Rowing Sam Lynch's Diary: Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. Cell 106. 2 a.m.

Can't sleep. Want to sleep. Can't sleep.

The alarm clock is glowing in the dark. The minutes crawl by. Each one is longer than the last. Much longer. Then ta da! A brand new glowing digit. We're another minute nearer dawn.

Can't sleep. Want to sleep. Can't sleep. My eyes are begging for sleep but my heart won't let me. Right now my heart is beating like a bass drum. Boom! Boom! Boom! It won't slow down. I've been lying on this bed for hours and it won't calm itself. Boom! Boom! I'm lying in bed with my heart beating out of my chest as if I'd just rowed a gut-busting race.

I'm thinking that I'm going to pay for this tomorrow. It's 2 a.m. now. No, 2:01 a.m.

Yes. I'll pay for this tomorrow. Really, it's tomorrow now of course. Maybe I'm paying for Tuesday now and I'll pay for now tomorrow when it's properly Wednesday.

Tuesday was one long, mean day. The repayments will take a while. We came back here to Seville on Monday night and Thor Nilsen, our coach, was waiting for us with his instruments of torture. After a day of travel we checked in here at around six. Then we went for a 70-minute run. We headed to bed dreading Tuesday.

Tuesday 7:30 a.m. Isla Cartuja.

We got up and ran for half an hour. I can't believe we're back to this. It's morning and we're off for a half-hour run. Hello day. Hello Seville. Thor says these runs are to set us up for the day. I think they are to make sure that we're dead and buried at the end of it. Thor smiles. He knows he's right.

Half an hour doesn't seem so bad. It isn't. Taken alone it isn't. Half an hour is just one-third of the session though. We run. We head straight to the gym for an hour of heavy lifting. There's no need to be in the gym at 8 a.m. of course but the Spaniards block-book the best times of the day because, well this is Seville and this is Spain and this is their Sports Institute. So we can only get 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. You don't want this hanging over you all day. So here we are.

Bench presses. Power cleans. Deep squats. Sit-ups. Press-ups. For those of you who know these things we do six exercises, five repetitions of each. We do this five times. Five times.

Doing the squat I can hit 140 kilos. Doing the power clean, maybe 110 kilos or so.

Bench presses kill me though. Lightweight women rowers laugh at me. I'm crap. I struggle with 60 kilos. I argue that these bench press muscles are the muscles you use to push the boat backwards. If we have a backward race I'll be whacked. Until then . . .

Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. Cell 106. 2:06 a.m.

In the other bed in Cell 106, Gearóid Towey (or Gags), my double sculls partner, is sleeping. Not just sleeping. Gags is flat out. Bastard. This could be a pale-light-of-dawn job for me. Eyes shutting five minutes before the alarm clock goes mad.

I'm lying here thinking that we're off running again tomorrow at eight. We have to run for an hour - 30 minutes upriver, 30 minutes back down. Routine, brain-dead sort of stuff. It's now 2:05 a.m. I'm dreading it.

And then we'll be in the boat and Gags will have to carry me because I'll be dead. He'll do it though because we feel these things about each other. We can sense when the other one is gone. He won't be screaming over his shoulder wondering what I'm doing. He'll be grinning to himself.

Gags and I swapped beds when we got back here on Monday. Just to make things a little different. I'm sleeping near the window now. Or not sleeping. He's sleeping in the other bed. Half wonder if I should wake him. Make him swap back. Get to sleep.

Maybe it's a feng shui sort of thing.

Swapping beds is about as far as we have got in the great plans we made on the trip back out here to camp. We need diversion. Entertainment. Our minds are turning to mush. The grand plan stopped with changing the beds around though. We're looking though at doing something as a group. Go to a football match once a week.

It's hard to know what it all means. We were going for a run a little while back and I said to Gearóid that Barcelona were staying in the hotel across the road.

"Who are they playing?" he asked.

"Betis," I said.

"Hmmm," he said and we ran a little farther.

"Is that the Barcelona?" he asked.

"Yep." More thoughtful steps.

"They're the guys who play in the big roundy stadium in Barcelona, right?"

"Right."

We've all noticed ruefully that Real Madrid are in town to play Sevilla right now. We're too tired. Too shagged for Beckham. Okay, so we've decided not to rush into things on the diversions front.

Tuesday 9:30 a.m. Isla Cartuja.

We've had breakfast. Now the day can begin properly. Thor has plans for us - 20k on the river. A race is 2,000 metres long. Thrown into that 20k on the water, Thor wants six races or six 2,000-metre stretches done at just short of race pace.

We have a race here in Seville in two weeks' time, which is good. Everything is a little easier when you look forward to a race.

It's half a race really, just 1,000 metres, but the Danes, the Greeks, the British and the Germans are here so there'll be some edge. A thousand metres in February won't tell much but you don't want to give anything away.

The 20k ached. Last week myself and Gags were back in Dublin, back in the real world of diversion and cups of coffee and decent television and, though we trained hard, we let ourselves forget for a little while the taste of real work.

Afterwards, we got two hours off. Slept like dogs in the sun.

Tuesday night/ Wednesday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. Cell 106. 2.13 a.m.

Just noticed. My galloping heart isn't keeping me awake. My squelchy hands and feet are.

Which reminds me. The day after the Olympic closing ceremony in Athens finishes I start back in med school. These hands won't do.

I remember once talking to Martin Feely, who rowed for Ireland in the Moscow Games and is now a master surgeon out in Tallaght. Back when he was doing his surgery rotation he came into theatre one day and the surgeon asked to see his hands.

Martin had the calluses and blisters of a full rowing season on there. The surgeon looked, shook his head and told him not to come back into a theatre until his hands were respectable.

