 we are ready to rock and roll. Let's get Charlotte on board. All right, please. I'm just trying to prop my phone up. Can you hear me all right? Vienna, you sounding good? Perfect. Right, how are you? Yeah, well, thanks. How are you? Good, yeah, I'm doing well. We had quite a long day of sessions, but it's been great. It's been really good. But you're bringing a slightly unique flavor to this, to the occasions that we have any sports, performance, conversation or personality that we're gonna have. Okay. Before we get started, I thought I'd surprise you with a little something just to set the mood of a lighter tone. Yeah. All right, I've never donned this, but Kara was going through the wardrobe in the day. She says, can we throw this out? And I said, we can't throw it out. So I've never worn it. Do you remember this? We never got to wear these. Hang on a minute. Is it the bomber jacket? This is tagged and all, to show that I've never worn it. So if anyone wants to buy it, real, this is the opening ceremony jacket for the Rio Paralympic Games. It looks really good with the tag on. Looks really good with the tag on. Yeah, like authentic. I never, yep, it's not, they're not actually real pockets. Oh. Wow, that's a throwback. Wow. I was gonna tell you to wear yours. And then we could have been like matchy-matchy. You know what? I don't even know where it is. That's nice, isn't it? I've probably put it, I've got a box of all my stuff that I keep from, like games and stuff. And it's probably been boxed away for a bit of time. But I've definitely still got it, but it's not one I wear, often, shall I say. This sentimental value attached, isn't it? You kind of don't wanna throw it out, but you're never gonna wear it. Yeah, exactly. It's weird. I'm not possibly throw it out, but it will just be in a box for a few years, probably. Right, so let's dig into a bit of background. I've got a load of things I want to talk about. Give us a little bit of an overview. You will do a better job of it than I will do, because I'll just big you up for the next five minutes if I do your bio for you. But Charlotte and I, I've got a little bit of scene assessing and then you can kind of fill in the gaps. Charlotte and I have known each other, probably since about 2008, 2009, we started working together in the build-ups in London, Paralympic Games. Charlotte at that point was a swimmer, and we'll come on to that as well, you're not a swimmer, technically, anymore. But I was Charlotte's training commissioner coach, and then Jaco, when he joined the team, did some work with Charlotte as well, through London, through Rio. And yeah, Charlotte, to give a little bit of context, Charlotte is one of the athletes that have the utmost and highest levels of respect for, because your career has not been a straight linear progression upwards, it's fair to say. But I started to talk to her and that was that we were going to chat tonight. And she said the same thing. She's like, Charlotte's just one of the best examples that we know of resilience. And it's like, I don't know if someone was going to describe your life, when you'd be like, that's the word that people would want you to choose, but it's actually like a really significant thing because it's been such a, your ability to do that has been such a defining quality of your personality and your career, which has got you to where you are now. And now it's like, yeah, it's been really cool. So give us a little bit of context about what you're doing has been like. So, yeah, I mean, sort of just to go to you, would that be the word that I'd want people to use to describe me in it? There could be worse words to be described by. And I think it's not until you take that time to step back and reflect on your career that actually it is quite a, that's quite an apt word to use. Because like you say, things didn't always go to plan and didn't always go the way I wanted them to. But yeah, I was a swimmer for many, many years. It was a sport that I had jumped from being tiny. And that was because really my disability, I'm a bilateral leg empathy for those that don't know. At the time, it was the early 90s. It was probably one of the only sports that was available to me at the time that allowed or had a bit of a pathway for disabled kids to go down. So it was a hobby. And then when I moved to university, it became something a little bit more serious. That's when I got on a program and funding and everything like that. Went to my first Paralympics in 2008. I was 21, so relatively old in terms of like debut Paralympic games. Since then I was at every major championship for swimming until Rio 2016. And then I had a bit of time out and now I've been involved in Para Canoe for three and three and a half years now. So that's the next part of the journey. Which is going well. Yeah, really well. Yeah, three-time world champion since I moved over, which is not what I expected at all in the first few years. But yeah, it's an amazing challenge and it's a change that I didn't really know that I needed until I did it. And then I was like, okay, this is where I'm supposed to be for the foreseeable future. Yeah. So let's talk about that because that's one thing I really wanted to sort of dive into a little bit. So there's obviously, training as an elite athlete has been compromised by coronavirus, first and foremost. So when you're doing a day-to-day basis, it's shifted massively. Like a lot of people was