Winnipeg rower headed to Boston regatta

Hi, yeah, my name is Mike Carrick. I'm a rower here out of the Winnipeg Rowing Club. I'm about to race the Head of the Charles. It's one of the biggest head races in all of North America. It has rowers from all over the world come, and the course is 4,702 meters long, and there's a lot of twists and turns in this course, a lot of bridges, a lot of obstacles. I haven't had the chance to race the Head of the Charles before, so it's going through the heart of Boston, so it's going to be a lot of traffic, a lot of stuff to hit. It's something I'm really looking forward to because it's like a really hard competition to get a spot and entry in. I've had a lot of success in the summer and I'm hoping to sort of take that to my rowing here at the Head of the Charles in Boston. My name is Kirsten Ryan. I am the head coach for the Manitoba Rowing Association and one of the coaches that coaches Mike it's a huge regatta it's almost 2,700 entries every year typically this year almost 900 clubs from around the globe are attending it's really a festival of rowing and the Boston community does an amazing job Mike is training all the time for all types of events we do sprint events or 2000 meter and this is called a head race so it's a longer distance kind of endurance event typically they'll be like four to five kilometers in this case it's 4,702 is the best line but you know 4,800 approximately for most people so the training for that involves a lot of aerobic capacity so we're doing a lot of long slow distance i've been doing a lot of training in the morning like it we have like boat lights that we put on in the like front and the back of the boat so they put like a white light in the back and then we put a red light on the like port side so I'd be like the right side and then on the star side we put a green light and then in the afternoons I try to get out for a row I just get out for rows on the weekend I do some like cross training where I'm working my legs because you use mostly your legs in rowing. How did you get into rowing and how what's it about the sport that keeps you coming back? It was a combination of my mom sort of pushing me into doing it and then me wanting to do just a sport that was a bit different than everything else. I had a pretty good track background from going Glenmont Collegiate and I tried it and I was putting like pretty good numbers on the rowing machine so I had the fastest rowing machine score for all 2002 birthdays in the country in my first week. What does it mean for you to compete in this race and what are you hoping to accomplish? I'm hoping to accomplish top 25% so I can get a buy and an entry for next year so I can just improve upon my results from this year. Being 24 years old I'm just entering the senior category building upon like my performance is really important. How do you think Mike will do with that for being a first-time competitor well Mike is in really good physical condition I mean he's a top athlete very close to gold medal standard for that like very fast and he trains for that the only disadvantage he has as a new competitor going to this is the fact that he's not as familiar with the course he is going to do a practice row when he's down there I feel very confident that Mike will get in the top 25% so he'll get an automatic buy for next year and he won't have to he won't have to like apply to get in you're in the middle race and your body is telling you to slow down what's going through your mind I like to go back to like the technical fundamental things on the rowing stroke so I like to think about okay like if I'm like gripping it But I sometimes grip it too hard on the shoulders. I like to think about being a little bit looser with the shoulders, getting the shoulders away down from the ears. It's like when it's hurting, I like to think about how can I go back to doing a bit more of the fundamental stuff that I've been doing in training. Going back onto your previous question on what keeps me coming back to rowing, my relationship with the Red River. always been like a consistent consistently flowing thing of like no matter how crazy my life gets outside of rowing I could always count on the Red River to exist and be there and be a place where I could just get on the water and just sort of have that calm environment to to work on things