George Russell: I always looked up to Lewis Hamilton – it's surreal being the older driver now
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: George Russell
9am
The first thing I do is jump in cold water. I live on the coast in Monaco so I'll go down in the lift from my flat and get straight in the sea, or into the ice bath at home. I have to pinch myself that I live here. I left school young so my friends are from the racing world, as well as athletes like tennis players and cyclists, who live here, too. To be in the top 20 of any sport requires huge discipline and sacrifice, so it's good to have like-minded people around you.
10am
I never train on an empty stomach. Breakfast is overnight oats, berries and banana with yogurt, then avocado toast with ham or turkey. If it's not an intense day of training, I'll go for a cappuccino; if it is, an espresso.
11am
A two-hour strength session. The most unusual workout routine racing drivers have to do is train our necks. We're strapped into the race car over our shoulders, our laps and through our crotch, so we've got a six-point harness and we go through corners at 160 miles an hour with the g-force pulling on our bodies. It's like your neck is trying to fly off. To put it into simple terms, imagine you're in the back of a car and someone goes round a roundabout quickly – yet going 50 times faster than that. My neck can see up to 50 kilos of force.
1pm
My nutritionist says I need different colours so I have pasta with cucumber, tomatoes and yellow pepper to get the fuel in and carb up.
2pm
Nap for 20 minutes – my trainer calls it a nap-uccino. I'll have an espresso before because coffee takes a good 45 minutes to kick in so it helps me wake up. I need a little nap to reset, but I can't overdo it or I feel like I don't know where I am in the world. There aren't many days I'm not moving. Deep down, I would love to be in a single location but, last week, I had nine flights in seven days. I'm pretty good with jet lag – my technique is shifting one hour per day. Before I travelled to Sydney for the Grand Prix, that took a lot of discipline. I started going to sleep one hour earlier each day so, the day before, I'm trying to sleep at 6pm, which messes with my brain.
3pm
Interval training or a 12k run. Monaco is so small that I end up running to Italy, then France, and back over the border. I run the Grand Prix track, through the tunnel of the Monaco race, and do two laps of the harbour. It's going to be an exciting season. I've always been the youngest and suddenly I'm the older of the two partners – when I was teammates with Lewis Hamilton, I looked up to him, so it does become a bit surreal. Kimi [Antonelli, George's new partner for Mercedes after Lewis Hamilton left for Ferrari] is a great kid. He's been thrown in at the deep end and he's super-fast, I'm sure he's going to keep me on my toes. I'm entering a different chapter in my career but it doesn't change my approach. My job is to drive the car as fast as possible – whether I've got a seven-time world champion or an 18-year-old rookie as a teammate, I go about my business just the same.
5pm
I'm terrible at relaxing, I can't sit around. I like playing padel with the other drivers or free diving, which is incredible for clearing my mind, because you have to solely focus on your breathing. But the most time I ever have off is half a day. I don't see anything in the Grand Prix destinations – I'm not taking this for granted and I'm not there to go sightseeing, I'm there to perform – but my favourite place is Austin because we always fly straight on to Mexico City afterwards, so we get to spend a couple of days there. On flights, I'll watch the race from the year before to get into the rhythm of that race weekend.
7pm
Within 200 metres of my flat, I've got the coffee shop I love – where I always see Toto Wolff – and my favourite restaurant, Cantinetta Antinori. I order yellowtail sashimi and this nice panettone they've somehow created a starter with. Their specialty is carbonara, so I'll have that or a good steak, followed by tiramisu. My girlfriend Carmen [Montero Mundt] and I talk and catch up on the day.
9pm
I try to be disciplined over scrolling social media as we live in a toxic world. It's challenging being in the public eye, everyone's got an opinion on what you do, what you say, how you look – it's often quite amusing. Instead, I watch Lost, which I've never seen before and it's a bit edge of the seat so it doesn't help the sleep, but I wind down by turning the lights down and watching with blue light blocker glasses on, so I look a bit funny.
11pm
My coach says sleep is free performance. I'm quite relaxed the night before a race. I believe in myself and – it sounds cliché – but what will happen will happen. If I put the maximum effort in, there's nothing more I can do to give myself the best shot at victory. If you let nerves impact you, it's going to impact the result. I get butterflies before every single race, we all feel an element of pressure and if you didn't, you wouldn't care, but I need to limit that as much as possible.
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