Will it make the boat go faster? A conversation with Kieran West.
PAGE 65 73
2020
rather than just looking to reinvent the wheel every time a business change is required, unless that’s what’s called for, I find myself looking in the first instance whether there are really critical small tweaks that can be more easily delivered and sum to a big impact. I confess I’ve retained the sports mindset of “why accept mediocrity?” I never saw the point of doing so; if you’re going to do something, whether because you want to or because you have to, you might as well do it really well because I find that’s a lot more fun and satisfying than being merely average. Whatever the situation, get the most out of it – if you have to be in the gym at 6:30 in the morning to do 20km on the ergo, it’s going to be horrible; so, you can either get through it and go home thinking it was miserable, or you can nail it, do the best 20k of the week and walk out the gym thinking how you rock and have a great day. Most importantly, rowing taught me the value of teamwork. You can’t win a rowing race unless everyone in the crew is focused on delivering the same goal in a way that is complimentary to the rest of the crew. Rowing is not a sport where individuals can strike out for solo glory; it’s the team that succeeds together and fails together. So you do whatever it takes to ensure everyone knows what you are trying to achieve and why, knows how you are trying to achieve it, is bought into this and is able to perform at their best to do so. For me, this is equally applicable in the workplace as in a boat. I think you’ve won everything there is to be won in elite rowing and now full throttle into a career post rowing. With everything to be won in the trophy cabinet, any chance of a return to elite sport? I do use the gym, go running and cycling but I haven’t been rowing for quite a while. I consciously took a few years out to give myself a break and was thinking of getting out there again, but with lockdown I haven’t had much of a chance. In general, I’ve deliberately avoided getting into competitive sport so far; I know myself far too well and one of two things will happen: either I’ll become obsessive compulsive in the same way that I was when a professional sportsman, which is fine, but I have other things going on in my life right now; or I’ll get frustrated because I don’t have the time to devote to making myself as quick as I want to be and I still don’t like losing races. So, I might get back into competitive rowing at some point, in the veteran scene where you don’t have to train quite so hard, but for the moment, I’m comfortable with just doing enough to stay fit. Although every now and again I do get that urge, the itch, the why don’t I pop out and try my hand again, so let’s see.
field was coming back on us, but our plan had given us such a lead they could only get to within a third of a length by the time we crossed the line. I remember Harry Mahon once told me the secret to rowing was: “we teach you all this nice technical stuff so that when you are absolutely flat out, it’s still there and you’re doing it efficiently; we don’t teach it so you don’t have to pull hard.” After the race, people keep telling me how we looked really smooth and relaxed, which I always find amusing as we were rating up at 40 strokes per minute, and absolutely gunning it – you just have to watch us at the finish of the final; we were all dead! Luckily we’d been coached and drilled so well that when we were absolutely flat out, pulling as hard as we could, it was still efficient, smooth and technical. Which is why our plan worked and we won. I remember you speaking at the sports dinner last year about rowing being a sport of marginal gains, made up of many small incremental improvements. Has the successful understanding and implementation of this in your sporting career had an impact on how you have carried yourself in your professional career and how you lead others? Sport was a major part of my life for a long time, so I’ve taken a lot of crossover lessons into the workplace, which influence the way I work and how I encourage my teams to work. To be good at sport required identifying what I needed to do to succeed and making sure I did it - pushing myself in training, going to bed early, or whatever it was – while avoiding wasting energy on things that didn’t help. We had a saying in the Sydney VIII which was our litmus test for decision making: “will it make the boat go faster?”, a really simple test for anything. When your goal is to win the Olympics, fundamentally you just need to be able to row faster than all the other crews, so therefore everything you do, everything, needs to be focused on how to find that speed; if an activity doesn’t help deliver boat speed, why do it? I apply it daily in business: to make something happen, identify what is genuinely important and ruthlessly prioritise it, and deprioritise everything else. Tied into this, sport has made me appreciate the value of clear goals, both individually and for teams or organisations. In rowing, everyone knew what they were trying to achieve in every training session and how it contributes towards the end goal; at work I look to apply the same related questions: What are we trying to achieve? How does this activity help deliver it? What is needed to make this activity successful? Rowing also taught me that big achievements are made of small incremental changes. In rowing, if you can find something that makes you go one inch further per stroke, over the course of two hundred strokes you have quite a big winning margin. So
