Philippa Stevenson: Fix gaze on future beats a caffeine kick

An early morning chat with a couple of highly motivated, intensely focused people makes you just whiz through the day, buzzing with energy.

I wouldn't have thought it possible but I am ready to swap my usual heart-starter - the 10am flat white - for an invigorating chat with a couple of top sportspeople any chance I get.

Out with the caffeine kick, in with the world-beaters.

This revelation hit my rather sedentary being one bitterly cold day last week when, at the behest of the Herald's stablemate, NZ Listener, I rolled up to Lake Karapiro to talk to Nicky Coles and Juliette Haigh, two of a team of seven who this month created New Zealand sporting history.

In case you missed it (it bears repeating even if you didn't), on September 3 in Gifu, Japan our country had its most successful sporting hour. Ever. And not even an hour.

In just 45 minutes, single-sculler Mahe Drysdale, the women's coxless pair of Coles and Haigh, the men's coxless pair of Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater and women's double-scullers Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell rowed to gold.

No wonder that last week Coles told me: "The whole afternoon was just like a fairytale".

It was a heady mix of media interviews, taking phone calls, "all the athletes from the other countries congratulating us because we were one of the NZ team. They just couldn't believe it."

"The New Zealanders," said Haigh, "were literally turning heads."

The eyes in the heads of these two women are something special. Their focus is steady, unwavering, and on me momentarily as they talk. For the rest of the time it is locked on their future. Just as well, too, because this is also the pair who fell out of their boat at the Athens Olympics.

Wow, do they know how to overcome challenges.

Ten years ago, aged 23, Coles was a qualified pattern-cutter working part-time in the clothing industry and looking for something new.

The former Northland schoolgirl athletics champ (she still holds a record for 12-year-olds) was at the gym on a rowing machine.

"I quite enjoyed that - I hate it now - and I thought, oh, I'll join a rowing club.

"I had no idea what rowing was; I had no idea that my height and physique were perfect for rowing. I turned up to the North Shore Rowing Club and was addicted after about three days."

Now a world champ, Coles is even less daunted by great leaps of, well, faith. She'll be 36 by the time the Beijing Olympics come round but has every intention of being there.

This is not a little thing. It means she and Haigh, who is 10 years younger, intend to row up to 260km a week for all but about four weeks of the year (and three days at Christmas) for the next three years.

They eat three times the amount a regular person does. They are so tired most of the time that they barely have the energy to talk even to family members.

They use university study - Haigh is studying for a diploma in public relations, Coles for an arts degree - to give their minds a rest from rowing.

They work well together as a team, they say, because they have the same determined approach to training but complement each other in other areas.

Coles is super-confident out of the boat but can lose it in a flash on the water when she thinks they are being beaten. That's when Haigh's excited and positive attitude kicks in and the younger rower's encouraging words "just totally lift me up", Coles says.

The disparity in their ages also works for them. Coles has done some "pretty nasty regattas" and knows how cut-throat competition can be. Her experience has helped Haigh through international competition jitters.

She may have been half a duo to blitz the field this month, but Haigh vividly recalls the first time she dipped her oars in the world pond.

"I was just so scared," she says. "I was sitting in the blocks and the only thing I felt was scared."

I suspect scared young things don't perform at their best, which is something our sport-mad nation is inclined to overlook.

But let them get a couple of outings under their belts and, hey presto, they turn out to be positively inspirational. And world champs.