Eric Murray: How to Row Faster, Best Damper Setting & Olympic Training | ENDUROX Podcast Ep. 9
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Dan Plews (00:13)
Hey Storey, what's going on?
Adam Storey (00:14)
Dan Plews, I'm good, mate. It's going good. I'm actually interested to hear about your updates on your injury, mate, and I'm sure all the listeners are as well.
Dan Plews (00:25)
Yeah, I've made very fast progress, actually. I'm biking, doing calf raises, stability. They said no running for three months, but I think I'm going to blow that out of the water, to be honest.
Adam Storey (00:40)
So what was the latest diagnosis, mate, from the specialists?
Dan Plews (00:44)
No surgery. A full rupture of the anterior, and a partial rupture of the middle, the bit that goes between the fibula and the tibia. The posterior is fully intact, which was my saving grace by all accounts. I don't know if I mentioned this in the last podcast. Most people have been very surprised with how fast I've progressed. When I got my foot in a cycling shoe, that made the difference. As soon as I got that mobility and started moving, I felt like things progressed really quickly. I rode three hours 20 minutes yesterday and that was all good.
Adam Storey (01:21)
Jeez, mate. Well, shall we introduce the best-looking man on the podcast out of the three of us?
Dan Plews (01:28)
We should indeed, yes. Today we are very, very delighted to have with us on the show Eric Murray. Alongside Hamish Bond, Eric was part of the most dominant men's pair in rowing history. Olympic golds in London and Rio, multiple world titles, and unbeaten for the best part of eight years.
What's quite exciting for those listening to the show is that he was also an absolute beast on the indoor rower. He rowed, I think it was 18,728 meters in an hour, which for those who don't know is an average of 1:36 per 500, held for an hour. He's also gone 14:56 for a 5K. That's sub 1:30 splits, 1:29.5. If you've ever sat on an erg, you'll know how mind-boggling that is.
I had the privilege of working with Eric as his exercise physiologist between 2012 and 2016, and I have to say it was a very fun time, really fond memories. One of the things I still talk about to this day, and probably one of the greatest feats I've ever seen anyone do in training, was four times 2K with three minutes recovery, all in under six minutes. That is crazy stuff and I still mention it to this day.
Today we're going to get into what elite training is really like, the mindset behind that unbeaten streak they went on to have for the best part of eight years, training intent, and what we can learn from HYROX and rowing, specifically indoor rowing. There's a study that came out that shows rowing is the most important of all the stations in the HYROX for the elite men, but for some reason we don't talk about it. It's also the station that has progressed the least out of all stations since HYROX was taken on, because of the technical component, I believe. With that said, welcome, Eric.
Eric Murray (03:37)
Thanks, Dan. Hey, what a welcome. To be fair, I think I've only got one world record left out of the four that I had on the indoor.
Dan Plews (03:45)
It's the 6K, right? Is it the 6K?
Eric Murray (03:48)
No, it's actually the 10K. I'm really surprised no one's tried to break that one. The hour and the half marathon that I did got taken by Colin McCabe, I think pre-Tokyo Olympics, and then the 6K disappeared. But the 10K, this is a really interesting one. It's 31 minutes and change, I think 31:07. Just watching the guys that are doing 5:30-something, 5:34, I think the world record now is 5:33 on the 2K, they're a different type of athlete. I think the problem is that once you stretch out that little bit longer, the physiology completely changes again. That's probably why nobody wants to do it, because not many people want to suffer for half an hour.
Dan Plews (04:45)
But to be fair, there were rowers who were almost erg specialists, just really good on the erg, but you were actually a better rower than you were an erger, really. And you were also very, very good on the erg. I always remember at Rowing New Zealand, there were always a lot of rowers who were terrible on the water but great on the erg.
Eric Murray (05:12)
Yeah, it's a misconception, and I think it's a bit of a stigma with rowing. People always say ergs don't float. Like anything, there's a standard deviation of athletes from one side of the spectrum to the other, but generally the guys that are winning Olympic medals are on the far side. There's the occasional person that doesn't go very well on the rowing machine.
I think it ties in with your aerobic base, your power and your physiology, but also the intent you go out with in a rowing race, which is to hold a pretty substantial amount of power for a very long period of time. The bigger guy has to be able to produce that power for as long, as well as do the technique. I developed quite a lot with the technique. The technique was always there-ish, but when you can combine the technique with that physiology, and a lot was done with the amount of aerobic-specific training we did under Dick's coaching regime, then you could really tie it in.
I wasn't an outright power guy. I probably wouldn't even have been in the top 50 in the world at the time for a thousand meters, or definitely 500 meters. But then you stretch it out that little bit longer to what we were race-specific for, which is roughly six minutes and a little bit more, and we were pretty much unbeatable.
Dan Plews (06:48)
I forget, what was your best time? Low 5:40s?
Eric Murray (06:51)
5:41. 5:41. The one regret, and you could probably give me a bit of feedback on this, was that we always did that in February. We never, ever did a 2K after February, not once. If we'd done one in July or August, mate, how much faster could we have gone?
Dan Plews (07:13)
Well, I think if you're doing four 2Ks in under six minutes, it speaks to the fact that you were going to do one faster than 5:41, right?
Eric Murray (07:28)
It is what it is. Those days are long gone now.
Adam Storey (07:31)
When in your development did you realise you were such a weapon, Eric? Was it quite early on, or was it later on?
Eric Murray (07:41)
Well, put it this way, I grew quite rapidly when I was probably 10, 12. I got a bit of height, and then I hit 13, 14 and I went sideways rather than vertical. I put on quite a bit of size. I stacked on the pounds, that sort of puppy fat that most adolescents get. That was just my body type. It wasn't until I was probably 19, 20 that I started to shed that puppy fat and develop it into a bit of muscle. I was probably six foot when I was about 13, 14, and by the time I got close to my full height of six foot four, when I was about 20, 21, I had that size.
I just learned how to use the rowing machine properly, and I'm sure we'll get to this later. You combine that with your size and the technique and everything else and you can put some good times and good numbers down. It really wasn't until I was close to 19 or 20 that I thought, I do have the ability to be quick on the water and also on the rowing machine. I reckon that was about the age, because I was getting into representative teams. You have some attributes, but you don't have all the attributes you need to be a champion.
Dan Plews (09:14)
Rowers are just by default very tall. They called me Little Dan, and I'm six foot one. They used to say, where's Little Dan? I'm not that small, but amongst the rowing team I was pretty short.
Adam Storey (09:31)
I suppose, both Plewsy and I worked with Joe Sullivan, and you would have done more with Joe through rowing as well, but he was a bit of an anomaly based on his height, would you say?
Eric Murray (09:43)
Yeah, absolutely. I always try to explain the best rowers to people this way. You've got to have a certain amount of strength, a certain amount of fitness and a certain amount of technique, and you're trying to take the three attributes and marry them together. You can't be really fit and really strong at the same time, so one has to give. The technique sits on the side of it. If you do a lot of fitness, you're probably going to have a better technique, and the opposite.
That's where New Zealand as a team did really well, because we did a lot of Ks. We didn't do a lot of strength training, so to speak, not like other countries such as the British. So our technique was generally very good. People like Joe had a very good technique. He learned how to row the boat properly. That's the difficult part with rowing, because you've got forces going this way and that, and conditions and everything else. Once you can figure that out, you can steer away from having to be super strong or super fit.
