The Club's Results

Ailanore and I cruised to victory (as the only entrants) in the Women's 2- event. Having allowed ourselves but one outing in preparation for this event, for which we made sure to row with one mens and one womens blade for that extra degree of difficulty, we decided on race day to swap the crew order and have Ailanore steering/me stroking since the power difference between the two of us was annoyingly exaggerated by my being at bow. However, having made it up to the start line (pretty much on time as well, I have you know) by the Motorway bridge, Ailanore announced that her first steering experience had been unimpressive and demanded to be swapped back into the stroke seat. We accomplished this feat seconds before having to row up to the start to the amusement of the Robs marshalls who, alongside all those little buggers from the Leys, had long lost all due respect for our superior pairing expertise. Since our race number was now no longer visible to starters, we were instructed to shout it out while crossing the start line which we proceeded to advance to (or rather, to which we proceeded to advance). This, and the fact that we had only perfected a standing start led to Ailanore catching her first ever overhead crab while I was busy turning to shout 'Wind one - 67'. My next memory is that of my knees colliding with Ailanore's shoulders... Since we hadn't actually made it across the start line, and had generally become an audience effective problem child, we were allowed to back it down and could finally demonstrate our unique standing start. The rest is already legend. A couple of Princess Bride quotes (e.g. 'Try ruling the world sometimes'/ 'Please consider me over suicide') and the odd Ailie-only strokeside corner later we veered across the finish line like John Earl out of the Biennial Dinner. Cheers, applause and 'You finished it!... That's all that counts!' from the bank.

We had made our mark on rowing history... and cycled off to run the 1500 in cuppers.

Many thanks to Ciaran and Matt for self-sacrificing bankpartying. (Pia)