Euphoric hard slog

Ashley emailed us with our seating positions for this outing, with a view to keeping them, so we were sort of organised. The boat looks like this:

Stroke – Matt

7 – Allan

6 – Rich

5 – Zak

4 – Martin

3 – Ashley

2 – me

Bow – Fran

Fran likes being in bow because then no one can see anything stupid she does. She did one session in 7 in front of Rich and he kept asking her to slide further forward to get out of his way. With me in 2, it looks like I’ve become a strokesider, which I don’t mind at all. I set out to be ambidextrous. Kat wanted me to be in front of Fran because she thinks I’m good to follow.

Kat was coxing and George coached. Someone had pointed out that we had to race the time trial in exactly a week, and so Ashley and George decided that we would go all the way up to the lock, which is apparently about 2.6 km each way.

We did our warm up in fours and then rolling sixes all the way to the lock, stopping for traffic a few times. George swears that when we passed the 3rd men’s City crew going the other way, their coach on the bank told him that we looked better than them. Not sure I believe him. Just as we got to the lock, the battery in the cox box gave up, and so Kat was shouting, but Fran and I still couldn’t hear her. Kat was shouting so much that she didn’t hear an 8 crew behind her asking to pass. George got stuck into her about that.

Anyway, we did a few starts from frontstops which felt pretty good, and rowed all the way back all 8. It was a very hard slog, but SO beneficial. Perhaps it was useful not hearing Kat, because I found that I was tuned in more to what the other rowers were doing (on strokeside at least). We were catching together, and we even starting squaring together. This had a major impact on the balance – it was fantastic and everyone was a bit euphoric. I felt very good after the session – not tired really – and I jogged home.

George had some very constructive comments. He said that Zak is too tall for the rest of the crew, with a phenomenal reach, and that he had to sit up straighter and not to reach those extra few inches. He said that Rich’s height wasn’t as much of a problem, but he can also help to compensate by not leaning back as far at the finish. He used me as an example of the extreme height difference in the crew. He gave us three words to think about for the next few sessions: one of them was control and I can’t remember the other two.

My thought at the end of this session was relief that we wouldn’t look like idiots at the bumps, but we would probably still get bumped pretty quickly.