like, worlds would have been disrupted a little bit. But I think from an athlete's perspective where most people can take their job and they can do it at home or they might have been furloughed or whatever. Some people have lost their jobs, but you're almost not exempt from the pressures of a performance. No, your project is still gonna have the work and your focus is still gonna be delivered, hopefully. So when coronavirus kicks off and then they put the paradigm that gains back a whole year, talk me through what happens when you find that out. Had you seen it coming? Had you mentally done some of the preparation before then or was it like, still a shock? It was a bit of both to be honest because when we went into lockdown, it was a very gradual thing, certainly for performance sport because we had got a bit of an exemption from the government to carry on training as normal as we could. But then when we realized it was becoming too risky for us and everyone else to do that, we gradually start to shut things down so eventually we weren't allowed to go on the water or anything. And at that point, it was when the athlete voice around the world was probably starting to say, a decision needs to be made. Whatever that decision is, we can't just plow on knowing or hoping that the gains will go ahead because it's putting people under your risk and we couldn't train properly so it added that extra stress to then think, well, if I'm not training properly, how's that going to impact my performance? It would have been four or five months for the Olympic guys and only six for us. So we wanted the decision but then when it came, it didn't make it any easier to deal with even though we knew it was the right decision. And obviously, from a coaching perspective, you write training programs that are planned around a particular point that you wanna achieve something. And so our four years has been sort of structured around performing to our best this September. So obviously to extend that by an extra 12 months was a massive challenge for everyone. They were sort of squirrelling away, trying to rewrite macros and everything like that. So it was a challenge but we used to things not going the way that we want them to and it's just an added hurdle that we've got to get over to get to the games next year now. Yeah. Did you feel a sense of disappointment? I'm sorry if you can't hear this, just started from the storm. Yeah, it's just finished here. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you fine. I just weigh down from Mansfield. Did you feel a sense of disappointment or was it more like an opportunity or like, cause you were peeking, like you're looking good, right? So you just caught back with a really successful championship. That's really like exactly from the sport perspective where you want that springboard into the games and all of a sudden like, okay, I've got to do that again now. Today we're going to springboard again. How do you feel about that? It was exactly that. It was, you know, there was disappointment. There was the worry that we sort of planned everything like you say to springboard to this summer and you know, there was always that sort of, well, what if next year doesn't go the way that this year has and what if we don't get it right next year? And I think that was something that we always knew we were going to have to contend with once it canceled the games. Everybody's kind of going, well, what if I'm not fit next year? What if, you know, you know, anything can happen in 12 months, 18 months. So it's definitely something you have to deal with. But I tried to kind of flip it round as, you know, this year we'd got halfway through the season. We hadn't quite got to the racing part of the season, but the training over the winter had gone really well. So there's not a huge amount that we want to change next year, which is I kind of have to look at it in the way if we've had a dry run and it was going really well. So why wouldn't it go the same way next year if we do the same thing, but just try and push it on? And so then I started to be really excited about it because I've only been doing the sport for three and a half years. So, you know, how much more can we push it on if I've got an extra year behind me and I've got an extra year of experience. And I think that's been the whole thing with this lockdown is trying to take the things that haven't gone quite well or the things that we can't do and focus on something that we can improve because of the circumstance. And it might be something that we don't get chance to work on on a daily basis when everything's normal because we're going full steam ahead with what we've planned. But there might be other areas we've not explored that now we have the luxury to explore. And that's really exciting. Yeah. And what does that look like for you? What areas have you felt like you've had the opportunity to spend some time like focusing in on? Well, it goes back to that stuff. And I post about it a lot and it goes back to the work that we did when we were working together. And yes, it's the traditional land-based work and the gym-based work has strength and all of that. But in both the sports I've done, it's really important for me to understand how the top half and the bottom half of my body are working together. And so being able to go back to some of that calisthenics work to really strip it back to understanding how my shoulders and my hips