It's pouring down with rain. More accurately, given the strength of the gusting wind, it's pouring across with rain, a rain that stings the face, borne by a wind that buffets the body.

The 55th Fuller’s Head of the River Fours race, scheduled to start on the reverse Boat Race course from Mortlake to Putney, has just been abandoned, leaving 2,000 or so would-be rowers to de-rig and load up boats which will not now be lowered into the surly waters of the Thames.
 

It is as I battle my way back across Putney Bridge that they pass me - all wearing international tracksuits. They're not jogging. They're running.  Running through the rain now that their plans to row through it have been frustrated.
 

And I think to myself, as I struggle on: "There is something very depressing about elite athletes." Of course, I hate myself for thinking it. But there we are. The thought is thunk.
 

Guilt and jealousy, no doubt, colour my attitude. Each eager runner who passes me is a rebuke, an invitation not taken to up my own game.
 

Over the years I have talked to many driven souls who have propelled themselves through ferocious belief and self discipline to the very highest levels of sporting achievement. They have their mantras, and very sensible they are too.
 

"Listen to your body." That’s a big favourite, particularly with endurance runners such as Paula Radcliffe - although for someone who has been listening to their body for years she seems to have spent a lot of time disagreeing with it.
 

Listen to your body. Yes indeed. But what if your body is telling you: "I quite fancy another round of muffins with lemon curd"?  Or: "Do you know what? It's not worth the bother"?

One of my favourite sporting quotes is from Dave Bedford, the former world 10,000 metres record holder who is now international race director for the Virgin London Marathon. Asked once what he found most challenging in his athletics career, he replied: "Getting out of the front door."

(In the same spirit, Houdini once said – if Gilbert O'Sullivan’s lyrics are accurate, and I have no reason to believe they are not – that to get out of bed was the hardest thing he could do.)

Bedford, of course, managed to get over the threshold with sufficient regularity to clock up 120 miles a week in training - which many people at the time thought insanely excessive.
 

But somehow that acknowledgment of lurking sloth makes his achievements palatable.
 

"Control the controllables. You can't control what your rivals do, only what you do." Again, sounds sensible on the face of it. But if, say, you have the swimming style of Eric the Eel at his panicky worst, getting in full control of it is not going to do you a whole lot of good. 
 

I remember once controlling my controllable all the way round Woodfield Stadium near Watford as I ran my first - and last - competitive 3,000 metres race against my mate Kidder, who trained regularly and was faster than me, and two characters who turned up in running shoes, rather than the training shoes Kidder and I sported.
 

On the face of it I seemed bound to finish last, witnessed by large numbers of fellow schoolboys and girls awaiting their own events. And that was what happened - although I did also manage to control the strong urge not to bother finishing as I saw my friend cross the line in third place more than half a lap ahead of me.
 

Perhaps I should have employed a bit of visualisation? Perhaps I should have laid down a mental template of victory. But what happens when you snap out of it and recognise that what you have just envisioned bears as much similarity to reality as a "yet more apocalyptic, giant blade-thrusting action!" computer game?
 

As they say on the Underground: "Mind the gap."

In his newly published book Inspired (Headline, £18.99), which discusses some of the characteristics which elite sporting figures have in common, Steve Redgrave calls the mindset of Olympic swimmer John Naber (pictured) "as inspirational as anything I have come across in sport."

Essentially, Naber, who had missed out on medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics, set his sights on winning gold in the 100m backstroke at the next Games and calculated that, based on the progression of times, he would need to swim the distance in 55.5seconds – four full seconds faster than his best.
 

"Then he broke it down again," writes Redgrave. "He trained for ten months a year, so he would only need to improve by one tenth of a second over the space of a month. There are roughly thirty days in a month, so he would only need to improve by one three-hundredths of a second every day. He trained for four hours every day, so he only needed to improve by one twelve-hundredth of a second every hour."

Naber eventually won his gold – in 55.49sec.
 

The moral of the story for Redgrave? Even an apparently insurmountable goal can be achieved by a motivated athlete.
 

The moral of the story for me?  I never could, and never would have been, remotely, a motivated athlete. A couple of days of improvement, fine. But day on day? Over four years?
 

As I say, elite sportsmen, they just make you feel bad.

 

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames.