How I met the bench row, a key component to Olympic gold

First day of rowing January 198

I was 13 and a half when I started rowing in Fontainebleau, France.  As a "cadet" rower, we were asked to join the Friday evening strength training session.  The weight room was part of an athletic complex across the street of a famous business school called, Insead.  This school attracted well accomplished US rowers such as, Alyson Townley, Chris Carlson, C.B. Sands-Bohrer, Anne Marden, and John Marden.  This early US rowing interaction presented me with the opportunity to hold Anne Marden's freshly won Olympic silver medal from the Seoul Olympics in my young hand.  It was amazing how big and heavy the medal was.  As I held it,  I remember looking at it long and hard which gave me the impression that the medal grew larger in my hand.  Then a voice inside of me said: "Xeno, you can achieve this, but it is going to cost you, you will suffer."  I tightened my jaw and knew that I was in it for the long haul.

My dad and I the year before Brown

As a young teenager I was a fan of movies such as Rambo, Rocky, Commando, the Running Man and a few others staring these actors...  I wanted to be as buff as Stallone and Schwarzenegger.  Even my father and grandfather enjoyed telling me that a strong body is important in a young man's life and beyond.  So it was no wonder that I was given a piston rowing machine and a punching bag for Christmas the year before I started rowing on the water at the Club D'Aviron Fontainebleau Avon.  When I first set foot in the gym that Friday evening, all I saw were free weights, a couple Smith cages, and monkey bars...  The elder rowers told us to grab four benches that were stacked along the concrete wall.  I had no clue what we were going to do with them.  Maybe we were going to sit down and talk about what we were going to do.  We were told to place three benches parallel to each other and the fourth bench was set on top.  Then an Olympic bar was placed underneath the top bench and I was told to lay belly down and grab the bar and start pulling.  The date was February 15th, 1985.

Shortly before driving to Sydney from Murwillumbah

The company of the bench row lasted 19 years from that evening on.  I did bench rows in Fontainebleau, Zurich, Sarnen, Providence, Boston, and Newport Beach.  There is no doubt in my mind that this specific exercise brought a huge amount of torque to my sculling and sweep rowing stroke.  I excelled at the French national bench row test, which consisted on how many bench pulls with 40kgs one could do in 6 minutes.  Years later, I laid there in the gym of the Newport Aquatic Center, my stopwatch already running and placed on the ground right below me, my finger tips hooked around the bar. As the stop watch reached one minute, I began pulling at a deafening pace, literally, because at the end of every pull the Olympic bar hit the metal frame creating a loud bang.  I thrived on that ear piercing sound.  I felt rage, I was in my element, my mind was screaming to go faster, harder, I wanted to tear everything apart so that my my opponents would get destroyed, they shall regret having chosen to race the single scull.  The metallic banging reminded me of a sledgehammer.  As I progressed through the six minutes, I increasingly felt my lat muscles pulsate with every draw.  My arms became twice as big.  Sweat dripped off my forehead onto the floor.  I kept counting, I wanted to go farther than 240, which meant an above 40 strokes a minute pace. I kept ramming the bar against the bench.  At one minute to go, I demanded that my body released every ounce of energy for the final sprint to complete the six minutes of hell, or was it heaven...  That day I pulled my absolute best, 248 draws at age 28, a month and a half before the Sydney Olympics.

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Xeno Muller won an Olympic Gold in Atlanta and an Olympic Silver in Sydney, and is the current Olympic Record holder in the 2000m Single Scull. 

Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.