The Club's Results

Well, we lost out on winning by 2 seconds. Damn. However there are a lot of positives to be brought from this. Firstly, there were probably that many seconds to be had simply by me taking a decent line occasionally. Apparently you don't just aim for the kink off Ditton, and First Post corner was a minor voyage of discovery.
However the other eight people in the boat seemed to be really fairly effective. We did pretty well despite our stated aim being to row it mostly like the first half of a Fairbairn's race, and I certainly felt that we could have carried on for a fair while longer. It may take a while to convince the girls of that however :). The rowing felt sustainable, and the technical improvements we've been making recently seemed to largely stick. Judging by the split at 1000m we seemed to go off faster than most other people, and then it would appear that Christ's were a lot faster than us over the last 1000 odd metres, however I don't feel that we "blew up" at all. Maybe we should have gone for it a bit harder in the 3rd quarter. Anyway, we've got some 5K pieces over the lock tomorrow, so it'll be good to see what happens when we try the Liz Hill, "Let's do Fairbairn's at 40" plan. It think it'd be fun, but then I would wouldn't I... (Swords)

Having lost by a margin of 2 seconds sucks. Especially knowing that we could have pushed that extra bit harder to get these 2 seconds. No excuse for that.

On the positive side, we had our best row together so far, and it was really noticeable that things finally start getting together. Let's build on this and really consolidate the technical achievements! Our main issue so far was not a lack of strength or fitness but of togetherness in the boat. We're getting there now. I'm getting excited to see what we can do if we synchronise our power!! (Ulrike)