Of course, Joseph had amazing explosive power. He was second to none. He really worked on that fitness and explosive power, and he had the technique. Fitness, not so much. He's still very fit, but not to the level a lot of his competitors were at. When you combine that explosiveness and power, bang, he was away laughing. If you put Joseph in a single, he would have some very, very good races in the single, but also some really bad ones. And when you put him with other people in the double, not everybody worked well together. It's very similar with Hamish and me. We could be put with other people and it might not be as good as what we were jointly. When you find a good combination like him and Nathan, who had very similar attributes of explosive power and being able to move fast, they were just gone.
Dan Plews (11:52)
And they were also of interestingly similar stature, because Nathan was also not tall, right? I think that has to play a part, I would imagine. But you said a couple of things there that I picked up on. One, Eric, is that you mentioned your training under Dick Tonks and how that built your aerobic fitness. I think that's a great segue, because I really wanted to talk about the life of someone who's trying to achieve at the highest level at the Olympics.
I also want to bring you back to another thing you said, which is that you can't be fit and strong at the same time. That's super interesting, and I totally agree with it, because we've just been writing a paper about whether a sub-50 HYROX is possible. One of the things we talk about is these competing demands of strength and fitness, that the two don't actually work well together. You said it dead right. You give one, you take away from the other.
If you look at HYROX on its own, and what it takes for the stations versus what it takes for running, they're not that impressive. The running is not that fast, the strength is not that fast, but together it's a real problem and it becomes really hard. I'd love to circle back to that. But before we get there, tell us a little about your time under Dick Tonks and how it changed to your time with Noel Donaldson. What was training like as an elite rower, day to day?
Eric Murray (13:24)
Rowing had this recipe of success. You always talk about that 10,000-hour rule, where you do so many hours and you get pretty good at something. Rowing was very similar. You had to do 10,000 Ks a year or whatever it was, 200 on average a week, bang, bang, bang. That was the minimum standard. That's what we aimed for, so that was really what the program was about, trying to get those numbers.
With Dick, when we went under his tutelage, which is probably the most appropriate term, we bought into what we'd seen previously with other coaches, this relentless and ruthless regime of constant work. You looked at it and thought, I'm glad I'm not doing that. I think we did quite a lot more than everyone else. Dan can probably agree. We did a lot more in terms of kilometres and intensity. Nothing was tracked. It was all done in a notebook. He'd say, this is what I've done with every other athlete. Miles make champions.
In 2010 he walked into our pre-year meeting and said we're going to stop doing weights. You can do some conditioning, but we're not going to do any more, and we're going to put more sessions on the water. We were like, we already do enough. Our volume just increased a lot. We went from about 200 a week to 260, 280, sometimes over 300, and you think, this is wild. But his philosophy was that you're going to get faster by being fitter than by being stronger.
I don't know if we were bought in, or if we were just told Dick's going to coach you guys. The problem is that he had a credential list of world champions and Olympic gold medalists. When you jump on board with someone like that, you think, if I go with this guy I'm probably going to get some success as well. So we bought into whatever it was, and whatever it was was pretty brutal. We started to figure out that it's not going to be fun, it's not going to be pretty, but you're going to get super fit. I could turn up on a start line knowing the race was probably going to be easier than some of the sessions we'd done in training. That psychological advantage was quite potent, because we knew, those 30 by 500s in Belgium, piece of cake, doing 2K in one go, easy. This isn't going to be a three and a half hour row.
It was learning intensity. I was explaining it to someone the other day: how do you figure out intensity without the science we've got today? We never had heart rate monitors. We just rowed, and Dick would ride his coach boat right up behind you and get the throttle on. You have to keep in front of it, otherwise it's going to run onto your stern. A lot of his training was, hold the speed, and you're working your ring off trying to keep it going. It built up this intensity.
Dick, and the New Zealand rowing program, was one of the first, and I think a lot of people have adapted it since, to that competitive training environment, where you train with someone else every day. They might be slightly faster than you or slightly slower, and you adapt to that. For us, the women's quad was the same speed, and the lightweight double was slightly faster. We could do pieces against them, and you're comparing yourself against people all the time. It became this internal competition where you're driving yourself. We've got a five-second head start on Nathan and Joe in the double, they should be beating us by 10, so they're going to pass us early, but can we hold them off? Can we stay in front? Can we not let them get away too much? Those were the things that drove the system and drove us to train hard and push the limits of what you thought training was like.
Some of it was probably not necessary, because there was no data behind it. It was just, I've got these notebooks sitting in my drawer that I've used with so many crews before. All the periodisation and when we do things was in his head. There was nothing else.
Then Noel came into the room for the meeting we had at the end of 2012, or I think it was actually after I had fought Manu Vatuvei in the Fight for Life, so January 2013. I love talking about this, I do public speaking and I've said it to a lot of people. He said, right guys, what do you want to do? I said, can we do less rowing? I'm sick of this, we're just bashing our heads against a wall. He said, yeah, we can do that, and we're going to do way more off the water. That's where Dan stepped in and said, right, I'm going to do bike sessions and erg sessions, and we're going to tailor them to your specific needs. I need a little bit more endurance, Hamish needs a little bit more power, that type of thing.
Honestly, training became an absolute treat. You come down in the morning, you do your rowing session, and you're like, we're going to get this perfect, and you really nut it out. Then it's, right, we're going to do these erg sessions in the afternoon. Eric, Hamish, you're going on the bike. Then you guys are going for 100K on a Wednesday. It made training so much more enjoyable. What we ended up doing, which I'm sure Dan will allude to, was so much more functional fitness, fitness that was on point rather than training for training's sake. The TSS scores were great, the time in heart rate zones, everything was just so much better, because we were able to mix and match what we were doing. That made it more enjoyable than it was with Dick, and we could see the results. I was never a big journal keeper. But when Dan's spitting out the data year in, year out, he'd say, this time last year you were doing this at this speed, and you're on point, or a little bit quicker. We were like, this is great. Then of course you go to World Champs and win, and he says, told you, mate. Data doesn't lie.
Dan Plews (20:43)
It's interesting, because a few things sprang to mind when you were talking. One is that Dick was obviously a great coach, but for a long period of time he also had the privilege of choosing the athletes he was going to coach. That plays a massive part, because at the end of the day, as exercise physiologists and coaches, we play a very small part in what's happening. It's the athlete, with their genetics and their ability and their mindset, that is the main thing. If you can cope with a high training load and you're choosing athletes who are a bit more resilient, it's always going to work.
The other thing I thought about was that time at Gravelines, when we did those 500s and he didn't tell you how many you were doing. You ended up doing...
Eric Murray (21:33)
Yeah, in Belgium. Thirty. Some of the sessions we did were just out of the gate. You talk to people about it and they say, what?
Dan Plews (21:42)
It's crazy. People listening to this will think the training sounds crazy. But there's also the additional aspect that he didn't talk to you, he didn't give you any feedback. That's the mindset, the hardness of that. One of the things I said in my message before you came on is that I think it's great you had that experience, and then an experience where it was a bit more interesting, but we still did important stuff and still did the hard training. I do think athletes often look for entertainment rather than training now. Unfortunately, the road to being the best is monotonous. There's a high degree of doing the same boring stuff to be really good.
