“Come along Geoff, the medical centre are having a ‘Come and have your Cholesterol checked’ day, are you coming?” And so began the series of events that culminated in my recent ‘Rowing Marathon’. Being in the military – the RAF, I did indeed go and have my Cholesterol checked and at the same time the medics were checking Blood pressure too. This was some ten years ago and with a chosen charity of the Blood Pressure Association, it won’t surprise you to hear that having had my blood pressure tested – they wanted to “do a few more checks”. And indeed, check they did. To be honest I wasn’t aware that I had high blood pressure, and now knowing that I did, seemed to make no difference either. At this time the Royal Air Force had it’s own hospitals and I spent a few days as a patient while the doctors while they worked out which was the best drugs for me. In those early days, I was back and forth for regular checks and eventually settled down with a tablet a day of enalapril. The enalapril was fine but the coughing side effects used to drive me crazy. From memory, that probably took almost a year to settle down.

Throughout my life and indeed, my service career, I have always tried to keep fairly fit. From swimming, football and rugby at school, through to hockey, karate, cycling (I used to cycle nearly 40 miles a day back and forth to work), hill walking, squash and Windsurfing with the services. I have been Windsurfing now for over 25 years and in particular, love the racing aspect of it. I represent the RAF and sail on the national circuit. As an aid to keeping fit for that, I bought a Concept 2 Rowing machine during the summer of 2002. As an added extra, I particularly liked the little monitor that you could purchase to enable you to view and record some basic statistics about your pace and work rate etc. and then with a little bit of extra computer software, ‘e-row’, it was possible to row on-line and compete against others rowers from all over the world. Fantastic, I loved it. The software at this time was in its infancy and online races didn’t always go as they were meant to go. At that time it didn’t seem to matter. My technique wasn’t obviously the best either, as every so often I would put my back out and then spend 3 or 4 months without any rowing while I recovered. Anyhow, time passes, my technique has improved – thankfully – and now with some swish 3rd party software from Digital Rowing, Internet racing on a rowing machine is now a real event. The on-line community is growing all the time, giving support, forums and regular online training sessions and races.