The University offers its congratulations to Team Row4Cancer, winners of the World’s Toughest Row 2024 – a 3000-mile race across the Atlantic from Spain to Antigua.
After 37 days, 13 hours and 20 minutes at sea – a new world record almost two days ahead of the second placed crew – the four-man Dutch team arrived at Nelson’s Dockyard on 17 January, having produced an estimated 1.5 million oar strokes, with the individual members burning in excess of 5000 calories per day. See the team celebrate and in action here.
To prepare for this extreme endurance challenge, Mark Slats, Leon Koning, Maarten Diepeveen and Tom Rijnders worked with performance experts in Sport, Exercise, and Rehabilitation Sciences for almost a year to ensure they were ready.
Working with Team Row4Cancer were: Professor John Dickinson, Head of the Exercise Respiratory Clinic who has also worked with the likes of the England football team and GB Swimmers; Professor James Hopker, a world-leading expert on the optimisation of the exercise training process who also regularly provides scientific advice to athletes from amateur to professional level in cycling, triathlon, athletics and football; Dr Megan Judge, an expert on endurance performance; and Alastair Thrush and Harry Rogers, who are both experts in Sports Therapy and Rehabilitation, providing input on strength and injury prevention.
Working alongside them was Dr Borja Martinez-Gonzalez (now with Kent and Medway Medical School), an expert in the field of physical and cognitive testing, with a focus on strategies to improve endurance performance and resistance to fatigue.
Professor Dickinson said: ‘On behalf of my colleagues here at the University, I would like to offer our congratulations to Mark, Leon, Maarten and Tom on their performance and achievement. To beat the second-place team by almost two days is astounding.
‘Due to the extreme and unique nature of their challenge, we helped the team understand their physical strengths and weaknesses. Once this was established we could provide a clear focus to training. Dr Borja Martinez would monitor training on a weekly basis and we could test the impact of their training on their fitness when they came back onto the the Canterbury campus every three months in the build-up to the race. This process helped the team see how impactful their training was, and developed their confidence in their ability to complete the challenge successfully.’
Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, part of Kent’s School of Natural Sciences, has a wide range of custom-built facilities, developed to support the content of its degree programmes. Many of these are open to the public and run by students with staff support, providing under- and post-graduates with the opportunity to work on real-life cases using world-class equipment and implementing the latest ideas.
Its Performance, Sports Ready, and Respiratory clinics house diagnostic equipment alongside treatment facilities for sports therapy, sports massage and injury prevention, including equipment for brain and muscle stimulation.
Team Row4Cancer’s chosen charity for the challenge was the Princess Máxima Center, a Netherlands-based facility for children with cancer.
