It might sound cheesy but I briefly joined ranks of ‘A-list’ celebs

13 April 2012

The London Olympics rowing hopeful continues our weekly diary in the countdown to the Games...

Fancy dress seems to have dominated the last few weeks for me.

I went to the Rewind Festival — it's basically a festival with lots of cheesy 80s music — with a group of mates and we went as the A-Team. The new film's only been out a while so people seemed to love it.

Actually, so many people asked to have photos taken with us that we were like mini A-Team celebrities as Go West, Chesney Hawkes and Tony Hadley belted out the tunes on stage.

I love my cheesy music so it was a good chance to let my hair down. I also had a mate's stag do in Swansea the other day and that had an 80s theme too. So there were plenty of tight white jeans, Hawaiian shirts and Aviator sunglasses — it was a great laugh.

It might sound odd to people who do stuff like this all the time but it was nice just to have a bit of a normal life, even though I still had to be sensible.

For example, with the stag weekend I could only make it for one night because of training and there was no way I was going to go crazy on the beers as it would just have undone all the work I've been doing.

But I didn't mind because, as an athlete, I usually miss things like stag dos and weddings — there's just no choice. So it's been nice to make a few things like that of late.

The intensity of training has really gone up at the moment. Not much of the time's been spent on the water — maybe just a single session each day — and it's hard work but my body's been holding up well, in fact a lot better than it has done for a long time.

Aside from training, I've been keeping an eye on West Ham. I'd said before the start of the season that I wasn't sure about Avram Grant and that still stands with us rock bottom in the table and facing Chelsea on Saturday.

Chelsea are flying and the following week it's Stoke and then Tottenham so there's every chance we might not have a single point six games into the season and it's difficult to bounce back from that sort of a start.

England showed last night that they can turn things around. I hope the Hammers can too.

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