Well these hands of mine wouldn't instil confidence in anyone. Horrible.

My stinging hands and feet are keeping me awake now. I can count the blisters. Right hand: two on each finger, one on the thumb, three in the middle. Left hand: not as bad, just six. That's on top of the old ones.

They way my hands are now I can hear them squelch sometimes when I lift them off the oars. I'm rowing and suddenly there is a sharp jolt in the boat because one of the blisters has popped and the skin has stuck to the oar.

It happens. Once, in a World Cup semi-final race in Lucerne back in 2002, a huge blister on my hand opened up in the middle of the race. The pain was so bad that I lost control for three strokes and then had to grab the oar and go on.

Right now, down here, the ground is hard after a fortnight without rain so we're all hobbling with blistered feet as well. My feet are raw. Doing their bit to keep me awake.

They can be quite dangerous, our blisters, but they are part of what we are. Part of the suffering. We do so much with our hands that they can get infected easily and then you are in a world of trouble. Sometimes you get a callus over the blister and it all starts to bleed under the callus. It's nice to look at, in a perverse way. Funny to watch as the blood just spreads out underneath the skin. It looks quite impressive and people who don't row recoil in shock at the sight.

The blisters make surgeons of us all. We get to them quick, trimming the skin away with little scissors, dousing them with Savlon Dry, bandaging them up. Little tins of orange Mercurochrome travel everywhere with us.

I'm bad right now but Iget little sympathy. Nobody's hands are as bad as Sinéad Jennings's. We're hard to impress but Sinéad's hands shock us. Sinéad has hands on her blisters. She is the Elephant Man of the blistered-hand world. And her hands never seem to get better. At meetings the standard image I have of Sinéad is scissors and bandage at work on her own hands. Maybe Sinéad's in the wrong profession.

The summer before last in the off-season myself and a few friends from the rowing club at home were out one night in Kilrush. There was an old guy hopping the ball for us at the bar.

"Where are ye from, lads? Limerick? Limerick is it? Aye, city lads. Never done a day's work in your lives I'd say."

"You'd probably be right there."

"Give us a look at your hands. Jesus boy! You a welder are you?"

Maybe Sinéad is a welder trapped in a rower's body.

Tuesday 2 p.m. Isla Cartuja.

We had this running exercise in the afternoon. Killer. There's a couple of Greek rowers in town, three of them actually, and from the moment we set eyes on them the 12 of us in the Irish contingent had this almost unspoken thing that we'd be laying down a marker for them.

Normally the running sessions are intense but on Tuesday it was much more intense than normal. We'd decided we'd put down this marker and see what these Greek guys were like and as it happened they weren't up for it at all.

They didn't rise. We ran ourselves into the ground and got no satisfaction from it.

The session is basically three times 10 minutes, with 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, or described another way, 12 of us trying to kill three Greek guys.

It was too late when we realised they weren't playing along. We Irish had all done the first half of the session at a way higher rate than we'd normally do it and the 12 of us were just hanging on for our lives for the last three minutes. The Greeks didn't know what we were at. They had a burst of energy as we started to slow down, which made it interesting for us at the end. I don't think they cared.

Afterwards, I noticed Gags going up the stairs ahead of me with one of the Greek lads. Gags would be a bit more friendly and sociable than I would be. At the top of the stairs Gags and the Greek burst out laughing.

In the room I asked Gags what that was all about.

"We were just saying to each other how great it is that we are here training together," he said.

"Yeah?"

"And then we looked at each other and just burst out laughing: 'It's a pain in the ass isn't it?'; 'Too right'."

Only Gags would have this conversation. It occurs to me that I've been racing against one of these Greek guys since 1997. I still don't know his name.

Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. Cell 106. 2:22 a.m.

Definitely my heart keeping me awake now. Doctors would say this condition comes from overtraining. Whatever causes it, I wish I could make it stop.

Gags is still fast asleep. That makes it worse. It's better when we suffer in synch. In Sierra Nevada last year I had a long night like this. I'm lying there at 1 a.m. and then I heard,

"You awake?"

"Yeah."

"Me too."

"Shit."

"Shit."

I try to focus now on my heartbeat. Damn heart is pounding out of my chest. That's all I focus on for a while. Hypnotic. Not hypnotic enough though.

I can't lie on my back. It feels as though my heart is lying there on my chest jumping about, getting ready to jump out like that creature that came out of Sigourney Weaver in Alien.

I can't lie on my stomach. It feels as if the bed is being shaken by the beating of my heart. I keep turning, like a chicken on a spit. Keep rotating. I don't think about the heart for a while. I deny it exists. Boom! Boom! Boom! Ah! There it goes.

Think about Athens. Think about how to put the world to rights. Think about the times this has happened before. Once, before a semi-final in the World Championships of 1999, I couldn't sleep. Finally I said okay, I won't sleep. I lay there.

Got up at eight. We were staying on a university campus and there was a bookshop beside the bus shuttle to the race. I went in to kill some time. Browsed through some book, a sporting diary, and the first page I opened said not to worry if you don't sleep the night before a big event - it's the two nights before that count.

I won by 0.8 of a second.

I got through Tuesday. I'll get through tomorrow.

Tuesday afternoon, late. Isla Cartuja.

Fourth session of the day is 12k of easy rowing. Up and down the Guadalquivir. This is recovery, Thor says. He says that this is to clean up the body.

How about a shower and a shave, I say.

Not what I mean, Thor says. He's right. Always right.

Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the Residencia de Deportistas. Cell 106. 2:29 a.m.

Heart won't stop racing. There are 185 more days like this before the Olympics arrive.

Not too much like this I hope.

Gags sleeps on.

In conversation with Tom Humphries