Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Annabel Vernon (fourth from right) and Anna Watkins (behind her) take part in the Head of the Charles

I'm working my way through the Russian classics at the moment after experiencing St Petersburg but, for a bit of light relief, a friend lent me the climber autobiography, which is fantastic.

As a sportswoman myself, it's always fascinating to learn about other sports, to try to understand where the thrill lies, where the challenges are, and what creates the highs and lows. The best part of this book is that Bonington is very descriptive of why he climbs - the balance between the skill of physically climbing the rock, and the danger aspect of hanging on by his fingernails over a drop of three thousand feet in the Alps.

It made me think a bit more about the books that you see athletes reading on the bus on the way to regattas, or lying on the bed between training sessions, or at the back of the boathouse hours before a big race.

The classic athletes' text would be , Ernest Hemingway's short story about a fisherman who catches a giant marlin, only for it to be virtually devoured by sharks before he gets it back to shore.

As I interpreted it, the moral is therefore that all achievements are transitory, and you should never base your whole life upon one thing because it could be you'll have nothing physical to show for it. The struggle is where the nobility lies.

Apart from this one, a lot of athletes will read sporting biographies. I suppose this is partly as a learning tool - learning how others have stayed motivated, improved, driven themselves and coped with highs and lows. However, in my experience sporting biographies are little more than a glorified list of achievements.

One of the best ones I've read would be . I may be biased as I know Martin (the Guardian's rowing correspondent and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 5 live reporter) well, but as a sports book it's fascinatingly detailed on the all the behind-the-scenes gossip and politics of Olympic sport, as well as the 'dark side' of the experience with an honest account of his own struggle with depression. This is a must-read for all aspiring Olympians - rowers and non-rowers.

When we go away on training camp, I choose books that are escapist. I don't want to be doing sport and reading about it as well. One of my best choices was - it was a good friend through the , and it meant that I could return from hard hours in the gym or on the river and utterly lose myself in stories of Russian court society, or the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars.

In Beijing I ended up in the reverse situation - with a book so bad it just made me angry. It was a historical biography but was so badly researched, analysed and written that it served an excellent purpose of taking my mind off my Olympic regatta by giving me book rage instead!

I'd be interested to know what you think of sports writing. I don't just mean biographies, but also abstracts such as or .

Are they read by people desperately searching for an insight or a shortcut that simply isn't there? I guess what I'm driving at is the question of whether sport is as interesting to read about as many people make out. Isn't the thrill all in the experiencing and doing?