Eric Murray (22:34)
Yeah, I agree with you on that. But what ended up happening when we were tracking things a little better was that the monotony died off a little. That's what I think is good about a lot of the sports science I saw develop in my time, because we started with nothing. Maybe a heart rate monitor, and no one took any notice of it. You just checked it, or you were mucking around. No one cared at the end of it. Then we got to tracking quite a lot. But still, I felt, maybe me specifically, I didn't go, what was my TSS from training today, I need to know. I was just down there puffing away, and my heart rate would be about 165 or whatever, and about 175 on the way back, but I felt good. I didn't feel like I was struggling. I didn't feel as tired that afternoon. Having your own personal knowledge of how you feel was really important, and we developed that because we weren't stuck on a watch. Now, if you didn't have the watch that day, it's like, mate, if you didn't have the watch, you didn't do the training. That mentality is there now. You still have to have that accountability, but you also have to understand yourself and how you feel.
If I was on the rowing machine busting away, holding 1:45 splits at rate 20, and I felt good and could actually say a sentence, I knew I was in a pretty good space, because that's where I normally was. That self-awareness is one of the critical things. And it's not only day to day. You'd know, because you kept all my data, I turned up to training after a month off about seven kilos overweight. My first month or two of training was horrific. I'm slow in the single, or in the pair Hamish is saying, mate, you're slow because your big fat gut is holding us back. The rowing machine's a bit slow, but then it gets better and better over those months. That was just who I was. I wanted to get out of there, I needed that break, drink some beers, eat some food, then knuckle down and build myself back to where I needed to be. And I took note of that every year.
That's why I feel New Zealand did well, because we were in the system. We always had the 5K in November, an hour or some stupid thing in December, 2K in January, February. As long as those numbers were as good as or better than they were the year prior, you were making improvement. If they're slower, you ask what's been going on. That led us right through the whole year. I knew when we were on pace. I knew when speed work was going to happen. I knew when we were going to do a lot more starts, the fast twitch work, those 40 by 20s we were doing. It develops so that you understand you can't be super quick in three months. You really do have to have a big period to build up, without taking too much off and starting back from zero.
Adam Storey (26:50)
Eric, it sounds like you've had some hellish sessions. You mentioned the four by 2K, but also that 30 by 500 on the water. So this one's a bit of a double-banger question, mate. If you reflect back, what would you say was your hardest session? And if you take us back there, what's your mindset going into that session, and how do you handle yourself throughout? That's a question I get asked a lot from athletes, in terms of how they should pace themselves. I'm always interested to hear, for someone of your caliber, how you mentally prepared and took yourself through each of those pieces.
Eric Murray (27:36)
I'll answer the second part first. How do you prepare for that sort of stuff? Try and fail. Figure out what you're actually capable of doing. You say, I've got these pieces today, I think I can hit this pace. You've got to have a realistic expectation. I'm not going to jump on and try to do a 5:50 on the first one of those 2Ks. I knew my expectation. I reckon I can hold 1:29.9 for all of these pieces. I had an expectation which I thought I was capable of achieving, and going into them it was, if I fail, I fail. Then I'll know I can do three and a half of them. Or if I only did two and the third one was dead, I'd think, I'm going to limp through this last one at 1:45, but I'm not going to quit. I just know that's where I'm at. Then you come back to it, and you come back to it.
I see that a lot with people online using rowing machines, and people I talk to. Every month they're going to do a 5K, or they're going to do 30 minutes at rate 20, and they just want to see where their improvement is.
Now, going back to what the most difficult sessions were. It's a very interesting one, because some were probably mentally harder than physically harder, and some physically, and aerobically or anaerobically. The one I think was the hardest, and that took a long time to recover from, was the six one-minutes that we did. Remember those, the anaerobic threshold ones, or whichever they were. I thought it was seven.
Dan Plews (29:23)
No, man, you're blowing it up. It was six.
Eric Murray (29:26)
Okay, six. Six one-minute pieces, full power, as low as you can get the split on the rowing machine. I was getting sub 1:10s, and it was just hold on. By the last one, probably even after the third one, I was in a lot of pain. We took lactate on that last one and it was 23 millimole. That one took me a good two to three days to physically recover from. Anything you tried to do with the body, it was, mate, no way. There's acid burning in your muscles.
Dan Plews (30:09)
For those listening, it was the exact session of six one-minutes with six minutes recovery.
Eric Murray (30:15)
Yeah. Full power. Full power.
Dan Plews (30:16)
The aim is that there's no pacing. You have to go full tilt from the start and then hold on.
Eric Murray (30:22)
You go as hard as you can and don't stop. He said, get the lowest split you can, I want absolute max. The first one, I think I did a 1:12 average split, and I'm like, man, this is great. And then the next one, that was game over.
Dan Plews (30:43)
The aim is to get maximum lactate accumulation and rise. But do you remember how much you bounced out of that after you'd done it two or three times? You were flying. It makes a massive difference. Two or three of those sessions are really hard and they take a bit of recovery. This is specifically for rowing, right?
Eric Murray (31:01)
Well, that goes back to the second part of that question. Mentally getting up for that again, it was, I don't want it. But I knew what I was in for, so I thought, I'm going to go as hard as I did last time and see if I can crack that 24 millimole. If I did the same split but my lactate wasn't as high, then technically, physically, I'd got better.
But going back to that question, it's hard to say what was physically really difficult. The 30 by 500s we did on the water in Belgium were full speed, row off 250 and go again, row off 250 and go again, and then turn around, and we had no idea what we were doing. That was so draining, and physically there was nothing left. People were crying afterwards. We ran out of water, and we didn't have a chance to start. So you're thinking, this is really going to affect me.
Then some of the sessions we did at Karapiro, we'd try to pace the double for a 10K at open rate, up at rate 30. A few times, if you didn't pace it properly, you knew you shouldn't be able to keep up with the double. The lightweight double was normally a bit of a nemesis, because they could tail us and hold us. You'd get to about 2K to go and you were dead and gone, but you're not stopping. So you're rowing for seven minutes in absolute agony. There's nothing left, there's no power, there's nothing. Those were the sessions that ingrained in your memory how physically demanding it was. But the 30 by 500s and the six by ones were probably the most memorable, the ones that imprinted on your brain.
The body's an amazing thing, because if we remembered pain, women obviously wouldn't give birth again, and we'd probably never do that type of session again.
Adam Storey (33:08)
It's so interesting you say that. Going back to America's Cup grinders and Marius van der Pol, I'm sure you might have heard of that individual, given what he did in a short stint in the rowing world. For our listeners, Marius was an ex New Zealand SAS soldier who then joined the ranks of Team New Zealand as a grinder. Again, Plewsy magically prescribed a similar session to the boys. You think of Marius as the absolute alpha male of alpha males, ex special forces, an absolute freak of a man, but he talks about his hardest session being a three by one-minute effort on the grinder. People look at him sideways, saying it's just one-minute efforts, but it's the context of going absolute maximum. Same thing, hey Plewsy, those six-minute recoveries on that one.
Dan Plews (33:59)
Yeah. Still my proudest moment is destroying an SAS soldier.
Adam Storey (34:04)
And did you ever set out on having such a long career, Eric, or did you play it almost season by season? Going back to mindset, mate, how did you do what you did over such an extensive career?
Eric Murray (34:21)
Well, in a way, we were the second generation of the centralised establishment. In 2001 at Karapiro they brought a bunch of young guys, all under 23, to train over the winter. We went to race in Canada, and the next year they did the same. They brought a few more, and we'd exited those ranks and gone on to under 23, and it just carried on. We were the first ones to get into that position.
