Kayaking: Dame Lisa Carrington's Christmas Day challenge, as ...

Dame Lisa Carrington at the 2023 world championships.

When you are tucking into treats on Christmas Day – and enjoying the festive period across next week – spare a thought for Dame Lisa Carrington and the rest of the New Zealand women’s kayaking team.

While the focus for most of us on Monday will be presents, family, food and fun, Carrington and her colleagues will be training as normal.

Christmas Day is a bit lighter – ‘only’ a 10-15km paddle – before heavier and more frequent sessions across the week.

It’s not ideal but that’s the price of being an elite athlete, which is always magnified in an Olympic year.

In 2021 and 2022 the team had a break between Christmas and New Year but that wasn’t going to happen this year.

“It’s a training week,” coach Gordon Walker told the Herald. “The way I put it to the team was, we have come a long way to get this level of fitness and to take a week off would kind of be a waste of time. It would undo a lot of the work we have done to get to this point. They will have a week off in mid-March … that will be like their annual leave.”

Walker said the squad understood the situation.

“They were pretty good,” said Walker. “They recognise that this is important and when they know that these are your other times that you will get to take your break, then it makes more sense to them.”

Those with families outside Auckland will at least get to return home, training on an individual basis. It means six-time Olympic medallist Carrington will be doing sessions on the Whakatāne River near Ōhope, with K2 partner Alicia Hoskin working out on the Waimatā River in Gisborne and K4 colleague Olivia Brett doing laps of the Avon in Christchurch.

They had their final session as a team on Saturday at Lake Pupuke and will reconvene at their Takapuna base on January 1 or 2.

Walker says the first month of the year is always a good opportunity for a “solid training block” as Auckland goes quiet.

Milestones next year include the Oceania championships (February 16-18) – where New Zealand hope to qualify female and male K2 crews – and the K4 selection trials in mid-March. Plans are still being confirmed for the overseas bloc leading into the Olympics but it will be long, possibly up to 14 weeks overseas.

It’s likely New Zealand will send crews to both World Cup meets next year, in Szeged, Hungary (May 10-12) and Poznan, Poland (May 24-26) before training camps in France and Spain.

“It’s a relatively short turnaround from the end of the second World Cup to the Olympics,” Walker said. “So it probably makes sense to stay in Europe.”

They will also spend some time in Paris, taking the chance for more sessions on the Olympic course, at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical stadium, after participating in a three day regatta last year. Walker described the venue, which is about 30km east of the French capital, as a challenging course.

“It will be an honest race,” Walker said. “There is a side wind, it will be tricky. It’s a bit like Lake Karapiro – a big lake that’s windy.”

Michael Burgess has been a sports journalist since 2005, winning several national awards and covering Olympics, Fifa World Cups and America’s Cup campaigns.