row2k Features
Interview
Andrew Campbell
July 22, 2014
Ed Hewitt, row2k.com

Campbell and Boston skyline; Brian Nevins / Red Bull Content Pool

Starting this week, USA lightweight single sculler Andrew Campbell embarks on a rare attempt to compete in two World Championship regattas – this week in the Under 23 Worlds, and then in a month at the Senior Worlds (though this year the double Worlds isn't unique to Campbell, as Ben Davison is trying the same in the U23s and Junior Worlds). row2k talked to Campbell about how he got started in the sport, how he plans to approach the double championship summer, his new sponsorship by Red Bull, and how he felt seeing his siblings make US teams as well.

Going back to the beginning, how did you first get involved in rowing?
I first got involved with rowing when I was in middle school. I lived in the Midwest in the Chicago area, pretty close to Lake Michigan where there was a lot of sailing. As a middle schooler, my community had a sailing program that I got involved with, and I really liked it. At the end of middle school, my Dad got transferred so we moved east, where I lived in a small town. There was no sailing league in the spring and fall like there was in Chicago, so I needed an activity or sport. At the time I had done swimming for enough years to hate it, so I decided to try rowing because I thought it would be like sailing, because it was out on the water.

As it turns out, it's absolutely nothing like sailing, but the physicality of it made sense to me, and I liked working out, I liked lifting weights. I got in with a good group of guys who were my age and had really good coaches, so I stuck with it.

Funny, Mike Teti used to say "if you take a guy who stares at a black line on the bottom of the pool going back and forth all day, and he'll probably do just fine as a rower."
Oh yeah, completely. My dad was an Olympic hopeful in distance swimming. He swam for Doc Counsilman at Indiana. He swam the mile and the 400. He was really, really well acquainted with that mind-numbing distance swimming. When my siblings and I were little we all had to do swim team; that was going to be our sport because it's what my dad did, kind of an obvious choice for us. But I am so glad I got out; rowing is such a better gig than swimming.

When did you start to show some aptitude for rowing? Do any big races stand out from when you were younger?
I definitely was a bit of a late bloomer. It took a couple of years to get big enough to get rowing. When I first started there was a group of five of us that were the same age in middle school when we first started out. I was the smallest out of the group and the least skilled, so those top four guys got put in a quad and got coached in a quad, and I got put in a single because I was kind of the odd man out. That's really where I started rowing the single, and I got full summers of training in the single. It actually ended up being a really formative time for me in that I got a ton of training in the small boats from a very young age. By the time I got to high school I was comfortable rowing and racing a single, which is a huge advantage for a 15 year old.

Sure, very unusual.
But I really started to come into my own when I got put in the lightweight double in high school and got to go to Nationals my sophomore year. I kind of emerged my senior year of high school, and I started figuring out the technique and how to really hold the pressure on the blade. My senior year of high school was kind of the break through. Going to Junior Worlds in 2010 and making the podium as a lightweight racing a bunch of other heavyweights was kind of my moment where I knew yes, this is what I want to be doing for the foreseeable future.

I could imagine that would be a pretty strong reinforcement there. Sprinting ahead a little bit to today, we talked about this a little after trials, but can you outline your strategy for doing two big regattas in a couple month's time?
It's a great opportunity to be able to do both regattas. Since I am still under 23, I might as well go compete and try to defend the title, but this year my focus is really on the Senior World Championships. The way I'm working it is that I have a couple big workouts that I typically do in the summer saved for after the Under 23s. I'm definitely going to peak at the Under 23s, but the idea is that I will continue to get faster afterwards. Right now I'm trying not to completely burn myself out, and give the training intensity in very measured increments so when I get back from the Under 23s I don't feel like, oh my gosh, I can't even get back in the boat now. But the way we are doing it, I'm excited to get back in the boat for the Seniors.

Can you share what those workouts are or are they sort of trade secret?
No, it's really not anything too surprising. I've been on the kind of high volume plan for a couple of years now, so I do a lot of steady state mileage, and then typically twice a week do pieces. I started the summer doing more AT style pieces, so like a 10 minute piece, 4-3-2-1 building rate, or doing a 5K at 30; stuff like that to help build up my athletic threshold and aerobic base. Then transition more toward stuff like 4x1K, then a 2x1500.

All this work is definitely focused on physiology, but I would say the greater focus is making myself row well at the higher cadence and at race pace. I don't typically do too much work beyond race pace. We try to keep everything at what the World Record pace would be, so that I'm not learning how to row beyond my ability, but I'm more learning how to row efficiently within my ability. Charley (Butt) is really helpful with that, and we do a lot of technique work as we're rowing hard through these pieces.

Who are your coaches?
Yes, Charley and Linda (Muri) are kind of like a tag team duo. I was working with Linda mostly during the beginning of the summer while Charlie was coaching Henley crews, but now he has a little bit more free time so he's helping me out as well. They're a great duo and I get something great from both of them. Linda is an awesome regatta time coach; she's super organized and really keeps me on track. I'm going to the Under 23s with her, and then Charlie says he wants to come to the Seniors. We'll see how his schedule looks, but it would be great to have him there.

That's a pretty good team for sure.
Oh yeah. That's kind of been a constant throughout my career that I've always had a phenomenal support staff. Going back to high school, Yan and Olga Vengerovskiy and then Vladimir Apalmic (9:51). Vladimir is actually now the coach of the Ukraine Men's Quad that's doing really well. So I've always had the privilege of working with really high level coaches, and of course coming to Harvard to row for Charlie and Linda was keeping with that trend.