and what leg I have all work in tandem to kind of create this sort of system that allows me to put down that strength. So it's been really nice to go back to the basics in a way and movement skills and just that understanding has been great. And because I've not been plowing down to the water all the time and I've not been able to go in the gym, so it's been, what can we do with the equipment I've got at home? And is it just in case you get the Swiss ball out and starting to do some movement and understanding that? Yeah, I'm going to move out of the conservatory. I wonder what that was. Absolutely. That's okay. Linging it down. Hang on a minute, but I was going to put a light on in here. Oh, it's fine. Yeah, so that's like a really interesting point because we brought calisthenics into your kind of training program a little bit sort of when we were, I don't know, like probably years out of the Rio cycle. Just we often get a lot of questions from people who are in swimming, particularly, about what the potential benefits of training like that or like what's been your experience of using like calisthenics for a sport to form a sport? I think to me, certainly when I was at swimming, it was because swimming is a bit of one of those funny sports where, yes, you've got to do gym work, but you ask any swimming coach and the swimming is the priority and it's the lion's share of what you do in your week. So for me, we kind of understood after a few years working together that that right balance of gym and water work was perhaps not smashing the weights in the gym because it meant that I couldn't perform in the water, but like I said, to strip it back and understand those real, specifically around my shoulder and all of the shoulder stability work and when you stripped it back and we kind of looked at the body position of where I was in the water and understanding the weight distribution between the top half and the bottom half because I'm top heavy, because my legs don't weigh as much. So it was how we worked on that and we challenged that in different positions, didn't we? Like we worked through the handstand work, which eventually we're doing on a voce, I think in the end and really challenging that instability, but keeping that kind of base and that kind of core part of my body position strong. And I think it just helped that I was able to do a handstand already. So we could sort of explore a bit more and kind of try a few different things, which was great and it was really helpful and just broadened that understanding, which I think I got to that point in my career that I wanted to understand that what I was doing was going to transfer to the water and that did absolutely. And what was it like when you got to Parakunu and you've got now like this calisthenic stuff that you really enjoy doing as part of your gym program? Was it part of what they were doing already or did you bring it in and be like, I've got this stuff that I think it's pretty cool? I don't know whether they did it already to be honest, but certainly in Parakunu, it's much more winter training and summer training just because in the winter, we can't be outside as much because of the weather. So the winter summer difference is much greater than when I was swimming. So the winter period when we're really working on strength and capacity and things like that is when we can explore a little bit more on land. So we have sessions programmed into our week, which aren't gym and they're not water, we call it robustness, which is essentially injury prevention, it's strengthening shoulder capacity, it's working on rotation and things like that. And that's where we kind of put in a bit of, we do some bit of bars work and some boaty work, we do a lot of balance work. And so that's where it kind of slots in really nicely in my little blocks. Yeah, I think that's it. And that's what's amazing, I think, is that as we continue to have conversations around sports performance in calisthenics, particularly around stuff with shoulder, like we've done some stuff with Scottish rugby and we're doing some work with artists, the guys, the sprints and athletics company in the States, it is that exact piece of going, well, let's talk about the shoulder and where physio kind of lets off or finishes and where strengthening condition traditionally starts. And there's a piece in the middle where we're missing, like we can scale strength, and we have a hard time like scaling stability. So for people that are sort of like interested in, there's so many people getting in touch and I've got issues with shoulders, obviously I mind me and Jack have got our own history. Tell us a bit about what your history of shoulders was like and how kind of, what they like then, how calisthenics changed it? Because there was some periods of time where your shoulder was on an, I used to describe it as a knife edge. Yeah. Like real borderline. Yeah, yeah. And I think you look at any swimmer's shoulders and they're probably 40 years older than the age of the swimmer. And I think towards the end of my swimming career is we're having real trouble with impingement and just real grotty pain whenever I was trying to put any power through the stroke. And like you said, it was getting to the point where I was losing days and days in the water because I just couldn't plow through the pain and it wasn't worth it. And I had two MRIs on both, I had MRIs on both my shoulders in probably that last