On Monday evening I had another experience that strengthened my utter contempt for the nanny state that this country has become, in all it's many forms, but particularly when it senselessly deprives me of doing something that I know to be in my best interests.

Having not had the dubious pleasure of going to a gym in a few years (with the odd exception, and thanks mainly to having a Model D at home), I'd gone down to the Leisure Centre in Royston, expecting either to sign up and hop on an erg, or to pay up for a single session and do the same, but hit an unexpected hurdle.

Due to the all-pervasive modern Health and Safety regulations, no-one can now go to a council or local authority gym and just do a session, not without going through an induction session first, as was painfully explained to me by one of their staff. I tried my best, even offering to sign my life away (as I've known some private gyms allow you to do) and waive their responsibility if I'd had a heart attack and keeled over while using their equipment, but they weren't having any of it, and to make matters worse, couldn't offer me a slot for an induction session after work hours for a whole week!

Finally I gave in and grudgingly took the offered induction session, before heading home to post a desperate plea on the Free Spirits forum for someone to give me access to an erg. Thomas took pity on me, and invited me round to his house yesterday, even though he wasn't going to be around himself for much of the time. I gratefully accepted, as a whole week without erging didn't bear thinking about, and it was too good an opportunity to miss to meet up with the first other Free Spirit I'd met IRL (or four, as I briefly got to meet almost the entire W-P clan!).

The sheer exhilaration of being back on an erg prompted me to warm up much faster than normal (mid 1:50s as opposed to 2:02ish), and left me dripping with sweat in just a couple of km (although this isn't that unusual - I do sweat a lot, even when not working particularly hard). It also gave Thomas a few minutes to do a quick appraisal of my technique, which despite me being very comfortable with my rowing, was somewhat damning.

"You're over-compressing, massively" was the general gist of it, though "weak finish", "slow at the catch" and "hunched over" may have been mentioned from time to time as well. Subconsciously, I've been aware of some of these problems (especially posture, which isn't just limited to when on the erg, but not really the over-compressing, which was the main one), but I've got so acclimatised to what I do that there's been little incentive to experiment and improve it. Thomas also expressed doubts about me getting adequate blood circulation to the lower legs due to the extent to which I was bending my knees, and when I sheepishly admitted that I had been known to suffer from calf pains on longer rows, commented with just a hint of sarcasm "I wonder, I wonder why that could be!".

Still the truth never hurt anyone, and with Thomas promising to get me annihilating my Low Pull in a matter of minutes, I was encouraged to give his suggested alterations to my technique a go. "Half slide" he suggested, and then on seeing my definition of half-slide, "one-third slide". Because travel on the slide is quickest (and therefore the stroke most powerful) when the knees are least bent, the increased stroke rate that this provides more than offsets the perceived shortness of the stroke. Inherently I knew this, but there's a world of difference between knowing something and applying it.

I've never had erg coaching, nor indeed rowing coaching as an individual, only as a member of a crew, when to a certain extent, sychronisation is almost more important than how any one rower actually rows, and has always been what the few coaches I've experienced (admittedly possibly, not particularly good ones) have focussed on, so it was a novel experience for me, and even with my ingrained habits, I hope I proved a reasonably attentive pupil.

It took a little time for Thomas to get me to shorten my slide, speed up the catch (possibly the most difficult aspect from my point of view), tighten up the finish, train out the feathering and sit up straight, but the improvements were quickly noticeable, as successive LP attempts had me posting 1:24, 1:21, 1:20 and finally 1:19, from a previous PB of 1:27.

Thomas himself then took over for a lightning quick warm up followed by a 1K PB attempt. I let him get on with it for the first 500m, but then with him just on or outside the split he needed, felt I should be trying to put some fire into him, so did my best to cox him to the finish, which he managed to make in 3:10.0 exactly, breaking another Mike Channin PB, though his painful next few minutes spent gasping for air would certainly put most non-ergers off the idea of rowing for life.

Once he'd recovered and departed due to his other commitments, I was able to apply my new technique to an O'Neill test, improving my PB substantially to 1214m without being completely fresh, and then to a 5K, posting 18:36.6 (16s outside PB, but still my second or possibly third fastest time ever) without feeling any significant strain or working excessively hard. A couple of 2K warm-downs (the second simply to temporarily gain back the two places I'd lost on the meter board), and I decided to call it a day.

So, an interesting session, my first experience of being coached, and it has left me with a lot to think about, and a lot of practice to put in to get comfortable with the new technique. It's not all rosy though... last night and today, I've been feeling the after effects of the additional strain I was putting on my knees with the compressed high-power drive of this new technique, and I still have some doubts about whether, while using this technique, I can cover the same kind of distances that I've got used to covering, but based on what I've seen so far, I'm reasonably confident of destroying my current PBs for distances up to 2K, and almost certainly improving my 5K and 6K times as well.