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Matt Langridge: Enjoying Christmas before hard graft starts in 2012

I guess as this is my first blog I should really take the time to introduce myself, don't worry I'll be brief...

My name's Matt Langridge and I'm a member of the GB Rowing Team training for 2012, I'm a current World Champion in the coxless four and I am an Olympic silver medallist in the eight from Beijing , and that's probably all you really need to know , oh yeah I'm also a state-educated Northerner so not your stereotypical rower, but don't worry I'll keep it clean.

We may well be quickly approaching the New Year and the start of 2012 but for us rowers the Olympic year started way back in August. As for us we all knew that the moment we took that final stroke in the final race of the World Championships, the Olympic year was upon us.

Even though for the last three years everything has been building up to this year, until now we've always had a World Championship to focus on and distract us from the fact that the London Games are for ever moving closer, whether we're ready for them or not (which of course we will be as we have Jurgen Grobler - our coach - to make sure of that) so what makes this season so different from that last three?

Well quite simply put, there are no second chances, we'll only get one chance in our lifetime to compete for Olympic glory in front of our home crowd, but although the Olympics will be won or lost on one day, it is not just that one day that counts, because if you get some of the other days wrong along the way you might find that the Olympic final day never comes, which is why for us our selection period is almost as important as the Games themselves.

Ok enough talk about the Olympics, there is still plenty of daunting training sessions before we get there. And none more so than where we were a few weeks back - in a high altitude training centre in Spain in the middle of what is no doubt our toughest training camp of the year.

As many of us had been there before the single thought that was going through our minds as we navigated the hairpin corners of the road that leads to the centre in the sky was survival.

We all knew that if we could survive the next few weeks we would leave the mountain much fitter than when we arrived. And that is ultimately the sole purpose of that camp. As it's a completely land based camp it strips away the challenges brought on by technique and allows us to purely work on the physical side of our sport.

Put simply we spend two weeks pushing our body to the limits by doing ergos (the rowing machine) weights and the occasional game of football ( I use the term, a game of football loosely as if you watched us you probably wouldn't call it football) .

The one thing that managed to take away the mundaneness of daily training camp life was the team participation in Movember, waiting each morning to see how each athletes tasches or Mo's have developed or who has managed to come up with the most elaborate styling has been a regular source of amusement, in the constant search for the best Mo's some athletes even have turned to Just For Men Moustache dye in an effort to make it more pronounced (it just so happened it was also the three Gingers) .

At the end we headed back down the mountain to what we hoped would be normality, we can never be 100% certain of what chaos has gone on in the UK while we've been removed from civilisation for two weeks at training camp ( last time we were away was the time of the riots).

Once back we were straight into preparation for our long distance trials in Boston (unfortunately Lincolnshire not the one in the States) last weekend.

And now it's really just a case of keeping motivation high till Christmas so that when you're sitting round the table on the 25th you have no regrets that you haven't completely earned the right to spend a week stuffing your face with as much cold turkey and Christmas puddings as you can get your hands on!

As you know, that when we return to organised squad training on the second it really will be the start of 2012.