Question: Did you bodybuild?

Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 12 Jun 2018:

Hey
Not body building per se. But as an athlete, in particular as a canoeist, we needed to be very strong, very very strong. But also it was also incredibly important to have a high power-to-weight ratio and to have a strong and stable core like a gymnast. For marathon racing we needed to be super fit too.
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When training I did almost every exercise you could imagine. A typical day was:
Get up at 5:30am
Cycle 6 miles to the swimming pool
1h Swimming
Cycle 4 miles to the canoe club
1h in the gym
Cycle 12 miles to collage
Go to lectures
Cycle 12 miles back to the canoe club
30 minutes warm up run
1h canoeing on the river
1h gym
Cycle 10 miles home.
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In the gym we did circuit training, heavy weights, strength endurance weights, core exercises you’d think were from another planet, chin ups with 60kg hooked on our belts, paddling/rowing machines; the list goes on and on.
In terms fitness I could run a 4 minute mile at the age of 16, and terms of strength if you put my stats into strengthlevel . com I and my fellow teammates were pretty much the strongest people on the planet in most exercises for our bodyweights.
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To be the best, to be world champion you need to put the effort in. And it paid off for me. Junior world champion at 17, on the olympic team by 21, qualified our entry for the Athens Olympics (I got glandular fever and this is the only thing that put an end to my Olympic hopes).
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My point is you can do all this and still have time to study and still have time for an awesome social life. You’ve just got to want it and work for it. Do you do sport competitively?