I’m so disappointed,’ George had said. ‘I don’t know who it was.’
‘It was me, George,’ I said.
‘I’m so disappointed, Chris. I don’t know why you did it – you’ll have to face the music.’
So on Monday morning I faced the music. ‘I’ve had this letter,’ said Mr Cowan. ‘It seems that someone has used a water pistol on a member of the public. This is clearly a serious offence,’ and as he said this, I thought I could detect a little smile. Still, he sentenced me to half an hour of picking up litter. On balance, I think it was worth it.
The training for rowing was more serious – and perhaps explains this frivolous diversion. In fact, thinking about the training we did back then can still induce a cold sweat – it really was brutal. At the end of my first year as a fully-fledged rower I was in the ‘A’ crew. Our coach was a student from Edinburgh University. He had some interesting ideas, this guy. Somehow he’d got his hands on some old East German Olympic rowing squad training programmes from the 1980s. He modified them very slightly for us. But only very slightly.
He was certainly committed. We had to be, too, or we’d be out. We trained before and after school, often five or six days a week, and through the summer holidays. It was highly structured, regimented even, but he put a lot into it, and so did we.
Our coach had some good ideas, but he was inflexible. His training ethos could be summed up in three words: push, push and push. To elaborate: keep working harder, don’t listen to your body. We were pushing ourselves to the limit and beyond, and at least one of us was always ill with a cold, a chest infection, or run down. I remember one session when two of us were throwing up over the side of the boat, not through exertion but because we were ill. From the towpath, we heard our coach shout: ‘OK, you back to normal now? Off you go again.’ And it was about three degrees Celsius. As I say, brutal.
Now, you may well be putting the words ‘East’, ‘German’, ‘Olympic’ and ‘1980s’ together, and coming to some fairly alarming conclusions. And yes, as we would all subsequently find out, many East German Olympic athletes were subject to state-organized doping programmes. While not wishing to condemn the East German rowers of the 1980s as doping cheats – I don’t know if they were; and many of them, in any case, were apparently oblivious to what they were given – this information could possibly shed some interesting new light on the training programme we were attempting to follow in our rowing days. Quite apart from the fact that they might or might not have been on drugs, they were grown men. We were 16-year-old boys. But the real problem for me was not so much the rowing training programme; it was doing the rowing training plus my cycling training; plus the fact that we all still had seven hours’ school, five days a week. I remember one Sunday when I took part in an 80-mile road race in the morning, then went, still in my cycling kit, straight to rowing training. Since rowing was a team sport, the schedule was sacrosanct – if you couldn’t make the session, you weren’t in the team.
Despite my misgivings about the severity of the programme – on top of my cycling training – the discipline of doing this training, of being part of such a committed team (rowers and coach alike), and the routine and suffering, were all, I think, good for me in the long run. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that. And there were certainly times when I felt that it might kill me.
It was as a pair with Grant, my best mate, that I enjoyed the highlight of my rowing career: winning a silver medal in the British schools’ championship, held in Strathclyde Park, near Glasgow. In 1993 I also won two Scottish gold medals, in the coxless pairs and coxed fours, and I represented Scotland in the Home Countries International.
But in some ways a more memorable race saw me form part of an eight, when we took on our rival Edinburgh school, Heriot’s. The eight was made up of our top four (our only four, in fact), plus their ‘C’ crew, who were happy to join us. They felt they were as good if not better than their peers in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews, and were only too delighted to have a chance to prove it. Their ‘A’ and ‘B’ crews joined forces, meanwhile, to make up the other eight. There were a lot of personal niggles, little battles to be decided and scores to be settled on that day, partly because our boat clubs sat side by side on the Union Canal, and partly because of the historic rivalry between the two schools. I was pretty oblivious to this, to be honest, but there were some guys who virtually lived at the boathouse, with lots of time, and ample opportunity, for feuds to form and fester. It all gave the contest an unmistakable edge.
As the race got under way they immediately, and with worrying ease, pulled a length ahead. They had been heavily fancied, not least by themselves … but then, with about 750 metres to go, we began pulling them back. In rowing you find that crews can build up incredible momentum; or hit reverse gear. When the tide turned, so to speak, we kept pulling them back, pulling them back, pulling them back, and eventually rowed through them – as the rowing parlance goes – as we came to the finish. We celebrated as if it had been the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. That was in 1994, and it proved to be my final outing in a boat. But what a way to bow out!
I rowed for about three years, finally packing it in because my cycling was getting more serious. Having also moved on from mountain biking, I had now ‘retired’ from five sports, which is not bad for an 18-year-old. It either shows my versatility and willingness to try new things, or suggests that I was very fickle. I loved sport, but I suppose I was still playing the field, looking for ‘the one’ I would be happy to settle down with … but enough of the romantic analogies.
I loved keeping busy, always being on the go – it had been a way of