The Club's Results

We made this a lot harder than it needed to be; at about 300m I realised we were on a strong pace and moving away, so called down 2 to save energy. I was hoping for a long relaxed rhythm, but instead we took it down a bit, rowed worse, and had to work just as hard to stay a length ahead of Leicester. This led to a very ugly wind in the last 250 to hold onto our length lead, which later turned out to be irrelevant; the umpire at the start who announced "first to final, 2nd to rep, 3rd eliminated" turned out to be wrong, and we were both many lengths clear of the Vet E+ pair in 3rd. (Peter)

After the experience of the previous round, and from racing various people down the reach, I was aware we didn't have a particularly effective sprint available. As such, even sitting on quite a nice 36 (?) through the middle of this final and leading 2nd and 3rd by a little over a length at 500m, I was worried we didn't have enough lead; calls for increased pressure at the same rate were variously not heard and ineffective, so when Lea visibly lifted the rate at 300m to go we were a little under a length ahead, and they quickly moved out to lead us by a length at 100m out.
When we heard the hooter as they crossed the line we essentially stopped rowing, so the result was exaggerated a little, but other than that I didn't think we did a huge amount wrong in the race. Not fast enough. (Peter)

After beating our only opponents by several lengths in the previous day's final, we were expecting this to be fairly easy. As such, although we moved nicely in the first few strokes, we were both a little worried at leading by only a length at 250m.

In 500m races you don't have to hold on for long though, and our race plan of "stay on rate throughout, push a bit harder in the last 10 strokes" worked fine; even after visiting the opponents' lane a few more times than necessary, the finishline still came a stroke earlier than I expected.

It was nice to note that in the following Sen 2- race (which we would have been in if we'd picked up a point the previous day) we would have been very close to 2nd and a length down on the Cantabs pair who won to become Elite. This makes it feel slightly less bad that we're now ineligible for the event we failed to win on Saturday... maybe I should have regressed a point when I had the chance. (Peter)