I took a picture of Yan getting thrown in the water at the Carnegie Lake regatta.
It's amazing to see how far his program has come even since I've started. If you go back even further to when Charlie Cole was first rowing for Yan, or when Dan Walsh was first rowing for Yan he was operating his program out of two garages next to a really tiny river that was kind of buried behind this boatyard. It was really a tiny bare bones operation. When I joined he had just expanded and bought a gym area where he could put ergs, and I was just back there for Fourth of July and he bought four more garages and is putting in new facilities, buying more boats. He's probably grown ten times in size since he started. It's really kind of a cool American dream story. He came here as an immigrant after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and built his Maritime Rowing Club thing out of nothing. He didn't start with any money, he found a couple people who believed in his him.

His wife was a maid and he was a meat man at a local grocery store. They came to the US with their son and just a couple suitcases and started coaching and started a rowing club. Then they got enough people to believe in them to start this small rowing club, and built it up to kind of the juggernaut going brand that it is today.

Can you explain your current collegiate or graduation status?
This past season is my last season with HVL (Harvard lightweight men), and I have one more semester left to go before I graduate in December. This came about when I took a semester off before the London Olympics, and then the semester before that I was part-time. So I've since made up with summer school the classes that I missed as a part-time student, and when I make up that one remaining semester I can graduate from Harvard in December.

And now you are sponsored by Red Bull; how did that come about?
Red Bull found me basically by an Internet search, and approached me after the IRAs this year. I knew I was done rowing with Harvard and I was no longer subject to amateur rules, so they approached me right after IRAs and I said yes, this is an awesome idea. They really sold me on being a brand that wanted to be doing things differently and exploring unchartered territory as far as marketing goes. I felt it was a good fit for me given that I'm an athlete who has kind of broken the mold on a lot of occasions, being really young to come into the Internationals, fit into the senior scene and everything. So I thought it was a good fit for me personally, and was excited about all the stuff they wanted to work on.

We're working on planning an event, a rowing style event in Boston, not this September but next September, in 2015. They approached me asking hey, could you help give us some feedback on this event we're looking into, and also we'd love to maybe sponsor you for the next year and hopefully it'll lead up to the Olympics. So I met with them and I signed a contract towards the beginning of this summer, and we're officially announcing it now.

What kind of expenses and things does a sponsorship like this help you with? Because it's pretty unusual in rowing.
Yeah, it's very unusual. This will help go towards my competition and travel expenses to international regattas, which is awesome because travel this summer is not cheap. I have a part-time job this summer that will supplement that income and allow me to focus on rowing more than I could otherwise, so it's really helpful.

What do you do for your part-time job?
I'm a grader for the Harvard Extension School, so I grade Finance tests and exams.

That makes sense. You also did a pretty unusual photo shoot with Red Bull, can you tell about that?
It was actually really fun. Red Bull decided they didn't want to just do the typical pictures on the Charles because there are already a lot of those and everyone's already seen those types of images. So they said let's go somewhere where people row, and the coolest place in Boston we could think of was out on the open harbor, taking pictures with nothing in the background but the open Atlantic Ocean.

We got up at 4 in the morning, I drove my single down to the wharf, and we chartered a boat, a kind of a yacht thing, put my single on the back and drove out in the harbor so we could get the sunrise. It was about 5:30 in the morning when we were getting out there. Then using the little water skiing platforms on the back of the power boat, we put my single in. It actually took about four or five people to do it because it was really bouncy out there, big waves. Once I was out there rough water is not that hard to handle, you just keep your blade set in the water. I worked with a great photographer; he's used to doing a lot of atypical photo shoots. He ended up sitting on this little deck that we launched off, and with all the chop and wake got completely soaked at 6 a.m. For the rest of the day he was walking around with wet shoes on doing the rest of the shoot.

Was it spooky out there, rowing in the open water?
Yeah. It definitely was a little bit, because you look around and all there is is just these big shipping boats going by and they're putting up huge wakes. It was not what I'm used to, but overall I was really comfortable because I've rowed in really rough waters before. I kind of like it. The Charles River basin can get pretty bouncy sometimes (laughs).

I've had a really good time meeting their team. I stopped by New York City the other day and went to a New York Red Bull soccer game with a bunch of their marketing team. They're super nice people, I love how interested they are in learning more about rowing. It's been really cool to teach people about it and hear genuine interest about the sport, and I guess it's cool that an organization out there recognizes what a cool, interesting group of people the rowing community is, and they're showing that interest.

Finally, you have some family on the team now, have you talked with your sisters about their racing this summer?
Definitely. I am their biggest fan. It's cool; now all four Campbell siblings are Junior National Team members. My brother made two Junior National teams when he was in high school in the straight four one year, and the double another.

Have you ever all four rowed together?
We have; we took a Christmas card picture one year in a quad. We talk about trying to put together a Director's Challenge Quad for Head of the Charles, but it has been tough with everyone's school schedule getting us all at the same place at the same time - but I predict that one year there's going to be a knockout Campbell Director's Challenge Quad.

That's a great way to end right there - a little family touch, a tug on the heart strings. Great to talk to you.

See Andrew Campbell's Red Bull bio page here.
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