I was 22 at the Olympics in Athens. Because of that group of people and the way we'd trained and the qualification we'd had, there was a four and a pair that qualified, plus a coxed four that I was in. You effectively had 10 guys going for six spaces. A couple of them decided they didn't want to train at Karapiro, so they got a bit of a black mark against their name. One guy got injured. It effectively came down to eight guys for six spots, and I was in that group. I remember vividly that whole summer it was, be in the top six in everything you do. Testing, make sure you're top six. I was third on the erg. I kept getting second on bowside and in seat racing. You put me in the pairs and I was generally second or third. So I knew I was there or thereabouts.
Then you come out of the Olympics with this enthused mindset of, I want to go back, get me back to the Olympics. It becomes a year-by-year basis, but at the same time you're looking at a four-year cycle. Every year you take it year by year to get back into the team, improve, get faster, get fitter, get stronger, whatever it is. You start getting into those half-percent, point-percent gains, and that was really where I started to develop. Then we got to the next one and we bombed out a little bit, which was unfortunate. I wanted to take a bit of a breather, and then when Hamish approached and said he'd do the pair, I thought, mate, this could be great, because we knew we were quick anyway.
Then you really do go year by year, but with the four years in mind, because you don't know what's going to happen. We had a couple of years where we got a bit injured and spent six, eight weeks out of the boat, on the single or just doing a poor job biking and on the erg. You don't know whether that's going to come right by World Champs or anything like that. That's how a lot of those Olympic elite programs work. You're still working on a yearly basis, but with the four years in mind, whatever we're doing this year might be a bit more loading, or whatever. We've just got to figure things out early, so you've got a reasonably good benchmark and you're not getting into the final year, in seventh or eighth place, thinking, how are we going to find six seconds?
That's what we were trying to do, and we were able to figure it out quite early. Then for us it was about how we stay in front. How do we keep this gap so we're not worried about the people coming behind catching up? If I was in their position, I'd have the mindset of, we need to catch where these guys are. If we just kept doing the status quo and they caught up to us, we'd be in trouble. Whereas if we kept searching and searching, we kept pushing that benchmark. We broke the world record, and then went nearly as fast again two years later. That set the standard for what the guys in the boat now are catching up to or trying to better, which I hope they don't, but at the same time.
Dan Plews (38:39)
Your world best still stands in the pair, doesn't it?
Eric Murray (38:42)
Mate, they nearly went close this year, those turkeys. They went through the K in like 3:02 or 3:03, and I was like, holy heck. They were gone.
Dan Plews (38:54)
It's interesting, though, isn't it? Rowing is still quite traditional. In triathlon, for example, the times are getting crazy fast because of the technological advances. Rowing is not really like that.
Eric Murray (39:10)
Rowing's not actually called a world record. It's called a world best time, because...
Dan Plews (39:13)
World best time, yeah. Same in triathlon, to be honest. It's still a world best time in triathlon.
Eric Murray (39:18)
Yeah, because you can have warmer water and a stronger wind, and you're going to go way faster.
Dan Plews (39:53)
Speaking of that unbroken record, did you feel mounting pressure as time went on? You'd been unbeaten, and not just for a title, like winning a World Cup. That's any heat, any semifinal, any quarterfinal, any single race. Imagine how many races that is over eight years.
Eric Murray (40:22)
Seventy-one.
Dan Plews (40:22)
71 races, there you go. 71 races unbeaten, that's mad. To me, you always just seemed so... Hamish, not so much. He was always pretty uptight before races, because obviously I'm doing your warm-up, and I kind of learned over time how I could behave around different rowers. With you, I could be talking to you normally, jovially, and you'd be so chill. I'd just make sure Hamish had what he needed, and he's very much in the zone. Is that natural to you? Is it something you developed, the mindset before racing? When you came on, you were just on, right?
Eric Murray (41:08)
Yeah, but it's a funny thing. Like anything, you have to develop your own pre-race routine and the way you deal with nerves and anxiety. I get asked all the time, how do I deal with nerves? I say, whatever works for you. Try something different in a race when nothing's on the line, in a practice race. Try a different warm-up. But you're never ever going to get rid of those feelings of anxiety and the butterflies and the lack of blood flow going to the gut that makes you feel sick, all that sort of thing.
For me, I'm probably partially undiagnosed ADHD, whatever. But when I start feeling it, the adrenaline picks up a little bit more than anything else. I really wanted to make sure I was enjoying it. There were a few times I remember, in the four, and one specific time in the pair, where rather than being really excited about racing to see if we could win, it was, I really hope we don't lose today.
After Lucerne in 2014, I remember we had a good chat about it, Hamish and I. We finished the race and we'd pumped everyone, and I gave a big fist pump on the finish line, and Hamish had no emotion. I thought, great. And he said, I didn't feel that great in that first part of the race. He's really critical about the race. I said, mate, we just won the series, we just won the World Cup, you should be happy. But that's the pessimism coming out, getting critical of the victories. So we had to have a chat about how we were going to make sure we got up for every race and celebrated even the small victories. Yeah, we won, but we could have done that a little bit better, rather than, could have done that better, but it's okay, we won. It was a real switch.
I found a way that worked for me. I'd walk around, I couldn't sit still. Hamish would be sitting down there quietly, having a sleep about an hour before we raced. It's about figuring out those things, but everybody is so different. I know it's hard in a crew environment, where you want to get everyone to that point at the same time. Even in our four, which worked well for us, we were all doing slightly different things. But the moment you got to the boat was when everything locked in, to when everybody needed to be at the same point. It was the same with Hamish and me. We'd do the bike warm-up together, but then someone goes to the toilet, someone gets some water, whatever else. As soon as we touched that boat, it was, focus, we are on. So you make sure you've got those lines drawn, that everyone's ready and prepared in their own way, so that when you touch that boat, it's game on. Not, can we do another piece, because I don't feel quite as warmed up as I should be. That should have all been done prior. We never really had that.
Dan Plews (44:21)
It's interesting, because even in HYROX we have doubles, so I think people can listen to that and think about what they're doing with their doubles partner. Adam talked about this the other day, about who's more suited to doubles in terms of their background. But I also think a massive part of your success with Hamish was your personalities. If you were both pessimistic, or both like you, you probably wouldn't have worked, right?
Eric Murray (44:49)
We'd never get on the water.
Dan Plews (44:51)
Or even if you were both optimistic, it might not have worked.
Eric Murray (44:55)
We'd never get on the water at that point. We'd always be sitting at the bar.
Dan Plews (44:59)
I always thought Hamish was good at getting you on the water, and when you got on the water, you kind of took over. Even in a HYROX doubles partnership, that's probably an important part. You don't train as much together, right? But Adam brought it up the other day. It's an interesting consideration.
Adam Storey (45:19)
A hundred percent. I was actually going to ask you about that yin and yang relationship between you and Hamish, and you articulated it perfectly. The level of pessimism he brought was almost a good thing for you in terms of ring-fencing you, and I'm sure your hyper-optimism did the same for him on the counter. Really cool dynamic to have. On HYROX, what are your thoughts on where things are currently with the erg splits, and where do you see some good gains to be made?
Eric Murray (45:52)
Yeah, it's interesting. We've been talking to Dan a lot about this, and I really want to get into a bit more of the coaching side with people. I watch it, I follow it. And I've been with Concept2, and Concept2 is your gold standard. The one thing with rowing that's really interesting is that the biggest flaw I see is people not understanding the physics of the rowing machine. Everyone's fit, everyone's strong. But what are you actually trying to achieve when you get on that rowing machine?
