Rowing Sam Lynch's diary: March. Thursday afternoon in the Residencia de Deportistas. The lobby. Two o'clock.

Good to be back here. Until this morning that is. It takes a lot to penetrate our little world here in Seville but Madrid is just two hours away on the train. This morning has penetrated. I'm in the lobby. There are two kayakers in the lobby with me. They are crying.

The scene is unreal. The place is in shock. Two hours up the track these images on the telly of people bleeding on the street are happening in real time.

This morning on the Spanish news I realised I had absorbed sufficient Spanish to pick up the details of a major tragedy. The casualty numbers and the other details seemed to leap out of the television.

On the river, lost in the rowing you could be anywhere. On the bank today you could only be in Spain. A few weeks ago we raced here and as part of the promotion rowers from each country based down here had to go to a local school and give a little talk. Myself and Gags (Gearóid Towey) were bused to a hall full of listless kids.

I was prepared to tell them that my name was Sam and my pen had been mislaid somewhere in the vicinity of my aunty's house but things were more formal and better organised than that. We had a translator and a rostrum and each kid who wanted to ask a question had to come to the front of the hall and speak the question into a microphone. The kind of things Irish kids just wouldn't do.

Stilted at first.

"What's it like in Ireland?."

"What's rowing like?"

Then "Who are nicer the Spanish girls or the Irish girls?" Me: "Swedish girls." And "Who do you follow Real Betis or Sevilla?" Me: "Betis."

Big cheer.

Gags, generally clueless about football but sensing the opening: "Sevilla!" Another big cheer.

It was crazy after that. We had a great time. It brought us out of our world. Into Spain and the world of 200 Spanish kids.

Now we're in the lobby and every Spaniard is shaking and pale and the people from Madrid itself can hardly look at the television.

And there's nothing we can do except what we always do.

March. Thursday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. The lobby. Early. Very early.

Things are getting tighter now. Racing season looms. We're sharper. Nerves jangle. It's time to lose weight. I'm having breakfast now. Black coffee and two slices of butter-free toast. I love butter. I miss butter. Just jam on the two measly slices this morning.

The next six weeks will be the hardest of the season. I'm the heaviest on the team, ergo I have the biggest problem. I'm looking at losing two pounds a week for the next six weeks or so.

I've been here before. I know what's ahead. I know I'll start to obsess. My thoughts will always be on the next meal. I'll leave the dinner table at half seven in the evening and within an hour I'll be thinking of breakfast. Sleep will be the thing I do to get me to breakfast quicker.

It's the one thing I hate about rowing. The hardest thing. I'm 76 kilos right now. I have to be 71 kilos for the summer; 11st 4lbs. I'm 6ft 3ins. That ain't a lot of meat.

It's the blandness that kills me as much as the portions. You eat quite an amount but it's not enough, not what you need, not what you crave. It's banal. Is that the word? Pasta and tomato sauce. Green salads. Vegetables with no sauce. That's it.

We have these conversations. They started when I used to room with Niall O'Toole. I thing the hungriest ones converge at these camps. Niall and I would speak for hours like prisoners on death row.

"If you were allowed the perfect breakfast what would it be.? Describe it in detail." And off we'd go.

Here Heather Boyle and I struggle the most. Heather isn't an old lag yet. She's allowed. How sad am I though? I've been having these chats about imaginary meals for 10 years.

There are two schools of thought on all this. One school says you should maintain your racing weight the whole year round and you'll spare yourself this. The other school says that your metabolism will slow down if you do that. You should go back up.

I adhere to the teachings of the second school. Passionately. Last year after the worlds I put on a stone and a half in two weeks. Pizza. Ice cream. Butter. Anything. It was great.

People say to me that at 6ft 3ins I should perhaps try being a heavyweight. My stomach makes the suggestion every day. I can't win the Olympics at heavyweight though. My stomach says, so what?. But some of the guys you see in a heavyweight boat make Shane Horgan look small. And Shane is a big man. These guys are six foot eight, one hundred and five kilos. I wouldn't have a hope. I'd like to try it for the pleasure of escaping pasta and tomato sauce but that's all.