year. And I remember the radiographer or radiologist kind of getting me into a room and he was like, well, there's nothing hugely wrong with your shoulders. Of course, when I first looked at them, there was so much like scar tissue and past injuries that he said, if I didn't know that you were a swimmer, I would have been really shocked by it, but just the amount of stress that you put through your shoulders on your swimmer is enormous. And it's relentless repetitions of being overhead, which is a horrible place to put that force down. And we're doing it for four hours a day some days. It's just disgusting on the shoulders. But when we were working together and we kind of started working on that, engaging the scat properly and making sure that I wasn't kind of in those awful shoulder positions and working on posture and the real basic stuff, you know, your rotations, the internal external rotation work. We know, I think there was one exercise that we did wasn't it, where it was just like an isometric hold against a wall to try and strengthen that just to hold it there and not allow my shoulders to kind of pop forward and let my pecs do everything. And that, I didn't understand that until we started breaking it down and taking it back to that sort of, you know, understanding what the shoulder does and how important it is to everything else below it. And that was a real eye opener for me. And it changed kind of everything because we kind of got on top of it, didn't we? We managed it, which was what we needed to do. Yeah, it's been an interesting thing because we jacked out in the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I had a bit of some information, my tendon, you know, it's from my own back end of last year into January and I was starting to get some like, I was jumping overhead a little bit and what happened is I kind of overloaded and underloaded it in previous to Christmas. So I went away for three weeks, didn't really do a lot on it. And then it just kind of started to get a bit niggled. But the interesting thing about it was that I probably had warning signs of it for about six months before, but it wasn't that bad that I didn't do anything about it. I think it was kind of like as well that it wasn't moving great. But then like, when I came back, I kind of tried to rehab it a little bit, spent some time with it, with a session with a physio friend of mine and Gemma Jefferson, you know, Gemma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. So, but then I did the same process as what you did. And when we were talking on a podcast with Jack, I just rattled through it, I was like, oh yeah, stripped it back, found out where I was tight. Did a little bit of ice age activation and built the pattern back up and now it's fine. And it's that, it's understanding that process of the shoulder requires so much neuromuscular control and precision. But you can't, you can't fix very often, I should probably say, you can't fix a problem shoulder just by training global movement. Like you've got to go back. And what I'd lost was a lot of like just that fine motor control around the shoulder, external rotation and being able to bring the joint head or the head of the humus into the socket. Without, like you said, just cracking into lats and pecs because like, boom, just going to be strong. But it's, sure, I can remember you getting like properly frustrated with that work because you don't feel like you're doing anything, but for whatever reason, you can't do it. And it's really not. Yeah, it's so true and it is. And I think because in my head, I couldn't, at the start of it, get my head around. Like you say, I feel like I was doing anything. And I thought, well, how is this helping? I'm not, I don't feel tired. I don't feel that gym kind of, oh, I'm so tired of work really hard. I didn't feel that. But like you rightly said, I was so frustrated because I couldn't do what you were asking of me. And I was literally, it was moved the TheraBand from here to here without doing, and I just could not do it. And it was like, it's the most simple movement but understanding where that you initiate that movement was so tricky to me. And it does take a real patience and willingness to work through something that perhaps doesn't always feel easy, or even though it's very basic, it's quite hard to plow through that. But obviously it's hugely worth it. And the work that it's doing is massive without you really realizing it. Yeah. I hope this was referred to say that we were trying to do that work on a Friday morning after you've probably done about eight swim sessions that week. Yeah. Probably not always in the, after the swim session, you're not always in the greatest frame of mind to be like, just tired now. You're not just giving me stuff, you're just pissing me off. Yeah, and I was like, oh, I just went in an hour and 45 minutes and then I've got to quickly get changed and come straight in the gym. And I was just, yeah, I mean, you had a rough deal getting me straight after a Friday morning swim session. But yeah, I think the energy levels might have been a bit different on an afternoon at the start of the week. Yeah, I'm sure. I've just seen it as soon as he signed in. So, you know, swimming with your friends. So with all that sort of short shot, like obviously, I remember one time we were shoulder wear it was probably one of the more kind of nerve-wracking times for me. And I don't know whether