Down by the River: Monika talks lockdown
In the midst of the pandemic Olympic rower Monika Dukarska found solace on the River Laune, writes Damian Stack
WHAT a relief to finally get back on the water and dip the oars into the inky blue of the river Laune. After nearly two months out, this was a homecoming in more ways than one.
This is where it all began for her. Where first she rowed. Where first she fell in love with the sport. The place that nurtured her and, in the middle of the pandemic, the place where she could reconnect to her great passion.
Down past the Fisheries and into the club on the banks of the river. Familiar. Comforting. A route she knew like the back of her hand. Onto the river, out of the town, leaving the statue to King Puck in her wake, and towards the sea. The familiar sight of Ballykissane Pier near the mouth of the Laune, indicating that it’s time, almost, to turn back.
It is, she says, “a great stretch of water” and on days like these it’s even more glorious. Before the weather turned in the middle of last week it was simply heavenly. Blue skies, sun beating down, West Kerry imperious in the distance across Castlemaine Harbour.
Just about the only complaint Monika Dukarska has had about the place in the last couple of weeks is that she can only get out once a day – owing to the tidal nature of the route. As complaints go, it’s minor. She knows how good she’s had it in comparison to some others.
Her fellow Irish rower Sanita Puspure, for example, hadn’t been able to hit the water for the duration of the restrictions. Being within five kilometres of Killorglin Rowing Club – or rather the stretch of water attached to it, as the club house remained closed – has been a godsend for the Kerry woman.
Even before she could return to the water, that couple of months when even the Laune was outside her two-kilometre radius, she’d been coping quite well, having returned home from Cork at the start of the lock down.
Each rower got a few pieces of equipment to take home with them from the National Rowing Centre in Ovens to help them through and, while they weren’t on their own after that exactly, it was all down to them as individuals at the same time.
“It wasn’t too bad,” Dukarska says.
“I would be used to training by myself anyway. In the past, before I moved to the centre, I would be doing singles sculling and stuff, so it wouldn’t be that much of a change I would say. It was refreshing in a way too, because you could just focus on what you were doing rather than having a lot of distractions.
“It was good being home. We’re usually travelling a lot or we’re abroad all the time or in Cork through the most of it. It’s been great to spend time at home with family.”
It had been about four or five years, she reckons, since last she spent so much time at home, and to spend so much time in Killorglin this year certainly wasn’t on the cards until the world was turned upside down by Coivd-19.
Instead she should have been ramping up preparations for the Olympic Games in Tokyo, which at the start of her stay in Killorglin were still on the agenda... if only just. The fact that they remained a possibility, however faint, meant she had to proceed as if they were going ahead as originally planned in late July and early August.
“We were still mentally and physically preparing for the games until the announcement that they were postponed,” she explains.
“There was that bit of relief in a way, because we’re competing for a place on the boat. Obviously it would be myself or someone else or three girls on a boat. Our training was compromised in a way because we wouldn’t spend time training together.
“Our performance probably would have been compromised so I think it was a good call to postpone the games. There is a lot of uncertainty now going forward, whether there will be a games next year or not because of travel and all that stuff. At the same time it’s good that we’re going to have another fifteen months or so to get better, get the head down and prepare for the games like we would have done had the pandemic never happened.
“It’s kind of good to know too that the standard of the games won’t be compromised because of the pandemic. So yeah, another year of hard training.”
THE Olympic Games were the furthest thing from Dukarska’s mind when she took up the sport. Back then, having just moved to Kerry with her family from Poznan in Poland at the age of sixteen, the appeal was simply getting to know people, having fun, and learning the language.
“I wasn’t great at it when I started,” she concedes.
“People were complaining about my rhythm, my technique and everything. I couldn’t keep in time.”
Despite that somewhat inauspicious start, it didn’t take long for her to fall in love with the sport and it didn’t take long for her to get good it either. Really good. Within two years of taking up rowing the Killorglin woman was competing internation
ally and within three she was crowned a world champion for the first time.
Those first big successes came in offshore rowing. Dukarska was Single Sculls World Coastal Champion in 2009, having medalled the previous year. It’s a different discipline to Olympic rowing. For one thing you’re out at sea, for another you’ve got a different type of boat – heavier and wider – but the basic principles and skills are the same.
“Once you can do the Olympic style of rowing you can do any kind of rowing,” she explains.
“It equips you with the skills necessary to do all of the types. I was in the river in the Olympic style of rowing for the club, and then we just travelled to the international competitions and I was good enough, I suppose, to win it. In the Olympic rowing you do 2,000m and you have a lane each, whereas the offshore rowing it’s over 6,000m. You all start on a line that’s not visible in the water – it’s just a line between two buoys. Then the course can be different. You’re going along four or five buoys.
“You’re going with the waves, against the waves, across the waves. It exposes you to all the conditions. It is tougher, but then the training that we’re doing for the Olympic style of rowing prepares us. It gives you the physiology and the strength to cope with those waves.
“You have to be able to navigate the boat and check your direction. That’s all acquired over time. Even regattas and domestic competitions in Ireland prepare you for it.”
It was around then, with those first international successes, that thoughts first turned towards representing Ireland. There was just one catch. She didn’t have an Irish passport. No matter what she tried, no matter which politicians she spoke to, it just couldn’t be done. She’d have to wait until she’d been in the country for five years.
Understandably wanting to develop her career, she gave consideration to rowing for her native Poland. She even returned there for a trial for the World Cup regatta, but it just didn’t feel right. Ireland was where her life was. Ireland was where her family was, and Ireland had become home.
