GB athlete talks about her career, dealing with nerves and where she keeps her medals

Profile: Debbie Flood, GB Team Olympic Rower

Height: 5ft 10in

Medals during GB career:

Olympics

Silver 2008 Beijing Quadruple Sculls.

Silver 2004 Athens Quadruple Sculls.

World Championships

Winner 2006 ETON Women’s Quad

Winner 2007 Munich Women’s Quad

Winner 2010 Karapiro Women’s Quad

Q: How did you get into rowing?

A: When I was at school I used to watch the Olympics and I thought ‘wow’ because I loved sport but it felt like another world away. I really loved sports and I wondered if I would ever represent my country.

Running was my first love and also judo. This helped me as I had never been rowing before but this was part of the judo training.

One day somebody came up to me in the gym and said ‘oh, are you a rower?’ and I said that I wasn’t a rower and thought ‘why would you say that’? I didn’t know anything about rowing.

The person said that I was doing good times on the rowing machine. Because I have done sport all my life I was obviously quite fit and strong on the rowing machine so I went ‘oh, maybe I will start rowing’ so I went on a rowing course and it went on from there.

Q: What age did you start rowing? Did you have any knock-backs?

A: I was the only one at school that did rowing. I lived in Yorkshire and I went on a rowing course in London then I came back to Yorkshire to go to the local rowing club in Bradford and I started that when I was 17.

I definitely got knock-backs; when I first started it did not feel natural at all. I was fit and strong on the rowing machine but on the water I found it really difficult to understand the technique and the balance required.

But I was very keen and did lots of training sessions but after about three months I was still coming last in the novice races and one of the coaches actually came up to me and told me to focus on my A Levels as I was not going to be much more than a club rower.

My dad told me that it was a proven fact that if you train hard you get better so that’s what I did. I also needed to find a coach that could help my technical side of my sport to help me progress as an athlete.

But to do anything special whether it’s a subject or a sport or your work it takes hard work. To get anywhere you have to get through the set-backs and learn from them.

Q: What is the best and worst part about rowing?

A: The best thing about rowing is it’s awesome to win races and to hear the national anthem which is one of the most amazing things. I have also made some great friendships through the sport.

I rowed for 15 years in the national team and throughout that time you work together as a team and you get to know each other through good times and bad times, and you get to know each other really well. You also get to visit and see some great places.

The worst thing? I think it’s feeling tired a lot of the time. I would often wake up in the morning and it’s raining outside and it’s cold and it’s dark and I could do with a lie-in. We don’t get lie-ins, we don’t get weekends.

I think the hardest thing is keeping going through the bad weather and when you really want to sleep and you know you really need to go training. As most athletes will say, you don’t suddenly just become good in the summer; it’s about training hard all year round even in the days you don’t want to get out of bed.

Even at school or work you don’t always want to get up in the mornings but you do have to get up to make the day productive and every session makes a difference. All the hours you do at school or work makes the difference, and it’s the same with rowing.

Q: what do you do before and after a competition?

A: So in the run-up to a competition our training slightly changes. Most of the year we train two-to-three times per day and each training session would be an hour and 40 minutes and we row around 20,000m.

But coming up to competitions the training volume gets less so we are not as tired and we do more race type of sessions like 500m or 1,000m to get race ready.

We also do another thing which we call practise visualisation, where we would pretend we were doing a race and we would go through all the different processes.

I have to be up five hours before a race just practicing what you would do on the day and I can’t eat three hours beforehand.

When we finish our competition we always get a day off, which is nice. But we always go and have dinner with the crew even if you’ve had a good race or a bad race you would spend that evening together and then it’s back to training.

In summer we have the World Championships or the Olympics and after that we get three weeks off. So we may go visit family or friends and try and rest before going back to training again.

Q: How do you deal with nerves?

A: People do different things. Some people might get really quiet or others really fidgety. We will always have nerves and nerves are good as it means that the adrenaline is pumping through your body and it means that you know it’s really important.

But as I have gone through my rowing career I have learnt how to control my nerves. At the beginning I would be so nervous but you learn how to turn that into positive nerves.

It’s important we remember that we do it because we want to do it and also that’s what all the training throughout the year has been for. I find training hard but I love racing so the training makes the racing worth it.

When I come to race I don’t want to be fearful of it; I want to be excited and even though I might be nervous I have to be positive and confident because all you can do is your fastest from start to finish.

As long as you have done your absolute best then whatever the result you should be proud of that. Obviously you want to win medals but if you can say you have had a fantastic race and you have done everything you possibly can then you should be proud of that.

Practice your breathing, practice what you want to do – whatever you need to do to focus.

As I said everybody is different. I like being in my own space and put my earphones in and play some tunes before the race.

Everybody finds their way of focusing themselves; it’s so important to be focused and thinking about the first 10 seconds and not getting distracted by other things. It takes a while to learn how to do that and you don’t learn it suddenly, you have to practice it so it turns into a habit.

Q: Where do you keep your medals?

A: I have a massive vase and I have all my medals in that. I keep my Olympic medals in the top because I have to remember to take them to schools and to various clubs and they each live in a GB sock which stops them from getting scratched.