If you take it back to a physics point of view and a mechanical point of view, you're trying to get the machine to a speed, and then you're trying to maintain that speed. That's what the technique should be about. Cycling must be very similar, Dan. You put in an amount of power to get the bike to speed on the flat, and then you're trying to turn the pedals over to keep it moving in an aero position. Rowing is very similar. On the water, you get out of the start, you get the boat up to a certain speed, and then you're using X amount of energy with technique to maintain the speed of the boat. The rowing machine is exactly the same.
Too many people have the damper setting too high, and every stroke is, I'm going to do another stroke, another stroke. But the flywheel is spinning at a certain number of revolutions, and it drops off by, say, 15 percent every stroke by the time you get back. You shouldn't be doing another 100 percent of power to get it back to where it was. You should just be adding that extra 15 percent every time. Tap it, tap it, tap it. Keep it moving. That's the efficiency part of rowing, because the flywheel doesn't just go and then die straight away when you take the next stroke. You're not in a stop-start cycle. You're in a cycle where you're just using enough energy to get it back. That's where the technique comes in.
With the coaching I do at the moment, there should be a work-and-rest ratio, using the mechanics of the machine. If you come off the finish, there should be inertia, that change in direction. You shouldn't feel like you're having to push everything back again, because there's a bungee. If you let the handle go, disclaimer, don't do it, but try it, if you stand at the finish next time you're on the rowing machine and let that thing go, it goes whack back into the housing. So why aren't you using the energy of that happening to your benefit, creating that inertia and then coming forward? The way forward shouldn't feel like I've got to use all this power to row it back to the front. There should be a moment of weightlessness, almost, where you're sliding into the front, and you shouldn't have to think about the deceleration into the catch, because your body is going to compress naturally and you can't over-compress. All these people say, keep your heels down, do this. If you jump on there without even having the handle and just zip yourself forward, you get to a point where you cannot go any further forward.
So the whole efficiency of using this machine, by using the mechanics of your body with the mechanics of the machine, gives you this ratio where you're using energy to drive, yes, but on the recovery there should be almost virtually no energy, just being able to do the next one. Then you tap it again, with the whole purpose of getting it up to speed within 20 or 30 seconds. And then it's just conservation, conservation, conservation.
That's why people get off the rowing machine at a HYROX event absolutely ruined. They've spent way too much energy. As Dan said at the start, it's one of the most critical stations to get right. If you get it right and you tap it, tap it, tap it, yes, you're using energy, but you're quite elastic. Elastic is probably a really good term to use for the rowing machine. When you can get that elasticity and that continuous motion, and you can be supple with the body, not super stiff and rigid, using the body's curves naturally to get this rhythm, then you can get off. Yes, the heart rate's spiking up, but it hasn't felt like a chore. It hasn't felt like you've had to really muscle it along to get where it's going. You've been able to do it quite efficiently to get your score.
Adam Storey (51:01)
That's absolute gold nuggets there, Eric. What's your go-to damper setting? That always comes up as a huge question from people all around, and as you mentioned, people just whack it all the way up. What are some of your key takeaways?
Eric Murray (51:18)
Put it this way, elite athletes in rowing use a drag factor of 130, which is about a five. That's pretty stock standard around any international rowing program. If you want to compare yourself against anyone else, that's where it is, and that's what they'll use for general training and 2K. There's no specific way you have to set it for the 2K, but it's a balancing act. If you are stronger, yes, you could have it slightly higher. If you can move quicker and you're probably not as big, it's probably a case of using it a little bit lower. So there's no magical number, but that middle ground, between three, four, five and six, if you're moving it anywhere out of there, you should only be doing that for training. Say, power strokes, two minutes on, one minute off, using a really high setting to feel the core stability and hold the technique under pressure.
On the flip side, which I do quite a bit with people, I do some live streams on YouTube, you put it down on one or two and you do speed work. Speed work, speed work, speed work, because you've got to learn how to move fast. People don't do that on the machine. They just get on and row. They don't look at it and say, I should be doing this, I should be doing that. So the damper setting is probably one of the keys.
The other thing I'd recommend to everybody, for your own mental sanity, and I still do it now, is to select Workout, New Workout, Intervals. Do intervals on time or distance. Set them to what you want, meters or time. People jump on the rowing machine and just row, and psychologically rowing is a nasty thing, because you run out of energy and you're just waiting for the time to tick down. People jump on at the gym and they don't know if they're going to do a five-minute warm-up, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. But if you actually set it and say, I'm just going to do some four-minute pieces today, increasing rates or just steady, whatever it is, you can set four minutes with a 20 or 30 second rest, one minute rest, two minute rest, whatever's part of your program. Psychologically, you just see it coming down. You're holding your split, you're looking at your average. Okay, I'm down to two minutes. Down to one. I've only got 45 seconds left to go. Boof, you've got a break.
The biggest problem with rowing, I think, is a lot of the psychological aspect when you're on it. Using the functionality of the machine can absolutely change the way you use it, rather than just rowing, not setting the time, not setting the distance. Say you do four of those four-minute pieces, mid rate, something like that. At the end you go to the memory and you see 1:55 splits average. This one was 1:54, the last one was 1:52. I did feel myself go a bit faster. It gives you the feedback.
So drag factor, we could talk all day about it. I think it's a really fine balance for yourself personally, and there's no magical number. If I was doing a HYROX, back in my day, I'd probably be looking at about 28 to 30 strokes a minute, really getting that ease of movement. Dan's probably got a different opinion, but I reckon that's about where you're not super strengthy and you're not losing a lot with the movement. You're somewhere in between, but also not just ramping it along at 34 or 36. Now, I would probably have done 34 or 36, because it's only a K. But I reckon somewhere around 28 to 30 is where you want to start.
If you look at it in terms of math, say you're at 20 strokes a minute and trying to hit 300 watts, do the calculation. At 34 strokes a minute, to hit the same 300 watts, you're actually doing fewer watts per stroke. So yes, you're moving more, but you're working less per stroke. It's really just trying to figure that out individually.
Dan Plews (56:15)
A few things I'd pick up on there, Eric. One is that you talked about the damper setting and how you can use it. I remember we used to sometimes even put a towel over it for the lightweights. You'd put a towel over and it would make it even lighter for them.
Eric Murray (56:25)
Yeah, mate, that's great. Adam should have a go at this. Adam, get a big black rubbish bag and put it right over it, tape it up with a bit of duct tape, and then see how fast you can move. You'll literally be rating through the roof, because the air can't escape, so it just sits in there and the flywheel just spins, and you're rating and moving really, really fast. As an exercise to get the body to move and try to hold shape, with a lot of core and inertia, it's a great exercise.
Dan Plews (57:01)
It's really good. We used to do it a lot, because the water's moving so fast and things like that. But when I look at HYROX training, a lot of HYROX athletes will say, I did this split and that split. My question is, what was your stroke rate? That concept of stroke rate and pace is so ingrained in the rowing world. A pace is nothing without the stroke rate associated with it, almost, on the erg. I think there's a lot to building that in, like 20 stroke rate, 22 stroke rate, doing things at the lower damper and being a bit more inventive in the way you can play around with the...
Eric Murray (57:40)
I'm pretty sure I could Google it, but as I said before, let's say in a minute you want to do 6,000 watts. So you're doing 300 watts per stroke at 20 strokes a minute. Roughly, I think my math's right.
