This is my first proper blog about anything. I have never quite got the point of athletes writing blogs as they are normally just talking about how hard they train and how tough it is being an elite athlete, but actually it can be a pretty fun lifestyle, so I thought I'll give this a shot and write a blog for The Huffington Post UK.
Hopefully it will give an insight to life as an elite rower on a regular basis, including training and some of what I get up to when not training.
We have just finished our final trials weekend; this is where we raced in single sculls against other members of the team. For myself as a lightweight I race the other lightweight men on the senior team, so there are nine of us altogether but only four raced at the weekend, the other five guys have had different illnesses and injuries so were unable to compete.
We were racing at the Olympic course at Dorney near Windsor. Dorney can be a challenging course as it tends to have a crosswind which creates for very difficult conditions at times. However, this past weekend we had a nice following wind which made for fast racing.
I came second behind Adam Freeman Pask, who we like to call the Champion of the Thames as any time he has set his boat on the Thames at Putney this year he has cleaned up all the competition! I was pleased with my racing this weekend, racing in a single scull is very different from crew boat racing, it requires being able to push yourself individually without the encouragement of crew mates and I felt I handled this well over the weekend.
Sometimes racing the single can be daunting but as I had raced it in the 2010 season this experience helped me push myself harder in training and racing.
It was great racing on the Olympic course this weekend, but I find that it doesn't matter where I race or what the course is like, it's still two kilometres of water which I want to move down as quickly as possible.
Another aspect for lightweights is weighing in two hours before our race at a maximum of seventy kilos, this can be really challenging for some athletes and less so for others.
At the moment, being young I fall in the latter category and seem to make seventy kilos reasonably easy, but I anticipate that as I get older it will become more difficult. Although in saying this for a week beforehand I felt as though I hadn't had a proper meal in about 2 weeks! However I did manage to enjoy munching away at cream eggs for part of the time.
Once I got home on Sunday in the evening I enjoyed a good Chinese meal, followed by a full English the next morning and an all you can eat Chinese meal that evening with my elder brother Richard, who is also on the GB lightweight team, his wife Abi and four-month-old Joshua, who is just a bundle of joy.
Richard knows that I find making the weight easier at this younger age so has given me the challenge of making myself skinnier by eating fewer cakes and more fruit and veg, meaning I can put more muscle on and in theory weigh in with less fat - but on our last skinfold measurements tests he was chubbier than I was! We are both fairly similar in build and in strengths and weaknesses with regard to rowing.
In coming to the end of two days off after our final trials regatta, I have had a reasonably productive two days of good eating and enjoying just relaxing and being back at my University boat Club - Oxford Brookes, to see how they are all getting on and catching up with mates.
Also I have just put a Brooklyn chocolate cake in the oven and will enjoy that later. Baking and cooking are something I really do enjoy outside of rowing. I love good dinners, usually with potatoes, especially roasties; it must be my Northern Ireland roots!
If you would like to follow me on twitter I am @PeterChambersGB - although to be honest I'm not sure it's that interesting!
- Peter Chambers is part of the GB Rowing Team which is sponsored by Siemens and funded by the National Lottery Sports Fund.