I don't like pasta and tomato sauce. By the end of the summer I will detest it. I will loathe it. I will be hoping for some scientific breakthrough which leads to the banning of pasta and tomato sauce.

On the other hand I like cereals which you'd think would be a good thing but you weigh everything right now. Literally and figuratively. Benefit versus calorific content. So cereals get cut out too. Till you have a diet of plain boredom and almost constant hunger.

And around you people have various needs. The lads rowing in the four are young. They can eat what they want. They're in their early 20s. Last year before Lucerne I came in one evening and I was starving. I went into the kitchen.

Eugene Coakley and Paul Griffin were cooking a big pot of pasta for their supper. This was after their mountainous pasta dinner at seven. I looked at what they were having as a bedtime snack and it was more than I'd eaten all day. I was homicidal.

Some nights you go to bed and you wake at one in the morning. Starving. Go downstairs listening to the little voice in your head.

"Ok. I'll eat something. Just to get rid of this hunger. I need my sleep. So I should eat." Then I mill everything in front of me. My mouth is full and I'm eyeing something else and the voice is reassuring me. "I'm eating now. I may as well keep eating. I wasn't going to be able to sleep. This does me good. Eating is good."

It happens to everyone.

Sinéad Jennings has a logic for one in the morning. Those are calories that you wouldn't be burning when you would be asleep. So you are allowed eat them.

We have our logic and our cheats but it's a precise science. We want to put in just enough food to recover from each session. You have to be quite exact. It's more serious than I make it sound and it's one of the biggest problems we'll have this year.

So breakfast. This cup of coffee. These two slices of toast with jam. On to the morning sessions. Weight lifting. Then one hour and 40 minutes on the water.

I'd kill for some butter.

March. Thursday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. The lobby. Twelvish. Lunchtime.

Guessed it right. I'm hunched over a modest plate of pasta and tomato sauce. It's tarted up with some peppers and Brussels sprouts and, day of days, a bread roll.

There's plenty of plate showing too. This isn't one of those pasta mountains I see the other guys with.

The food issue makes me feel old. All the young turks are racing in the fours boat or battling for a place in it. Gags and myself have noticed lately the motivation thing works two ways for us now. The Italians are ahead of us and we chase them. The young Irish lads are behind us in the rear-view mirror closing in. Guys like Griffin and Coakley are coming behind us at such a rate we know we'll lose our seats to them.

Gags and I , we're the two oldest in the team. Eight years ago on the way to Atlanta we were the two youngest. Now they do stuff that frightens us. Makes us wonder about ourselves. Are we hard enough?

Griffin, for instance. Paul is a tough, hard Kerry man. Somebody with the mentality that makes me look at myself again and again to see what I'm doing. I used to be the hard man for training. Paul, though, attacks every training session like it was his last. He never lets himself off the hook. Yousee that hunger so plainly in somebody else, you look at yourself wondering if you've gone soft.

He frightens me. A couple of months ago in Sierra Nevada we were doing a session on the rowing machines. We were in sick bay. Sort of. I had an Achilles injury. Paul was dead tired. Absolutely wiped. We both were tired but there we were and I could see it in him especially. Worse than tired. He'd had a virus in the beginning of that week, that had wiped him and weakened him. He and I were the only two on the ergs.

Thor (Nilsen) gave his intructions to Paul. Do these pieces with Sam. The pieces were killer stuff. Four 15-minute pieces. Thor continued. Don't try to match Sam. You're tired. You've been sick. That thought was gone as soon as Thor left the room. Paul left his guts on the floor. Did everything I did. The more I worked the more he worked. By the end of the pieces if you'd asked us our names and where we were we couldn't have told you.

Not the smartest thing to do maybe, but definitely what I would have done.

We raced heavyweights a couple of weekends ago down here. Myself and Gags came fourth over 1000 metres and were quite pleased. The lightweight men's four won though. Beat the Dutch, the Russians. Big, fast crews.

