AFTER Jess Eddie kicked off The Northern Echo’s exclusive Road To Rio diary last month, fellow Durham rower Nathaniel Reilly-O’Donnell delivers the latest update on his winter training programme

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Jess started our Olympic Diary with an update from our visit to Rio. It was exciting to see the city, even if Jess kept nagging for “a photo for The Northern Echo” at every other street corner!

We landed late one afternoon and were in the gym at 7.30am the next day. My chief coach, Jurgen, cracked the whip, piling us into the biggest training day of the season so far – a not so subtle “right lads, you’ve got to get on with it” sort of day. Within just a few days we were racing in Nottingham for the 2014 British Rowing Champs.

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WHILE they might have had a questionable choice in kit styling, the women from Tees Rowing Club did the North-East proud at Brit Champs.

Olympic champion Kat Copeland and national team rower Tina Stiller won a bronze medal in the double and then joined forces with Beth Bryan and Charlotte Davies to come fourth, by just 0.02secs, in the quad.

Jess Eddie showed her class with a women’s four and quad win in a national team composite while I limped in tenth in the four but then a stronger fourth place in the eight.

Newcastle and Durham Unis were well represented with Newcastle showing the early season edge. Absent national team rowers Will Fletcher (Chester-le-Street) and Jamie Kirkwood (Cresswell) had sick notes from their mums but are now back training and “smashing it up” in Will’s words.

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LAST month, I went in for my MOT with our medical team and came out with a few “advisories”. Rather than wait for any really nasty problems, the doc sent me to our spinal specialist on Harley St for an epidural.

It’s likely that I’ll have a few more injections over the coming weeks, worked into the training programme to keep the downtime to hours rather than days or weeks.

Previously, it would have felt like a big deal, but I’ve been in the team long enough to have been through this more than once or twice. The priority is to get quickly into good shape to be knocking it out of the park each day at training.

Over the next few weeks, we start to ramp up our training mileage and intensity, building on the gains of previous years and looking for that edge for next year’s Olympic qualifiers.

My early season scores have been pretty reasonable and I’m really looking forward to finding my rhythm in training where each day I look to knock 0.1secs off my average split times and add a couple of kilos to weights lifted in the gym.

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IF you’re from Northumberland, head down to Cambois this weekend (November 8) for the final leg of the Northern Sculling Series.

Jess will be writing in a couple of weeks,but you can catch us day to day on Twitter at @JessEddie and @Nrodtweets.