The Evening Times Globe, Saint John, N.B., April 6, 1999

Ed Winchester glides along the Kennebecasis River in this December file photo, as he resumed training on the water after his operation.

Our Olympic-class rower hits a tough training camp and learns there's no quick way back from serious surgery

By Ed Winchester, Special to the Times Globe

Editor's note: This is the fourth installment in a journal Rothesay rower Ed Winchester has been keeping for us as he recovers from his October back surgery and strives to qualify for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

You could tell the guys from the East by their bloody hands.

Rowers from the East - anywhere east of Victoria's Elk Lake, actually, where winter doesn't drive Canada's national team off the water - are used to the spongy handles on rowing machines.

Nasty little blisters are inevitable after a winter away from the rough, unfinished wood oar-handle. But during today's time trials, the painful climax to the weeklong February national team training camp, they are worn down into crimson sores. And after six months away from the water, my hands are hamburger.

The workout is called a pairs matrix. It's a guaranteed 3 1/2 hours of hell. The matrix is a series of five 2,000-metre races performed in pairs, with the rowers changing partners after every race. The point is to blast down the course as close to maximum speed as possible, switch up partners at the dock and row back to do it all over again.

All this blood - on our oars, staining our uniforms - seems, like dirt under the nails or paint on coveralls, just like part of the job.

After the race, our coach Volker Nolte will crunch the numbers and come up with the first real ranking of the season. It's the start of a process by which every rower here will be either named to the boat or sent packing.

Nothing that extreme will happen this time out, but from this raw data the first images of the 2000 Olympic team will emerge.

Five months ago, I had surgery at St. Joseph's Hospital in Saint John to remove a herniated disc. It was a drastic measure. No North American rower has ever made it back to international competition after a discectomy, but it was the only procedure that would let me return to the National Team in time to trial for the Olympics.

I was presented with a slim window of opportunity to go under the knife, heal properly and start training in time for this upcoming rowing season. Dr. Richard Backus, Rowing Canada's team physician, had told me to write off this season and focus on returning by 2000. But with this year's World Championships, Pan-American Games and Commonwealth Rowing Champs all taking place in Canada, I was determined to fashion a second opinion - my own.

I pushed my recovery, constantly on the cusp of re-injury. I managed to progress from swimming laps in the pool to rowing again on the indoor rowing machine. It was only in the last few weeks that I stopped struggling with the higher-intensity stuff and could start working on my sprinting speed.

It was synchronicity the way my recovery was timed with the National Team winter training camp in British Columbia. I was right on schedule with my best-case scenario, timeline. But how would I know that once I got out West, Volker would up the ante.

Volker's in search of the elusive clutch performance and he's got a new approach to drawing it out of his athletes this year. That's what this camp is all about.

For the past two seasons, the lightweight men's program has failed when it counts. At the 1997 World Cup in Switzerland, the Irish four rowed us down in the last 250 metres. Same race, one year later, the Spanish did it. And at the 1997 World Championships in France, our lightweight eight gave in to the Australians in the second half.

Volker sees it this way: "You guys are not tough enough."

This is an about-face for a coach who's believed in lots of low-intensity training for six years. At past training camps, a week of high-volume, light rowing would be capped with one day of racing. This time around, it's competitive workouts every three days. As a primer, we started the camp with a 40-minute ergometer test. Two days later, our muscles were shredded in a competitive endurance weight circuit. In some cases, Volker nearly doubled the weights we normally use and as we moved from station to station - squats, leg press, cleans - he'd have someone counting every rep, recording them on paper. We lumbered around lock-jointed for the rest of the week.

As one of the guys observed after a painful descent down the stairs, "Every step you take feels like a squat."

And waiting at the end of a week of three-a-day practices was the matrix.

Elk Lake's pastoral-sounding name is deceptive, just as rowing's symmetry and grace misleads watchers about what it really feels like to bash heads out on the water.

Not much of a lake, in truth it's more of a kidney-shaped pond where National Team rowers have been chasing their Olympic dreams up and down since the early 1990s.

This was the rainiest and windiest February on record. On the morning of matrix, it's clear and cold. Frost covers the dock. If there were to be any day to be blown off the water, any workout of the camp to miss, this would be it. But there's only a slight northwest breeze and the surface of the lake is glass.

It feels like we're going into battle.

Dr. Richard Backus' casual appearance at the boathouse suggests that someone's expecting casualties.

A week earlier, he gave me the once-over at his downtown clinic, pronouncing me healed enough to keep rowing. Through a series of flexibility and reflex tests, he figured that the October 22 surgery by Dr. Ed Abraham had been a success. There was remarkably little scarring around the incision. I still had sensory problems in my right foot, but I had full range of motion.

"If it wasn't for that scar on your back, there's no way I'd be able to tell you had surgery," he said.

Still, caution was going to be a major theme in my rowing career, however long it lasts, stressed the doctor.

The 10 of us assigned to do the racing were laid back. It's easier to get wound up for one race. But this is five races and it calls for a different approach.

Imagine knowing in advance that your hockey team will be playing in a triple-overtime game. It makes no sense to blow the wad in the first frame, and hang on for the next five periods. You need a specific strategy focused on the economy of energy. The trick is to always be riding the edge between blowing up and keeping the boat moving at a good clip. The race is against the clock.

On race one, all my blisters tears open, but that's the least of my worries. We go off in a line, one after another, with 20 seconds between each boat. The first boat in my line of vision is barreling down the course and running right up our stem. Kick and send. Hold the stroke rate. But it's hard; I haven't raced on the water in six months. Kick and send. I can hear my first partner Tony Shearing's short, shallow breathing behind me. Okay, they haven't moved. Last 500 metres. Tony calls for a sprint, in between gasps. Take the rate up. But I have nowhere to go. Go now. The stroke-rate jumps a bit, but it's hardly a sprint.

A coach floating in a tin motorboat yells when we cross the line. We stop on his first syllable and slump over our oars. Look around at the three other pairs. Everyone else is slumped over too. One down, four to go.

This continues on for the next three hours. After every race, we row back to the dock to re-hydrate and change partners. My back holds up, but as the morning wears on I get more and more hunched-over.

This doesn't go unnoticed by Dr. Backus.

"I don't like the way you're moving," he said. "Are you sure you want to keep doing this?"

Nobody wants to keep doing this, says a beaten-sounding voice inside of me, but I didn't fly out to Victoria to bail on the most important workout of the camp. And besides, it was the state of my raw hands, not my back, that was bothering me the most.

There's nothing more painful than hot shower water on raw blisters that feel worn down to the bone. This is how the camp ends. Low blood sugar, hands throbbing and a sore back. The races now behind us, and Volker somewhere off calculating the winning times on his laptop, we shower and drag ourselves upstairs in the boathouse for debriefing.

The ranking was disappointing although somewhat expected. The West Coast rowers were first and second on port side - rowing is divided into port and starboard (I'm port) - with the rest of us filling out the bottom. I wound up basically in a dead heat for fourth, enough off the pace that, on this day anyway, I wouldn't be in the top four ranking.

Later that weekend, at a house party marking the close of the camp, crewmate Graham MacLaren tried to console me. He said that people say it’s a miracle I’m rowing again, never mind competing in the grueling pairs matrix.

Cold comfort, at the time anyway. In a one-on-one, Volker said the same things. Suck it up, he basically said, and have more respect for your competition.

"After all that's happened, if you were to come back and be the top guy, something would be wrong with the program," said Volker.

With further introspection, I realize he's right.. I'm crawling back into the melee and it's just going to take some time.

Fitness is no longer a worry and every week of training under my belt sends last season's disc surgery, a little further out of mind.