The Club's Results

I have never had a successful Uni IVs race. In the past my crews have drawn the winners of the event, and suffered a fairly spectacular equipment failure. This race was dominated mostly by nerves, lack of training, and Downing.

After a very quick series of starting calls 'Firstandthirddowningattentiongo' I proceeded to air stroke through the start. No doubt because of this, we were rating 38 (fair higher than we had ever attempted in training) and Downing took a quick lead. Alex tells me we gained a little of it back, but at this point I was more concerned with getting my blade in the water.

The race then became an test of extreme cardiovascular fitness down the reach, overrating and losing ratio with every stroke. The final margin was 31 seconds.

When I decided to enter a IV for the competition, I did it to give meaning to our training. I figured at the very least it would give us a wake up call, possibly light a fire under the squad. The positive that we took from it, walking out of the crew room afterwards, was resolve. That's what I've seen in every outing since. (Julia A.)

It's difficult to take the IVs race seriously (as evidenced by the fact that I've just typed it as 'rave' and had to go back and change it) after the 4.3k slog that is the VIIIs race.

I don't think any of us knew how this was going to go, with very little rest time between the VIIIs race and this one, losing all of our possible bank parties to the spur of the moment Black Prince IV, and people switching sides and crew order. We consoled ourselves with the fact that it was 'only about 3k' and the day was 'almost over'.

The rowing was scrappy up until the white bridge while we sorted ourselves out, and then Alex called an up 2, which fixed most things. I was a bit concerned at the call, as we typically do our best rowing at middling-high rates, but I did my best to follow it.

The P&E came up faster than I was expecting, and at the same time I was aware of some sort of activity at Chesterton, but couldn't quite see what was going on. We had our restart and calls for catches, moving together and finishes, and by the reach the rowing had gone from acceptable, to really quite nice. Halfway up the reach we became aware of some epic battle between the two IVs behind us, but it was a relief to be able to observe it rather than be in the thick of it this time.

We crossed the finish line strong, and slightly worried that Sara was about to die after the battle cries on the reach.

The final verdict was that it felt much better than the VIIIs race, but probably could have done with more oomph overall. Reasonable result considering how pleasant the race was.

Our actual opportunity to finish Sara off was on the paddle back, with SP sitting the boat at bow, unable to row due to her Mars bar and jeans, (Becky having run off to catch the Varsity bus) and Alex swapping Nina and I in to row with Sara. The proof of her power was in the length of time it took certain crews to come by us. It was an amusing row back, (probably less so for our amazing 3 girl) and a nice way to end the day. (Julia A.)

They don't call me Sharapova for nothing. (Sara)