What has Polly Shorrock learnt from rowing for Cambridge?

Polly Shorrock will row in Blondie, the Women’s Reserve Boat, racing against Oxford’s Osiris on Sunday 13 April. She talks about balancing rowing with an MPhil in Classics and what being part of Cambridge University Boat Club has taught her. 

How do you combine studying and rowing for CUBC?

It’s difficult, but it really teaches you to look after your time and means that you have to be focused when you’re doing each thing. You have to make sure that when you’re on the water in the morning, you’re fully focused on the processes of rowing and then as soon as you get back into Cambridge, into the library, you work all day until it’s time to go to do land training in the afternoon.

It’s really helped focus my work actually, because doing a humanities degree involves a lot of self-directed study and so having parameters in which to work has been helpful.

How did you go from rowing at Trinity to CUBC? 

I did the Cambridge University Development Squad in Easter Term last year and over the summer and that was basically a nice step up. Then I could just step into trialing in September this year.

Where and when did you learn to row?  

I learned to row when I was about 9, in Italy, which is not the traditional way of doing it! I pottered about on the Arno with my sister.

Is there anything about rowing that will help you in your future career? 

I would like to teach and so depending on where that is, it would be really fun to do some coaching as well as teaching in future.

What are the three most important things you have learnt from being part of CUBC?  

Communication

It’s such a high -pressure environment you’re seeing the same people twice a day, every single day for six months. You have to be really clear when there’s something that you’re uncomfortable with or if you’re overwhelmed with something – so that you can create happy, wonderful relationships that I hope I will be able to maintain for the rest of my life rather than allowing that stress to feed off each other and so communicating has been huge for that.

Trust

It’s taught me trust – that you’ve just got to trust the process. You’ve got to trust everyone else, the eight other people in the boat to be doing the best they can. That kind of initial step is really terrifying, both on the water and socially, but once you’ve got there, it allows you so much more freedom and headspace to be able to work with other people.

Finally, discipline … making sure you get all the work done when you need to get it done by.