Back in August 1996, when we were all very young, the World Rowing Championships were being held in Scotland, at Glasgow’s Strathclyde Park.  Local girl Katherine Grainger, an Edinburgh University student and keen rower, was in attendance. 

In fact, so enamoured was she with the sport, that she was actually working at the event as a volunteer, and was lucky enough to be selected to hold the medals for presentation at the winners ceremony.

Looking on with the medals in her hands as these great athletes stood before her, an esteemed official from the rowing world who was there to give out the prizes started making conversation, and asked 21 year-old Katherine if she partook in the sport herself, to which Katherine replied yes.  The woman said: ‘Maybe one day, if you’re good enough, then you might get one of these medals presented to you.’

Skip to one year later, this time in Aiguebelette, France, and there was Katherine, on the podium, this time truly amongst the greats, kneeling forward to be presented with her very own medal by the very same woman who spoke to her as a student at the previous championships.

Is there a moral to this story?  Well, if you want one, take your pick, they roll off the tongue like a list of sportswear slogans: Just Do It; Impossible is Nothing; Believe.

But perhaps you shouldn’t use this story as an inspiration so much as the person about whom it is written: Katherine Grainger.  She is the moral and the story.  And if you want to learn about winning, about inspiration, about aspiration, then look no further than Katherine, who, now turning 32, has spent the last decade and-a-bit dedicating her life to being the best in the world.

And when we say her life, in this case, we quite literally mean it.  If there is another sport in the world that demands a more muscle-mushing, joint-jarring, sinew-straining regime for only a few fleeting chances of glory, then please let us know.  Because when In The Winning Zone spoke to Katherine at her home in Greater London, she did not paint a pretty picture of the life she has been living for the past decade.

“Most of the time we train seven days a week.  It’s probably one of the hardest areas of our sport and the training itself is very intense and with it being an outdoor sport we are out in snow, wind, rain and darkness a lot of the year.”

Katherine doesn’t usually get rest days.  She has rest times.  If she isn’t training, she is chilling out, because there is as much chance she will burn-out from under-resting as there is she will do likewise from doing too much.

“Rest is actually part of the training, and if we mess up the rest time it’s almost just as bad as overtraining.  If you train seven days a week you make sure any down time that you have is very much down time.  You learn to be very good at time management!”

All this hard work, and for just a few measly regattas per season, she tells us.  Katherine’s calendar is not like a professional football player’s, where there would be perhaps two opportunities each week to strut her stuff (or on this case row her stuff) on the water. 

Nope, there are quite literally just a handful of events each year where she can prove all the labour has paid off.

“We train every month of the year, but all our racing happens from May to August. The majority of the year it’s just training, and we don’t compete within that timescale. We have about four major internationals a year, plus the Olympics or the World Championships.”

In the eleven years or so since Katherine won her first World Championship medal, she has totted up quite a collection of ribbon emblazoned precious metal.  But with so few opportunities to compete each season, how does she motivate herself through those cold, dark months?

“Mentally it’s really tough, and obviously it takes its toll physically.  Motivation this year is very clear with it being an Olympic year, but with other years it’s always hard.  But we are a very competitive squad, so through the winter my team mates are my opposition so it’s always competitive, because there are always people who want to take your top position in the boats.”

The fact that Grainger must compete for most of the year against her team-mates is one of several unusual and interesting dynamics in the sport of rowing.  Another is that even though they are forced to push each other harder and harder each day, in some cases pitting their careers against each other, the bond that runs between team-mates is often very deep. 

Take the example of Sir Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, who remain the best of friends seven years after they rowed their last race together, and who are godparents to each other’s children.  Katherine agrees that relationships formed in rowing are indeed incredibly strong.

“What got me hooked on rowing was actually the people I got to meet through it,” she explains.  “I have met some of the best people in the world through my sport, and so many people in rowing have said similar things. You have this bond with people you row with and compete with. 

“It’s a really strange team sport, because you are absolutely reliant on other people in your boat.  If anyone is off you cannot cover their areas, because you need everyone in each part of the boat to do their own areas. Yet when you are racing or competing you’re not able to look them in the eye, you are looking at someone’s back, so you need to have a level of understanding and trust on how to work together.”