Gags and I just watched in awe. We've seen them all since they were juniors four or five six years ago. They were so far behind. We thought they'd never make it. They won really well though. Paul, Eugene, Timmy Harnedy and Richard Archibald.

And behind them battling for a seat in that boat are Derek Holland, Neil Casey, Niall O'Toole and Brian Young. All in with a shout.

It never ends. You spend so long making it and when you think you've made it the competition is closing in just as quickly as you did.

Last week, for a change, I went out in a double with Holland. Derek is an old timer like me. Derek and I rowed in Atlanta together. Last week, though, was the first time we'd been in the same boat since 1997. Entire careers have elapsed between then and now. People have made the international team, had careers and gone again. Paul was amazed. I was unnerved. Twenty eight is too young to be so old.

March. Thursday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. The lobby. 3 p.m.

There's a rule of thumb. There's always two weeks in the year when things aren't going your way at all. I reckon we're alright for this year now. And next.

We had our first race of the year a few weeks back. Right here on the river in Seville. Everyone went home the day after the race but Gags and I, hardchaws and martyrs both, we said we'd stay out for an extra week because of the weather at home.

So we got four days of torrential rain. By the time we'd get to the end of each outing there'd be 25 litres or so of water in the boat. We'd be skewing all over the river like drunks We weren't used to rowing like that. The upside was we've never paddled that fast in our lives.

Rowing in the rain can be nice if it starts raining when you're on the water. When it's pouring as you go out you just never warm up. The week reminded us of where we come from. We did 32 to 40k a day at the end of the hardest camp I've known.

For me the problem with the rain and cold is you get weighed down. I wear a huge amount of kit. I just hate the cold. I suffer really badly. In the winter I put layers and layers of kit on until only my arms can bend. Full Michelin-man look. I peel them off as I get warmer.

Gags is a freak. He doesn't feel the cold. Before Christmas in Sierra Nevada we went out for a cycle. Rowers as a group are extraordinary empathetic with cyclists.

We were cycling up a decent mountain towards weather of two below at the top. That was bad. Cycling back down was worse. You aren't working. The wind is rushing past. You're freezing.

I didn't have the right kit on. I almost died. I came into the place we were staying and jumped straight into a warm shower. The worst, the most stupid thing I could have done. I was instantly in such pain I got sick in the bathroom. I staggered out of the room into the hall, decided I needed to see a doctor quick. My brother was on camp with us. I went into his room. Tears were coming down his blue face. Herbie Griffin, his roommate, was in the bathroom moaning.

I decided that okay, this is normal.

Gags was unmoved by any of it.

We've had two weeks at least each when things haven't gone our way. The racing though was consolation and encouragement. The first event was a 1,000 metres race. Or half the regular distance. There was a tailwind on the Guadalquivir. That suited us. We were racing the heavyweights and the big boys wouldn't have the time to pull away in a quick race.

We won our heat by just under a second. In the final we decided we'd throw everything at it and die as close to the line as possible. It happened as we imagined it would. We led at halfway. We were well in the picture up till seven or eight hundred. Just .3 of a second off maybe.

Then two crews just went for it with 200 to go. We'd been going two strokes faster than them just to stay where we were. They squeezed the extra power, beat us by about six feet. The good news was we did 3.01 minutes for the 1,000 metres.

The fastest we've ever done.

The world record for 2,000 metres is 6:10. There's a formula that suggests that at our pace under similar conditions we'd do 6.12 for the 2,000.

Our Italian friends won't care. They are sure of themselves. It matters to us though. We are contracting quicker. We're going through the water quicker. Early indications are we've done what we set out to do.

Did we have more inside us? No. We were in bits.

Gags we can win this! Never again.

The afternoon stretches ahead. I've an hour to kill. Reading haematology. Then we're back out. Running. Rowing. And evening dinner is pasta with an elegant sauce du tomato.

Sometimes I wish I was a big guy.

In conversation with Tom Humphries