we ever really kind of verbalize it, but you kind of picked the niggle the Christmas or the December before the games, I think, in, which is going to be the following September. I can remember just being like, I'm where we're like, this is a little bit kind of borderline, but, and this is kind of what I wanted to get some of your takeaways on. Like, you've been through a number of different processes through your career wear or time periods where you've kind of had to kind of properly do that process of regrouping. And I just be interested, I'm not going to, I don't want to lead you in any direction on that one. But like, what have you learned from all those times where you've been in a place where you're like, okay, things are pretty crap right now and I need to find my way out. Or I don't know where the way out is because you've always managed to kind of climb, pick your way through quite a bit of complex situations. Yeah. I mean, again, I think it's a challenge of any athlete if you're going to put your body through what you put your body through, you expect to have niggles and things that affect the daily routine, which then affects the mind because we love to know that that consistency is there. So it's what gives us the confidence when we step out onto the field of play. And I remember working with Jaco when I was doing the psychs of with him and he used to say, if you can step out to race knowing that you've done everything that you possibly can, you're in the best possible place to perform. And obviously training disruption through injury starts to get into your head of, well, I'm missing out on XYZ. So then when you come to race, you think, well, have I done everything that I can because I've been so plagued by days where I've had to have old sessions or I've had to have a few days off for whatever reason. And it's really tricky to navigate that. But I think I got better at it as I got older. And I think I started to understand that it was part and parcel of what I did. And I think that's when we kind of stripped everything back. And we actually worked out what I needed to do versus what we thought I needed to do. And that in turn had a massive impact on those injuries and things that were affecting me physically and mentally, stripping it back to, well, the textbook says that we should do XYZ at this point of the season. But actually for you, it doesn't seem to be working. This is when we always get injured or this is when we pick up a niggle that, you know, is there any need to do this? Is that affecting the body? And so when we started to play around with things, then that was when it gave me that ability to sustain a level of training that wasn't enough. And I think that that was part of having those honest conversations with everybody that was around me and making sure that everybody was on the same page, coach, S&C coach, psych, physio, me. We were all singing from the same hymn sheet and that allowed me to navigate those slightly tough times with, well, actually we just need to have faith in what we've planned and it will come good eventually. It's not easy at the time, but I think once you understand that everybody's fighting for the same cause, it makes it so much easier to work through those rubbish types. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting for people that are sort of listening to this and not in an elite sport environment and going, what does that look like for me? And it's just like when we're in an elite sport setting, we just lay a more complexity onto it because it's basically more of a take effectively. We have to perform because for the athlete, for the team, for the country, whatever it might be that we're involved in that conversation. Well, I think for most people, there's a couple of things that you said there, if they're like training calisthenics, the training sport, whatever it might be that they're just enjoying it and they're a recreation athlete, that those times are stripping back and working out what you actually need to do. Because it's so easy to add more all the time. But actually we're gonna be the most beneficial things. Like you said, get back to what do I really need to do but then also be very clear on what you want out of it. And I think you got to that point where you've actually started to refine those processes. You had a very clear goal. You knew what time you had to swim. You knew what you needed to do. What was interesting for all of us is when we did less, you swung faster. I was like, this is not how it's supposed to work. No, I know. I'm doing the feeling, yeah, she's getting quicker. Yeah, yeah. And that's something that I think as I got older and I got through my career and I mean, I think there was this five seasons, I think that I never swam a personal best. And I was winning medals at majors but I was never getting faster. And that was a real grind and how I kept going through that, I have no idea. But I think I always knew in the back of my mind that there was more to give. It was just finding the way to get it. And that was when we stripped it back and actually, I think it was five years and not PV'd and then when we finally got the mixture right, I think I PV'd three times in three weeks or something ridiculous like that. It was like, it was a six-week period that I kind of went from being just completely flatlined to going way quicker than ever gone before and like I was doing less and it was just finding