“I felt personally that Ireland took care of me at a time where I was vulnerable in a way,” she explains.
“I was sixteen, just moved schools, couldn’t speak English and I found that people were very friendly and they were genuinely caring about me. They were helping me in school. I was looked after and I felt that by rowing for Ireland this was my way of giving something back. I think that’s the way I saw it.”
Now 30, Dukarska got her passport in November 2012, and officially competed for Ireland for the first time in 2013. She has made her mark in a big way since then, culminating last September in Linz, Austria, where she and Aileen Crowley qualified a boat for the Olympic Games. A huge achievement. Monumental really.
“This was the first time an Irish women’s heavyweight pair ever qualified, and that’s brilliant too,” Dukarska enthuses.
In and of itself, however, that doesn’t mean that Monika is guaranteed a spot in Tokyo.
“Well you see that’s the catch,” she explains.
“The fact that we qualified means that we only qualified the boat. So it’s not guaranteed that the two of us will go in that boat. So we spent the entire year trying to defend our seat. Also, the coaches are trying to qualify a women’s four for the games.
“The qualifying race was supposed to happen last month and there were two places available for the women’s four. So I suppose for us it was about being in the best possible shape to get a place on a boat, whether that be the pair or the four.
“I suppose now because the season is basically cancelled we have to do that all again. The boat is qualified, but it’s us then that have to perform and show that we are the two fastest.”
The partnership between the two rowers, then, is determined solely on the basis of performance, with the coaches at the National Rowing Centre constantly assessing their athletes with trials, strength and endurance tests and the like.
Indeed, Dukarska’s partnership with fellow Killorglin woman Crowley only came about when her previous partner, Aifric Keogh, fell ill. That makes it all the more important that the two develop a real understanding – and do so quickly.
“We have to know each other in a way that we are on the same page all the time,” she explains.
“We both have to work to knowing that the other one is doing everything that she can, so you can take it for granted. It’s about matching your skills and making sure that you’re managing that pressure... well maybe I wouldn’t say that, but the expectation that we have put the work in and we will qualify, that you put your work mentally and physically into that, into the crew.”
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WITH the easing of restrictions this week, Dukarksa has been able to return to the National Rowing Centre, and the hard work of ensuring she’s on the team for Tokyo starts anew. Thanks to the last couple of weeks on the Laune, the six-foot tall, two-time world coastal rowing champion is in a pretty good place to hit the ground running.
“You can be doing the rowing machine and all of that, but the skill in the water not as much,” she says.
“You have to be very efficient in how you move the boat. Going back to the centre will give us a chance to work on our water skills and by bringing the entire team together it will create a competitive environment again.
“You can be training by yourself and think you’re doing great, but if you have someone beside you pushing that bit harder you have to go again, and that just increases the performance of the team by having people in the group together.”
Still, that understanding built up over weeks and months and years with her crew mates won’t be there straightaway.
“It will probably take a couple of sessions,” she suggests.
“I’d say that if we get back in the boat on Monday, by the end of the week we should be okay. We have all the same skills and technique is similar, but it’s the little elements: are the bodies going at the same time? Is everybody pressing their legs down at the same time? Those little technical details take months and months to perfect.
“There’s a lot of things, pacing and things, that will come quite quickly. But it’s those details that make the difference between winning and losing which just take weeks and weeks to sharpen up and perfect.
“No crew is perfect. It’s just trying to get as close to perfection as much as possible.”
Understandably it’s a very technical sport, with efficiency the order of the day. The uninitiated might imagine that you rely heavily on upper body strength in rowing. That, however, would be a fairly sizable misconception.
“It’s all majority lower body,” Dukarska qualifies.
“Imagine you’re sliding up forward and you’re placing blades into the water, and the first thing that moves is your legs. I would say you’re using 80% legs, 10% core and 10% upper body if I was to divide it up.
“Training is more broken down based on physiology and endurance. Strength training then would mainly be lower body. You’d have maybe two leg exercises, two or three upper body ... some core. Then again, in terms of training, we’d be doing quite a lot of mileage.
“You’d be doing anything from maybe 20-28km per session and you have those twice a day and then weights thrown in in the middle of it. We do weights then Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so three times a week. Then around that we have work on the water and the rowing machine.”
To get it right on race day is no easy task. It requires compromises, planning, intelligence, and near flawless execution.
“We race over 2,000m and if you think about it, it’s like a long sprint,” she explains.
“What happens is for the first 200-300m that’s your start – the first minute of the race – and in the middle of the race it’s all about endurance. It’s about maintaining an even tempo, and then the last part of it is another sprint. We do a lot of mileage to ensure that our base is good, so that we can go hard in the middle of the race, and we do explosive stuff so that our starts are quite sharp as well. The 2,000m is the borderline between an endurance race and a sprint race, so you have to do both types of training to prepare for it.”
The next stop for the PHD student won’t now be the Sea Forest Waterway in Tokyo, but there is a target on the horizon for her and her crew.
“Hopefully the European Championships do happen again,” she says.
“They are scheduled for October and they’re in Poznan in Poland, so it will be nice to get home and race. That I think will be confirmed in July if it’s going ahead or not.”
That brings it all back home in another way for Monika, with the chance for her Polish family to see her in action and cheer her on. Fingers crossed it won’t be the only time they and we get to cheer her on in the next year or so. The 32nd Olympiad and the opening ceremony in the Japan National Stadium await.
I was sixteen, just moved schools, couldn’t speak English and I fould that people were very friendly – Monika Dukarska