The Club's Results

The race itself was 'reasonable'- we were able to sustain around 32 whilst being fairly together, the sit was good, and we were all quite tired by the end. Some lifts out of Grassy, Ditton and for the finish had mixed effectiveness, but the lift towards the end was very strong (indicating we probably could have pushed harder for the rest of the race). We certainly have the potential to be the fastest M2- with a working coxbox we would definitely have made up the 3 seconds between us and Maggie M2.

Upon getting to the lock and Rose catching us we proceeded to play around with tape and loud speaker in a vain and foolish attempt to get some audio to the bows. Sadly this was more amusing than functional and we had to rely on our ever-audible bank party to call our pushes for us. A lacklustre handful of strokes out of grassy made our Plough Reach burn more of a damp squib but we had a slightly better lift out of Ditton for the Reach. On hearing we had but 20 strokes left, magically the effort levels increased by more than they had any right to, as did the boat speed. As Ben points out, this is something which needs to be corrected. We crossed the finish line and then witnessed the disturbing result of Maggie crossing the line with overlap on Jesus; it turned out they only had 3s on us in the end.

I went into the boat with an ambiguous frame of mind: I was saddened by the absence of both Alexa and Imogen, and apprehensive about the snow and cold, though the arrival of kit was a nice surprise!