that right balance that worked for me. And I think that's really important, especially when you can kind of get caught up in what everyone else is doing and it's something that I apply now to canoeing and I've got that benefit of experience and I've got that benefit of knowing what essentially went wrong at swimming and now I'm eager to not make that mistake at canoeing and it's about training smart rather than lashing myself into the ground and not being able to get out of the hole that I put myself in and that's hard to get your head around sometimes when it doesn't feel like you're doing a great deal but you have to have faith in that it's the thing to do and that's something that I'm so thankful that I went through that and had that period where we had to think slightly differently because it's been a godsend for the rest of my career, for sure. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that's a really important takeaway for people to go through that process on a regular basis. Because we kind of get the fitness industry or pull us into the process of thinking you've got to be the hardest worker in the room. You've got to do more than everybody else and that's how you get better. The physiology of tellers are actually like and even as an athlete, because you constantly got that pressure of so my competitors might be doing more than me. But I think it's when that maturity that you're talking about now is going, you know what, they might be doing more but if I'm doing it smarter, I haven't got to do as much and that's the whole thing you need to do is as little as possible to get the most amount of change and when you get that right, then you're going to be in a good place. Absolutely. It's not to say it's not difficult. You know, there's still days where I think, whoa, I wonder what such and such doing and should I be doing that? But it's then having the ability to have those conversations with the people that are around you, whatever that may be and whoever that may be and float those ideas, you know, do I need to be doing this? And if not, why not? I think I want to understand why I'm training. I don't want to do anything if I don't think it's going to better me because why would I do that? So I think knowing that and having that freedom to talk to someone and have that conversation, do we need to do this? What about this? Can we try this? Yes, no, maybe let's try it for now. That's crucial to any sort of upward trajectory in my mind. I always love that about working with you. Is that you would always like, but I always wanted to use the name, why I chose this. Why? It was just such a good relationship because I would always like from that perspective when I come and say, this is what I'm thinking. I would obviously be quite open about that. But then you did the same thing of coming back and going, you weren't afraid to go see why we're doing this or is this the right way to do it? Or the stuff we're doing in the water is not complimenting what we're doing here. And I remember, I'll never forget one time when you said to me, and this was probably a game-changing point for me. It was like, you know what I feel really good in the water at the beginning of the season? And I'm like, what do we do at the beginning of the season? We do loads of lightweights and loads of high reps before we get bogged down at Hedberg. And then we went, all right, let's just do loads of that. And that was a turning point. But it was that honest conversation around what does it look like? What do I need to do? And what's going to work. So the question before we start to wrap it up a little bit was just around loads of people, because they love training and particularly because calisthenics is addictive, they want to do more of it, but it's quite high intensity. They find themselves pick-up niggles and you've had issues with elbows before, with wrists before, with shoulders, like super common injuries in calisthenics. What is your advice to people who are thinking that they might have a bit of something going on, but they don't really want to acknowledge it? And then also, what does you learn from like, you got quite good at getting over injuries? Talk to me a little bit around identifying injuries and then also dealing with them. So identifying them, I'm the first person to, and I've been injured since I've been at canoe and now it's not shoulders, it's ribs and back because of the rotational element, but it's the same sort of thing. And I think the more you can know your body of what's normal for you is the first thing, because I know that when I do a certain amount of, certainly now in canoeing, it's whenever we change our training block, my back flares up, I know that now and we can almost prepare for it before it happens, but I wouldn't have known that had I not become very in tune with how my body responds to such. So I think the biggest thing is to know your body of what's normal and what isn't. And that can be really hard to start with, to know what's normal and what isn't. And it's have that conversation with, I don't know if you've got a physio or you've got a sports massage person or whatever it is that kind of gets your body through the training, that's the first port of call. And chat it through and don't ignore it because I've done it and thought, well, that's not quite right, but I'll be okay. And then I've carried on training on it and it only has made it worse. And then the time