The idea of looking at someone’s back is, in a strange way, quite fitting in trying to explain the relationship between rowers in a team.  Because the effort and sacrifice they put in for each other is hellishly physical, so seeing the muscular shoulders of your team-mates fully functioning is a visual boost, and it encourages trust within the group.  Like the military, they go through immense individual pain and suffering for the good of the team.  So seeing those same bodies working in unison to your own is somewhat comforting.

Katherine’s own body, more-so than most it is safe to say, is perfectly designed for world class sport.  However this is not purely down to the rigours of her chosen discipline, nor natural talent.  Because she actually only took up rowing in her first year at university, which means she has been doing it for less than half her life.

No, Katherine Grainger has become the athlete she is today because she has had a solid grounding in sport, in all its guises, since she was a child.  At primary school she did swimming and racquet sports.  In high school she became a black belt in karate, and excelled in athletics.  And she firmly believes this has helped her make it to the top of the tree in the rowing world.

“I definitely think having that wide range helped me. I was a jack of all trades, but you don’t have to be the best at everything you do all the time.  I just learned things as I went along. 

“I feel so lucky that I wasn’t just doing one sport from a really young age because I might well have burned out, or maybe not have found the right sport for me.”

“Having been involved in a massive range of other sports has also given me so much more enjoyment and fun, I didn’t feel at the time I had to succeed or fail, I just enjoyed it all along with my experiences.  I didn’t realise I had all these different skills until they all came together at the top level.  Without these skills I probably wouldn’t be the person I am now.”

And now she has settled on one sport, Katherine wants to make sure the school-children of today get the same opportunities she did. 

“Sarah [Winckless, her team-mate] and I went to a few schools with some rowing machines to do some work with the pupils.  We talked to the kids about what it’s like going to the Olympic Games, and the countries we have been in.” 

The idea is to encourage a new generation, but sometimes it works the other way too.

“In a way I find it really inspiring myself, because it reminds you just what sport and the Olympics is all about.  There are so many messages, for all different ages, whether it’s following your dream, setting your own goals, or just trying things out. When I was at school I never sat in a rowing boat, and I never planned to go to the Olympics.”

Katherine realises she is lucky to have had the opportunities to partake in so many sports, many of which came from her time attending Bearsden Academy in Glasgow and Edinburgh University.  And she knows that a lot of young people will not be given chances like that. 

There is little one person can do to change problems like this, but the fact remains that sporting heroes come from all sorts of backgrounds, and ultimately they all display the same character traits: They have a target, and they work their socks off to achieve it.

“Hard work is what you buy into, and that’s what it is going to take to take you to the top,” Katherine acknowledges.  “I’ve done enough of it for years to know what it is like.  You have to build steps to the big time goals and work on short term goals.”

And of course, there are always obstacles in the way of achieving those goals.  And overcoming those obstacles can, in their own way, be as rewarding as actually hitting the target itself, as Katherine recalled.

“2003 was the first year I won gold in the World Championships, with Cath Bishop in the pair.  That was one of my proudest moments, as it wasn’t just because we won it, it was the way we did it.

“Three months before winning it we weren’t even meant to be in a pair together.  The selectors didn’t select us because they didn’t think we had been going well enough. We were only the fourth ranked boat.  In the end we were selected, but even when we did get through we weren’t really given a lot of attention.  It was like the two of us against the world for quite a while.  But against all adversity we became the first women pair in Britain to ever win the World Championships.”

Why did they win?  Because they were triumphing over adversity?  Perhaps.  But more likely, it was because they had set themselves a very simple target.

“Even during the race I remember it wasn’t about finishing first, it was purely about seeing how fast we can make our boat go.  We knew when we were doing well that the boat absolutely flew! It was a question of ‘can we bring everything we have ever done in our lives into this one race and see how fast this boat can go?’

“And by doing that we beat everyone else in the world, but it was as if the winning was just a side effect of us getting the boat going as fast as possible.”

The moral to this story?  Much the same as last time; she just did it, impossible was nothing, and she believed.

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