Dan Plews (57:52)
That's about right.
Eric Murray (57:55)
Of course, to do that same thing while you're rowing at 30 means you only have to do 200 watts every stroke. That's what I think a lot of people don't grasp about rating. They just think, the rating goes up so you go fast, you've got to do more. Not necessarily. If you can move faster and produce that power at the same time, obviously that's good. But that's the easiest way to describe the calculation difference with the rating.
Dan Plews (58:26)
I can't remember, when we used to do the 15, 20Ks on the rower at 20 stroke rate, you used to hold a 1:48, 1:47 split, was that?
Eric Murray (58:36)
No, 1:45, 1:44.
Dan Plews (58:38)
That's just mine. Anyone give that a crack. 20 stroke rate, 1:45. It is so hard to do. It is crazy.
Eric Murray (58:47)
Yeah, but is that 300 or 325 watts? You've got to remember we're specialists. And that was the same on the bike. On the Watt bikes, I know Hamish was about 330, 340, and I was 305, maybe 310, but you'd have to hold 310 watts for an hour.
Dan Plews (59:06)
That would be a bit easy for you.
Eric Murray (59:11)
Yeah. But that's the thing with the rower as well. The rower has such a functional movement to it, which is part of the technique. One concept I try to get through to people, and it's easy to discuss and show videos, is that the rower is full body. We used to always say, let's hang. When you're on the rower, you want to hang. You want to keep your arms really long. I Googled it, it's called non-contractive tension. Is that right, Adam? You probably know non-contractive tension. It's like when you're carrying kettlebells. You're not trying to hold them up like this. You're just hanging.
Adam Storey (59:50)
That's perfect, mate.
Eric Murray (59:51)
Rowing on the rowing machine is exactly the same. You've got to have non-contractive tension. If you can do that, and you can hang, and you can let the body be driven by the legs, that's all I say to people. The body is driven by the legs. The legs drive that body back. You add the force of the leg push and the force of the body being driven, and that gives you your total force. And what do the arms do? Nothing. They only hold on and draw through.
If you ever want to see how your body's doing it, on the Concept2, press Start Rowing, second button down on the right, and there's a force curve. If you can get a nice, smoothish force curve, and don't worry about whether the peak is left or right, because that does tell you a bit about technique, but if it's nice and smoothish, then your body's in a really good transitional phase, and that's really what you're after. Then look at where it starts to die on the other side. That's right when everybody tells you to pull the arms. So what are you pulling the arms for? Nothing. The energy that's required to hold that hang and have that non-contractive tension is there, but it's not a physical interaction of contractive pulling, or trying to add any speed to it. That's why you'll see the best rowers in the world, even on the water, especially, have long arms, the body comes through, and all the hands do is move this motion around, and job done, baby.
Dan Plews (1:01:29)
Do you think there's an aspect of this in HYROX, considering where the row lies? I've thought about this a lot. After the row you go and do the farmers carry, the lunges, and then the wall balls. The lunges and the wall balls in particular are very leg dominant. When I used to watch you row, it almost seemed to me like you were going half slide. Anyone watching this on YouTube can watch you, I think it's the finish of your one hour or your 2K, next to Hamish. There are two things that are really noticeable about that. One is how relaxed your hands are. Really relaxed, to the point where you're hardly holding the handle in your hands. In the context of the farmers carry, that's really important. You're not gripping the handle. And it's all body swing. You're not even using the full slide.
I think correct rowing technique is really important because it saves your hands for the farmers carry. It saves your legs for the last part, when you're not going full slide and full drive and you're using more of the body. There's something to be considered with that.
Eric Murray (1:02:46)
Yeah, but that's the whole thing. It's trying to match, as we said right at the start, technique, fitness and strength. Rowing, and especially the rower in HYROX, is the same. If you're really strong and powerful and that's your forte, have it a little bit higher, 22, 24, and you can muscle it along, because that's what your body's used to. But if you're trying to go fast, I don't think that's the way to go, because you're just burning too much energy. So it's really about finding that sweet spot of rhythm and speed, and it's psychology. As I said all along, rowing is such a psychological sport in terms of how you approach it and how you think about it. You're getting the boat to speed, or in this case the rowing machine to a speed, and then every stroke, all you're trying to do is get back to the amount of power you had a second and a half ago. I don't have to go from zero to 100. I've got to go from 90 to 100 on every stroke.
The more you think about that, the more people start to realise what they're actually doing, especially at high rate. Obviously when you get to low rate, it's slowing down to maybe 60 percent and then you get back up again. But once it's moving that quick, it's just, how quickly can I move to stay in front of the speed of the flywheel and pick it up. Tap it, tap it, tap it, because that's all you're trying to do. Your numbers are dictated by how fast that flywheel spins. If you can just get it back to the same number of revolutions again, that gives you the number on screen. It's as simple as that.
Adam Storey (1:05:17)
Absolutely love that. Eric, a bit of a tangent, mate, and this is probably more for our YouTube viewers, but I dug out two photos. We would have been two ships passing in the night at both the London and Rio Olympics, so we never actually formally touched base. Do you want to run us through these photos once I pull them up on screen? The first one, have a look at this. Look at that.
Eric Murray (1:05:43)
Yeah, nice. Absolutely.
Adam Storey (1:05:46)
I haven't changed.
Eric Murray (1:05:47)
I think that was the night I sat on the Queen's lap, actually. At that same event, I'm pretty certain they had the impersonator lady that dresses up like the Queen. Everyone was going up, saying, I'm standing next to the Queen. And I was like, hey babe, can you sit on my knee? So I pulled it up, and everyone's like, holy heck, because she looks a lot like Lizzie. But yeah, mate, great times.
Adam Storey (1:06:13)
And if you remember, Russell Brand was actually standing right next to us. I've got a photo of the three of us right now.
Dan Plews (1:06:19)
Is that the closing ceremony? I was there too. Where am I? I'll be somewhere around there. I was in the same place.
Adam Storey (1:06:26)
And then the next one is, do you want to explain this one for us? This was in Rio.
Eric Murray (1:06:29)
Yeah, mate, that was great. We were the last Olympics where they had free McDonald's, because they stopped doing it after Rio. When I first went to Athens and then Beijing, they had a food hall, which is ginormous, four or five rugby fields long, huge, with every ethnicity of food and everything you can possibly imagine. At one end of it was a McDonald's. These counters, there's about eight counters, you just go up and say, give me this, bang, free, done. Then they pulled it out for some reason in Rio and put it as a standalone at the other end of the Athletes' Village. People had to go all the way down there, and the queues were massive. Not in the first week, obviously, but in the second week. They had a limit of 20 items per person. So we went in, the five of us, and I was like, well, I'll get the Big Macs. You get the McChickens. You get the quarter pounders. You get the chips. And we just laid it all out, and then we took it all back, because we'd waited nearly an hour. Everyone took turns at doing it, and if you ever went, it was always a group, and it always came back, the Sevens girls and everyone would be into it.
Dan Plews (1:07:57)
Probably because of this photo, I'd imagine.
Adam Storey (1:07:57)
Did you actually finish it? How much damage did you do on that table?
Eric Murray (1:08:05)
No, no, we just laid it out for the photo, and then we took it all back to the village and to New Zealand House, where our apartment was, and handed it all out. In Beijing, I tried the 100 chicken nugget challenge. I got to 60 and I was like, no, mate, I can't do any more. I felt awful for hours afterwards. But there was some Belarusian or Bulgarian guy that did about 120. I was like, mate, how do you stow those away?