recovery is five times as long or whatever, but once you've got that experience of knowing what's normal for you, it makes it so much easier to identify things and alter things before problems get too much of a problem if that makes sense. But yeah, it's tough, it's really tough. But I just kind of got to the point where I was like, I've put in my body through the ringer, it's not a machine, it's gonna give at some point and it's how you can sort of reduce the give point as much as possible and know when to push and when to say, actually, this is enough for now, like we need to just reset and recover and go again. But it's tough, it's really tough. It's that same thing that I think the point you make about knowing what your body's like and so to know yourself and then also just listening because you get plenty of warning signs. It's rare that you get to the door where it just goes, bang. And you're also okay, it's a traumatic injury, maybe contact base is a bit different, we're talking non-contact injuries. You get the signals for quite some time. Oh, absolutely. You're just not doing anything about it. Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, it's not just to do with injuries, but it's a big thing I've learned is fatigue levels and case in point this week, we work on three week cycles with two heavy weeks and a D-load week and I was on a D-load week last week and this week was supposed to where it ramps up again and I didn't feel recovered enough after my D-load week. I just normally it sorts me out, but I got to Monday and I thought, I still feel tired and I could have plowed through it the whole week as it was written, but I had those conversations on Monday and we changed things up and we altered things for the rest of the week and yesterday I had a gym session planned in and I started it and I was 15 minutes in and I thought I won't be able to finish this to the standard that it needs to be finished. So what am I getting out of it? Just plowing away at that fatigue level, which then come Monday morning, it'll come back to bite me in the behind. So what's the point in pushing through it? So after a few minutes of going, oh, I really should do this gym session, but I don't think I can get anything out of it. I actually listened to my body, which was telling me I needed to rest and it's tough, it's really hard when you want to do more and you feel like you should do more, but listening to your body about not only injury but resting recovery is so important. It's as important as the training. Great advice, I think that's a good one to sort of people to take away, to take home. So what's training look like now? So what's the reintegration from post-corona lockdown sort of starting to look like for you guys? So we can go into our training environment gradually. So tomorrow there's four of us, I think that are allowed on the lake. We're kind of the first people in and it's all very regimented, temperature checks on before we travel to train in and everything because we're essentialised programming so we all train in the same venue, which is a bit of a hotbed for the virus if someone wants to bring it in. So we're being really stringent on access in and out the water and boats being cleaned down every time we've used them and gradually reintegrating back to training on the water. Jim probably will take a little longer because that's an environment that just sharing equipment is tricky. It's probably actually where coronavirus started in a gym somewhere. It wasn't in the Wuhan food market. Exactly. It was probably the gym. I know. It was fit somewhere. Yeah, so that's a bit challenging but we've got what we can at home to... I've ruined one of my patio slabs by dropping a dumbbell on it in the first week of lockdown because I'm gym training out in my garden. But if we can get back out on the water that's one step towards slight normality, which would be great because we've not been... I think it'd be 10 weeks so we've not been on the water so that just to get the feel back will be key. Yeah. I can't remember. I wanted to... The thought is coming to my mind about the phrase that I've heard that I really liked. I need to remember it. But it was this idea that like you've got to keep training so that you're always ready because we still don't know what's going to happen. Like how long this is going to take. Yeah. Rather than trying to get ready just trying to be ready all the time. Yes, that's probably like the only mindset that you guys can dox them on because we don't know what normal is going to look like. We don't even know what games might look like next year. Well, exactly. Yeah. And we've had our training... We've had our entire season cancelled basically. We're not going to get to race at all this year. So that's tough because we've done some really good work and we're not going to even get to the domestically race I don't think just to give ourselves a run out. Which is tough. But we've got a nice block running into the end of our season which it would be coming into the end of our season now. And we're just going to get fit and we're changing the mindset of normally we're going fast but let's work on that base engine which, you know, I'm fortunate to have a pretty good engine from swimming anyway. So just need to get the more petrol going round it which would be great. And it's a different stimulus. It's a different challenge but as far as we know the games are going ahead almost exactly a year later. So we've just got to get through to October which is the start of our season normally and then we know what that looks like from October onwards. We know what the year is going to be. We know when our trials are going to be. We know when our peaks have got to be. So we've just got to get through to the start of a season that will look like something we've already seen before. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Two comments coming through. One of them, somebody says that you look like a paintbrush and I think they're probably assuming... I was like, wow, I never thought maybe it's probably you. Look, Priya, I think it is, lockdown haircut it's like when you commit to a haircut like this and then you get locked inside for 12 weeks. There's only one way it's going. Like it doesn't do anything else. No. Give me a break on it. Is that not cut at all from... Is that no trim or anything? The car is back in the size we just left the top which you've now... It worked alright for a while. Johnny Bravo for a bit, but now it's equine problematic. Yeah. Mark Shardlow's on, thanks, Mark, nice to hear from you. And then also somebody called Ox Strong Health used to swim with you, Charlotte. Says you were absolute world class and I would agree with that, Joe. OK, that's Nathan, yeah, he used to swim at Nova. Amazing. Right, so that was everything. Thank you so much for that. I just wanted to... I was laughing at me now, I know it. People are like, why don't you shave it off when I can't? I haven't got the right kind. Imagine moving the bald head, it just wouldn't work, would it? I'm not, yeah. I don't think I've ever seen you with any other hair, but some form of that. Well, what else can you do? I think you just grow it out. That's our guy's hair. I don't know. No hope, yeah, definitely keep it like that. Yeah. That's what guys do. You get a good haircut and you stick with it. Like, it's... You're not going to be messing about long, short. You're not going to have the flexibility that girls have with their hair. Oh, yeah. We're also terrified of changing barbers, in case they don't get it right. Also true. Yeah. So thank you for that sharing, you're... I think you, like I said, there's so much experience of being in the game as a full-time athlete. How long has your career been now, would you say, at the world-class level? So, I raced my first international for GB when I was 17 and I'm 33 now, so 16 years. Yeah. Yeah, so you've done it. There's not much you've not done in that time. So I encourage everybody to take on board what Charlotte said, and I think, even if you are not in a performance environment, just spend some time thinking about what it looks like for all of us, and whether that's surrounding yourself with coaches that can help, get advice from people, training groups, whatever it might be, communities that you're part of. But, yeah, take an honest look at your training and take some of this stuff on board, because Charlotte learns it the hard way. So, you have to take the benefit from her advice. It's been so nice to catch up with you as a senior. I always always say, we're trying to come and get together for coffee, but the only thing that lockdown has done for me is it's put the brakes on. So I'm now going to create some more time in my diary to actually do the things that are going to be more sort of... Well, I think it's done that for everyone, hasn't it? It's made you kind of reassess a few things and slow down and prioritise what's important. So, if there's going to be a benefit that comes out of it, I hope it's that. And what's going to happen to, like, one thing we've not talked about, music industry or musicals... Oh! Like, Charlotte is a very big stage theatre fan. I am. I don't know. It's the same as, you know, a lot of the environments that are to do with theatre and things, it's very people in very close proximity. It's kind of similar to gyms and places like that. It's not an easy environment to start back up again. So I think it's going to be a bit of time before something like that comes up. But again, similar to the fitness industry, there's been so much sharing of knowledge and experience online. And a lot of performers I've seen have been doing stuff online, the same as people doing workouts together online. So I think it's definitely created a bit of community. It's just not quite the same as being all together in the room. But yeah, I know I miss the theatre very much, but hopefully at some point, I'll be able to get back. It'll be a strange moment. It'll be like sport where you've got every three seats empty. The same as theatre. It's going to be a strange world for them. I did see the clip from New Zealand. They think they had a rugby match yesterday. And it made me a bit emotional, actually, seeing like a proper stadium with a match and a crowd. It was like, it feels so long since I've seen that or experienced it. It's something that kind of gives me that buzz. And, you know, to not be able to have that is massive. So hopefully at some point in the near future, that'll be back. All right, well, I hope the next few weeks goes well. Integrating back into training, you get back on the water and then you enjoy wiping your boat down with antiseptic wipes. Oh, I know. That and me, yeah. All right, thank you so much for joining us, Charlotte. It's been good to see you. Thank you, Tim. See you later. Take care. See you later. Bye-bye.