Results and reports by Event

What a great race! It's really good to be able to go out and be within sniffing distance of First and Third, who have numerous CUBC returners this term. Also very satisfying to be faster than people who were beating us in Lents, such as Fitz.

The races themselves were both very decent rows. Our major aim was to hold nothing back in the downstream leg - we wanted to give it everything, all the time, even if that meant we blew up on the return leg. As it transpired, we produced two consistent and powerful rows, managing 32/33 into the headwind and 34/35 in the tail. There's work to be done - we lose too much speed on the corners and bowside is sadly not yet quite deserving of the moniker "wowside", but we have a combo that works - this was our first official M1 outing, and it's not even our final form. Looking forward to what the next couple of weeks will bring in terms of speed and technique!

Uploaded Saturday 2nd May, 19:06

Wow. That's really disappointing. It had felt like quite a good race but you can't argue with those numbers. Something's going wrong if we can be beaten by a four, even if they did apparently put an engine in their stern for the second leg.

Thinking back, I'm not sure what it could be. We had one or two shaky strokes and my line around Grassy wasn't the best on the way back but there's nothing there to account for that kind of time difference. Not having a rate meter probably didn't help - however well you put the power down, you can't win a race if you only do so 30 times per minute when other crews are at 34 or 36, and I think that's the sort of level we were at.

So, we need to get better at higher rate (and get the rate meter in our brand new boat working - grr), which will require lots of pieces in the next few weeks and lots of shouting from me. And what do you know, tomorrow there's a sprint regatta over a 400m course. I'd call that a golden opportunity for a silver lining.

Uploaded Saturday 2nd May, 21:40

After the race we all felt that we'd had two solid, albeit sluggish feeling rows and I think everyone will be disappointed with our position and time. However, there are positives to take away from this. With three subs in what was M2's first outing we managed to produce two tidy races and for the first time all term seemed to have learnt to sit the boat. Hopefully, over the next couple of weeks, with a settled crew and the opportunity to do some rate work we can add speed to go with the tidy rowing on show in this race.

Uploaded Sunday 3rd May, 11:09