done what we’d set out to do. Previously we’d been concentrating on technique and how to make the boat move as efficiently as possible; in that outing we went out with our cox screaming at us and the crew just furious, and just had a really hard session. We went back to the village with this burning anger inside us. The race plan for the repechage [semi- final for those crews who didn’t qualify directly for the final by winning their first-round race] was really simple: “you guys humiliated yourselves in the first round. When the gun says go, you’re going to put all of that into the race. Don’t you dare let off between when the gun says go and crossing the finish line.” It was the least well-planned race we’d had. But we released the frustration at ourselves and just went for it! Outcome? A really fast race, where we took the field apart. What made the difference? Brutal honesty about how well we had done and taking responsibility for it. And having taken responsibility for it, then saying look, let’s do something about it. IT was a big turnaround. For the final, the race plan became much simpler. We knew we would likely get a medal with a decent row, but rather than making sure of one, we made the decision we would go all out for gold and lead from the front from the start and go for broke down the course, even if this risked running out of energy and costing us a medal - better to go for the win and get nothing than to race cautiously for a silver or bronze. Rowing is raced over a 2,000m course, which is approximately 200 strokes, taking 5 ½minutes. We broke the race down into four 500m sections, with the plan to attack each section in sets of five times 10 strokes. Go out unsustainably hard for the first 30 strokes, lead the field from the start, find our rhythm and push into the first 500m mark. Then up a gear for three sets of 10 strokes, push for 20 more into the 1,000m mark. At halfway, whether up or down, put in a killer 30 stroke push, to either kill off the opposition or to get us to the front of the race, maintain for 20 strokes to the 1,500m mark. In the last 500m, go flat out for 10 strokes, and repeat four more times, or however long it took to cross the line. Basically, go off the start as hard as we can, keep our foot on the gas till we cross the finish line and hope we make it! The plan worked better than we had hoped. We led off the start, had a third of a boat length over 2nd place within 500m and extended this half a boat length by halfway. I was counting out sets of ten strokes in my head and ignoring everything else; when I looked up at halfway, I was stunned we were so far ahead – eights races are like the 100m in athletics, it tends to be tight the whole way and often a blanket finish – then head down again for the next 500m. At 1,500m, we were three- quarters of a boat length ahead, which moved out to almost a length with 400m to go. By this point we were exhausted, having gone flat out for over four minutes. Then we stepped on again. With about 250m to go we were running out of energy and the
early session in the gym, gap in the morning where you can work, water session in the afternoon, gap in the evening to work and rest; it’s very focused so helps break your day down nicely. There’s none of this student waking up at 10 o’clock and wondering what I should do; I’d be up at six, quick breakfast, get dressed, down to Goldie boathouse and by six- thirty be cranking away in the gym. By about half- eight I’d be in college, having done 20km on the ergo or lifted a load of weights, had a shower and got changed and come back in for breakfast when other students were still getting up slowly. It was a great feeling: your mind is awake, you’re ready and alert and can hit the ground running in the library by nine. So long as you then use the time properly, it gives you 3-4 hours in the morning to work, plus evenings and any days off, which is ample. Best of all, when I was studying and rowing, I didn’t get bored – in the run up to the Olympics I took time out of studying to focus only on rowing, and found the recovery downtime between and after sessions a bit dull as there’s nothing to do but sleep, watch tv or read books, which is great for a short time but the novelty quickly wears off. I remember watching the 2000 Olympics on the television. GB were up there as favourites for gold in the 8 but had lost the initial heat to the Australians. What had you and that team developed that team that meant you could re- gather and ultimately pull through for quite an emphatic win in the final? That first race was awful and it was our fault. We went to Sydney having beaten everybody in the world at some point that season, then messed it up. We were too cautious and overthought it. We had a smart plan all mapped out and we forgot that’s all very well and good but you still need to just going for it out there. When we came back into the landing stage afterwards our main coach, Martin McElroy, basically gave it to us both barrels. We were disappointed but rather than mollycoddle us, which would have been really fatal, he said it was an absolute disgrace. The other coach, a world class technical coach called Harry Mahon just said to us "If you want to go and do dressage, you can f**k off to the dressage arena! If you want to race, stay here. You’re going to go home now and tomorrow you’re going to wake up and you’re going to do it properly”. The first thing we did was recognise it was our fault. We felt we’d made fools of ourselves and we were angry! We’d underperformed and lost as a result. What really turned it round for us was focusing our anger and humiliation. It was being really honest with ourselves, sucking it up and saying “that was rubbish”! As a result, the next day when we came down to the water, we were really mad! We’d done all that training and preparation to get to Sydney and in that first race we’d not
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog