After numerous exchanges of
emails, the fledgling City boat crew finally met at the City boathouse at 7.15.
Ashley had done his best to include me in all communications until now, though
I considered myself on the periphery – particularly when there were lots of
people in the ‘to’ box of the emails who I didn’t know and assumed were much
better than me.
Ashley had used his best
persuasion skills to get a girl called Danielle from the club to cox for us, because
even though there were plenty of crew around, coxes are always a valuable
commodity. We had a girl called Kat from the Cantabrigian Boat Club (henceforth
Cantabs) to coach us from the bank. Danielle was running late getting home from
London, and so
we found the right blades and seats for the boat. The weather had been
unsettled and a thunderstorm had been forecast for Sunday, then Monday, but the
rumbles only materialised by about 6pm on Tuesday. The weather was looking
fairly dicey by 7.15 but we were all still keen to go out (I had my spray
jacket).
We started by standing in a
circle in the boathouse and introducing ourselves. I was surprised to find a
few familiar faces that I now had names for. A woman called Liz who works in
the Judge Business School at the uni had been at a couple of novice sessions,
Sikander had never been at novices but had always been around, a Scottish guy
called Allan who lived in Sydney for three years had been at one novice session
(and was really subbing), a guy called Matt I’d never seen, Ashley, Fran, me,
AND....................guess who? David Beckham!! His name is actually Richard.
I was pleased to find that there really wasn’t that much more experience than I
had had. Ashley did a bit of a speech, and announced that of all the names that
had been floating around, there were only eight who had committed 100% to the
project and were available for enough sessions. I suddenly realised that I was
one of them.
Danielle arrived and we went
to get the Lord Todd out of the CRA boathouse. We got him in the water with no
problems. We then had to work out who was going to sit where. Quite a few
people expressed a preference for strokeside, mostly due to injuries. Sikander
was put in stroke, and the other strokers in the other three stroke seats. That
left the rest of us to find a bow seat somewhere. We ended up with a boat like
this:
S – Sikander
7 -
6 – Richard
5 - me
4 - Liz
3 - Fran
2 - Matt
B – Ashley
Allan decided to ride up the
tow path and watch. We got in, numbered off (you have to call your seat to show
you’re ready) and pushed off the bank. The bow four started while the stern
four sat the boat. They rowed with arms, then with arms and bodies, then with a
quarter slide, half slide and finally full slide. There was probably a fair bit
of traffic and so we may have stopped a few times. The stern four then did the
same thing – arms, bodies, quarter, half and full slide. It started to rain
just after we started rowing. I must say I can’t remember a great deal about
the details, except that right from the start I felt uncomfortable. When I went
to full slide I realised that I was hitting the end of the rails and still had
a little way to go. As a result I probably spent the rest of the session
pulling away from the voluminous shoes with my feet in the air. I vowed to adjust
the foot stretchers for each and every session in future.
It was getting fairly dark
under the clouds by about 8.30, and having Richard blocking almost the whole
view in front of me was disorienting. Sikander was setting a very unrealistic
stroke rate. It’s like he was trying to race straight away – and no one managed
to stop him. He was doing a reasonable speed while his blade was in the water,
but his recovery was just as fast if not faster, which is ridiculous. So as a
result, it was all I could do to get my hands out, body over and slide before
the next catch. The fact that I couldn’t use my legs properly meant that I was doing
most of the pulling with my back, and I had no concentration left to give my
hands so my catches were all messy and crab-like. So I was out of breath from
having to move so fast, my back was hurting and my forearms were starting to
seize up from twisting the blade to feather it. With three men in front of me putting
quite a lot of strength into the stroke, the boat was moving faster than I had
ever gone and I found that my blade just dug in and got dragged along if I
didn’t push it ridiculously fast.
Before long the rain reached
torrential proportions, and we all realised that leaving our shoes in the
bottom of the boat was a REALLY BAD IDEA. Kat was calling some advice from the
bank, but wasn’t really being of much help – she’s not forceful enough. We
would have rowed in fours only up past the Plough Pub (or was it the Pike and
Eel?), but not as far as Baits Bite Lock. We stopped and turned, and I gave up
on my glasses completely. Kat said that she’d never had a contact lens actually
washed out of her eye by rain before. Someone commented that you weren’t
supposed to be that wet INSIDE the boat. Richard lamented that we Aussies
weren’t as used to rain as the locals.
On the way back, we rowed
with all eight for a while. The start was terrible and we stopped before we’d
even got to a second stroke. The second time was better. The balance was still shocking
and we stopped a few times after full-scale crabs, but it was good to see that
after bad stokes people were mostly recovering to pick up the next one. I heard
Danielle tell Sikander to slow his slide down about 4 times, but he never did.
Then for the last spell we had back to the boathouse, she asked us to row very
slowly back, and it started off very comfortably and I was hopeful. Within
about 6 strokes, Sikander was back to his ridiculous pace.
We pulled in on a very
swollen river and put everything away without bothering to wash the boat down
(it was saturated anyway). So saturated in fact, that when we rolled it up to
heads to carry it back, what felt like about 15 litres of water drenched us as
it came out of the bottom. Lucky it only caught me from the knees down.
The only comments I heard
from other people about this session were centred around the fact that we
survived and that we actually physically managed to row as an eight in our
first session. There seemed to be no talk of technique at all, and everyone
else seemed satisfied on the whole.
I came out of this session
knowing that I had to work on two things: pushing my hands/the blade out faster
after I had finished my stroke, and squaring my blade sooner before the catch.
I had the overwhelming feeling that I wasn’t strong or fit enough to race and
an appreciation for the reason for single sex crews. I also had to work out a
way of warding off blisters....
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