Dan Plews (1:08:27)
Mate, 60 is not even close! I'm getting conscious of time, and we've already gone a bit, but if you've got a bit more time, Eric.
Eric Murray (1:08:51)
Yeah, 100 percent. Go for it.
Dan Plews (1:08:55)
Just to finish off, anyone watching this might be a budding athlete, an aspiring Olympian, an aspiring HYROX Olympian. What three bits of advice would you give to an athlete who's really looking to go all the way and have a career as an elite athlete? You only need three.
Eric Murray (1:09:19)
Bits of advice. I guess, one is a realistic expectation. I think that's probably one of the keys, and it goes in all aspects of training and competition. Where are you right now? Do you know what you could do right now? You need to know what you can do right now. If that's not good enough, where does it need to go, and how am I going to get there? Knowing your capabilities in that sense is second to none. Every time we went into a training piece, whether it's early season or whatever, a 5K with the team or sprints, 1,000 meters, we had a rough idea of, we'll probably do this time today. And if we did it, we'd be like, that's exactly what we thought we were capable of achieving. Because of that, as you progress, you know throughout the season, the year or the cycle, whatever you're working in, whether you're seeing that improvement.
One thing I never really did, which maybe I should have, was keep a journal or a training diary. I know we've got TrainingPeaks and stuff now, which is obviously ideal and everything under the sun, which is great.
Dan Plews (1:10:44)
Well, we opened it the other week, remember, and it's all still there.
Eric Murray (1:10:47)
Yeah, I know all that stuff's there. But I never really did. I just had a rough idea, because I had about four things in my head, 5K, 2K, this, this and this. If I beat those times year on year, I'd think, well, it's 12 months later, I'm two seconds quicker, so I'm better. But knowing little bits of training throughout that period would be really good.
Two, actually go out and try and fail. I know that's an easy but also a hard thing to say. If you're doing a test, and you're using this realistic expectation you've got, you think, well, I've done a test recently and it came out at this time, so why not be brave and do an extra X number, and just give it a nudge. Don't be afraid if you blow up completely. Then you'll think, well, I got seven out of the 10 minutes right, I just need to figure out that last three and where that could change. Learning how to do those failures is quite important, because it teaches you where you've done things wrong. Sometimes people will go out and do a race or a piece, and they might start quite steady, and it gets really good through the middle but then they die off at the end, or they go out real hard and then die. Which was where exactly during that you could have been better? You don't know until you actually try.
And three, just do it. Have a go. Life's too short. You get people who put things off, they don't try it, they're a bit worried or concerned. Do it for yourself, not for anyone else. People say, you must have felt really proud, and your family must have been proud when you won the Olympic gold medal. I was like, yeah, but I was a selfish so-and-so. I was doing it for myself. They're supportive and everything else, but I literally was like, this is what I want. I want to do this.
Everyone goes that way, and I always hear it from athletes, and it really annoys me. I sacrificed so much to be doing this sport. You aren't sacrificing anything. Everyone else is sacrificing, because you're the one wanting to do it. I didn't sacrifice anything while I was rowing. Everyone else around me sacrificed. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. If you think you're sacrificing a whole bunch of other stuff, go and do that instead of doing what you're doing. So I always look at it and say, you've got to be slightly selfish. Within reason, I know, I'll put that as a little bit of a disclosure. But at the end of the day, you've got one opportunity, and if you see something you want to do and you want to have a go at it, just knuckle down, have a go, see what you're capable of achieving, see what's humanly possible for you. Whether it's saying, I want to beat the 500-meter world record on the rowing machine. People have solely spent their time on that, trying to do a 1:10 or 1:08 or whatever it is at the moment. That's literally what they spent their time doing. Life's too short to sit around wondering and pondering what could have happened or what you could have done. Get out there and have a go.
Dan Plews (1:14:16)
You're so good. That sacrifice point, I totally agree with you. I always find it hard, because it's always a choice. It's a choice, not a sacrifice, isn't it?
Eric Murray (1:14:28)
Well, that's the thing. There's an opportunity cost to everything that you do. I feel like there are a lot of people who say, but there are so many sacrifices to get to this point. I'm like, yes, by other people. You would do this whether you had all of those people around you or not. I was in Europe for three months, so what did I sacrifice? Nothing. People are back here looking after the boy or whatever else. That's how it works. You've got this amazing opportunity, and it comes with opportunity costs. Yes, you're tired. You can't go out for a bender on a Saturday night because you've got some testing on a Sunday. You can't go to someone's wedding because you're going to be doing this or that. Those are opportunity costs that come with doing what you're doing, and that's just the trade-off.
If at the moment something becomes too difficult, or you'd rather do the alternative, that's when you probably need to make a change. That was the thing with me and rowing. I knew Zach was going to need me, my boy, who's 15 and autistic. I knew that if I went back to rowing, his development and everything was going to be put under the pump, and that wasn't going to work. So that sacrifice was off the table, and that's one of the big reasons I finished. I'd love to have been in that eight, don't get me wrong. It would have been fun. But at the end of the day, that was my sacrifice, so I made the decision that was the end of it.
Dan Plews (1:16:06)
Do you want to talk a little bit about that? You do a bit of charity work for autism now, don't you? Do you want to mention that?
Eric Murray (1:16:12)
Yeah. My boy, he's 15, nonverbal autistic. You probably saw him running around earlier, at the start. The old man came in to have a nosey. Look, I'm patron for Autism New Zealand, so I'm just an advocate, really, for the neurodiverse community. There are so many people with neurodiversity, whether you're autistic or severe, what people would say, it's a spectrum. There are so many different ways that people can be autistic. It's not just this or that.
The problem, especially with Zach, is that he's gone through puberty and he had no way of really describing his feelings, so we were getting things thrown at us. He wouldn't stay in class, wouldn't do anything. He's at a special needs school, and it's pretty wild. There's only so much in the disability support area for funding or capabilities. So he comes home from school every day, half days, and I'm here to look after him. That's basically how it is, so I've had to work my lifestyle and everything around that. If anyone asks me to do anything for charity, I'm generally there. Obviously with the golf day, I said, mate, sign me up.
That's part and parcel of the success we're given. It feels like there's an ownership from the public. I've always been like, look, yeah, selfish pursuit, but at the end of the day, taxpayers allowed me to sit on my backside for 16 years. So if I can give back in any way I can, that's exactly what I'll do. If people want to yarn, if people want to have a beer, absolutely, that's what I'm here for. I'm not pretentious. I'd rather sit and have a chat, enjoy some company and tell some good yarns, than sit behind closed doors.
So it's part of life now. I'm trying to do my best. He was pretty good here. I taught him how to use the nail gun, safely, disclosure. I did some kickbacks with it, so that it pings back, and he was holding it. I said, keep your hand away, put it on. While I was framing the inside of the renovation here, you could hear this, boof. Zach would come out, happy as Larry, having put a piece of timber on a piece of frame, and take a photo of it. The thing is, Zach's very focused. He gets his mind on something and he's in there. If you try and hide something away, he's like, I want that. And he'll use his iPad to communicate it. He had all my tools, and I was like, he really wants to use that nail gun, so I taught him how to use it.
