The Club's Results

Newnham Short Course, Lent Term 2015

2nd men's VIII (2nd VIIIs)

Coxed by: Liv Godwin

3rd in Category, 9th Overall
Time: 7:23
An eventful day for sure. After troubles with the speaker system in the boat the previous day, Liv was audible for around one minute before it cut out again. RTT gave her a megaphone to attempt to cox with, but this was limited in its effectiveness, leading to most of the race calls coming from the bank. Marshalling in the snow for 20 minutes was an interesting experience, but we had the pleasure of Maggie M2 blasting some tunes from Frozen through their coxbox.

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.
(Ben)
With a barely functioning cox box promptly turning into a non-functioning cox box very early on in the outing we knew this was going to be a fun race. Marshalling took rather longer than we were hoping for and by the time we pushed off my fingers were royally frozen, making the paddle to the lock even more painful than usual. We also decided that we had to win otherwise Thornton wouldn't get his t-shirt.

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.
(John)