With the autism, it's the fixations. Once he's got his mind on something, that's it. So it's about managing all of that, managing his daily routines and everything else. As I say, I love doing charity stuff. I love being able to go and tell a good yarn and a few stories, and at the same time, like this, give some advice, maybe some expertise, whichever way you want to package it, because I can see value in what people are doing. I want people to succeed.
It's like that question you asked before, the three things. There's nothing magical you can say to someone. A lot of it is really just your own experience, making sure you don't make too many mistakes twice, but not being scared to make them. Not thinking it has to be a perfect timeline to get to where you're going. Having fun while you're doing it, having a laugh, giving it a crack, seeing if it goes, and that can be your journey. I can't say that my journey is going to be exactly the same as someone else's. I can say things that helped and things that worked, which is exactly what we talked about here today. Not everyone would be able to do what I could do, and they might do it slightly differently. But if you can take something out of that and help yourself get better quicker, then absolutely, do it.
For a while there, I think the average age of an Olympic gold medalist in rowing was like 28, 29. So you've probably done two Olympic cycles before you get an Olympic gold medal anyway. That's exactly where the stats sit. It's very difficult for people to think they're going to come in fresh and get it. It does happen, don't get me wrong. But the stats and the data show there's an average for this. So you need to work up toward where you're probably going to be near your peak, and then hold that peak for as long as you can. I think we probably held our peak maybe six, seven years. We could have gone longer, but, you know.
Dan Plews (1:21:33)
Amazing. To finish off, I wanted to finish off with one thing. At the start I said I think rowing is overlooked in HYROX and believed to not be a significant event, but I think it plays a massive part. I wanted to bring up this last study, published in Frontiers. The outcome of it, and I'm going to read it, is that rowing was the strongest single-station predictor in men. Looking at each station time on its own, rowing explained the most for men, ahead of sandbag lunges, burpees, burpee broad jumps and wall balls. I don't think many people realise that, because we never talk about it. It's something to do with the overall aerobic fitness and the state you're getting to on the rower.
Then for the women, rowing had the highest upper value of any station, level with sandbags. And when they looked at this data over the seven seasons, rowing improved the least. The authors suggest the reason is the technical limits, and that HYROX athletes aren't paying enough attention to the way they row. It's probably a big gap we can really work on. I think there's more to be said for the fact that you can recover between the stations.
But Eric is actually part of ENDUROX, and we do technique sessions with Eric. If you're someone listening to this and you feel your rowing needs work, and I would say it does, most likely, you can check out ENDUROX. You can send your videos in to Eric. We've got it all set up, and he'll give you direct feedback on your rowing technique and help you take that next step. We've had quite a few people through there already, and it's been nothing but glowing reports on how it's helped. If you're interested, do check it out. We'll give links in the show notes, and we'll figure out a bit of a promo code as a short-term discount. We'll call that promo code ERIC ROW, and we'll do that as a short-time discount.
But it's been amazing. Is there anything else, Adam? I promised you an hour. We got an hour and 20, so that's the first time.
Eric Murray (1:23:54)
I just talk too much. That's my problem.
Dan Plews (1:23:58)
There's been too much good content.
Adam Storey (1:24:00)
There's been too much good content. Just one closing question for me, mate, actually. I really do appreciate every gold nugget you've shared with us, Eric. So many people would look up to you, both figuratively, you're a tall bugger, but also as an athlete and as a person. I genuinely mean that. So for you, who is it that you look up to, in terms of an idol or a mentor, someone who's been a bit of a rock for you?
Eric Murray (1:24:33)
Interesting. I can't really pinpoint one person. I never just wanted to have one person that I could bounce off. There are so many different people. I've had some great business mentors, and friends here in Cambridge growing up. One guy specifically, Kevin Burgess, don't take this wrong, he owned the pharmacy. He was a massive sports advocate, and he worked with a group called Inside Running that was doing management for rugby players and stuff like that. You could just bounce ideas off him. He had an ear for everyone. I think he's godparent to Rob O'Dell's kids. He's had this long line of people throughout the years, rugby players and rowers and cyclists and everything, that he supported. So you've got guys like that, and then you do have people like Rob, who was a great ear to chat to, especially around dealing with Dick and the things he went through.
Dan Plews (1:25:47)
Dick Tonks, so we clarify.
Eric Murray (1:25:49)
Dick Tonks. So you had people like that. And then personally, a really good mate of mine, which hasn't been great for my diet, runs Burger Fuel for New Zealand. He's the COO of Burger Fuel, Jase. He's just a great guy. If I'm having a bad time, you just chat. So I've never thought there's one person specifically that I'm going to talk to about everything. I feel like I've spread it enough that there are really good groups of people all around the place, and depending on what needs to be said or heard or vented, you've got a place to go. I think keeping that network quite wide is really good. I've just got a great group of people around me for so many things.
Even Dane Dougan, the CEO of Autism New Zealand. We chat all the time. A lot of times we miss each other, but we're always in contact, and it's just checking in, because raising a child with neurodiversity can be very, very tough. He's got autistic kids himself, so you're just venting and having a chat. I've got a good mate in New Plymouth, Mark, who I go down to see all the time. He's got a farm. I just let go. I'm like, there's nothing he can break and nothing he can get in trouble with. We're 5K from the beach. Then I can just sit down and relax, rather than worrying about what's happening and the neighbours. Not that Zach has escaped, but in the back of your mind you're like, what if, what if? So there are just so many different people, and I think that's probably one of the good things, having a good group of people around you.
Dan Plews (1:27:45)
One of the people who does look up to Eric, and people won't know this, is Hunter McIntyre. He's a massive fan of Eric Murray. He loves Eric. He's got a picture of Eric on his wall in his gym.
Eric Murray (1:27:54)
Yeah, well, I've been on his podcast a few times. Hunter's great.
Adam Storey (1:28:00)
There you go.
Eric Murray (1:28:00)
Yeah. So what's the record in a HYROX individual? What's the record for the K?
Dan Plews (1:28:08)
Pro 51:59.
Eric Murray (1:28:11)
No, for the rowing, though, as a station.
Dan Plews (1:28:15)
I'm not sure, actually. No one's in the 1:30s. You're talking low 1:40s. 1:45 splits is good at the moment.
Eric Murray (1:28:24)
Really? Because I feel like...
Dan Plews (1:28:30)
It's hard to know, because you only get the split of the actual station. You've got to run there and then run out, so there's a little bit of time in between. All you can do is look at the splits when they're doing the races in the Elite 15s, and they're 1:45s, 1:46s-ish.
Eric Murray (1:28:42)
I think there's 10 seconds at least there that someone could get, if not more. And not only that, it's what you can feel like after, so that you're not getting off and going, hang on, there's no way I can run after this one.
Adam Storey (1:29:05)
Yeah, I'm tanked.
Dan Plews (1:29:06)
Because even an average rower could row a thousand in 1:38 and be very fresh. You'd be recovering at that. But that's nowhere near happening at the moment. If anyone wants to get in touch with you, where can people find you?
Eric Murray (1:29:24)
Just jump on my Instagram. That's the easiest thing. I'm on it all the time. I doom scroll at night to get to sleep. So if anyone sends me a DM, Kiwi Pear Eric on Instagram, and you'll find me.
Dan Plews (1:29:35)
Excellent. Well, this has been amazing, the longest podcast to date, and I think it's going to be probably the best one. Thanks for it, Eric.
Eric Murray (1:29:39)
Thanks, boys. No worries.
Adam Storey (1:29:47)
Thanks so much.
