Results and reports by Event

Bit of a strange one this. On paper, two subs in, one of whom was Gao (no offence, mate), and the other subbing for our 7-man suggested it wouldn't be our best. But then the warm-up was really great - the concentration was high, and we did a really sweet R28 burst that came out on a long, relaxed, and entirely-unexpected 32! As we lined up to marshal, we were feeling optimistic, and excited to see what we could do.

Perhaps "excited" was the operative word. Maybe my rousing speech about how Champs Head was over inside 5 minutes and there was no time to hold back meant that we overstretched our capabilities. It was gutsy row, but gutsy in the sense that we spewed all our guts out on the operating table and made a mess. Our start was good but we lacked an effective transition - Ditton came all too soon and we were lurching around all over the place. We had patches of good rhythm on the Reach, but overall we were struggling to find something sustainable, and the drive phase lacked "oomph". Coming off the water, we weren't too keen to see how we'd placed.

But bizarrely we did alright. 5s faster than Queens', who we're chasing, and 5s slower than King's chasing us puts us in a good place approaching bumps, given the subs. If we can pull that out of the bag on what was a pretty awful row, hopefully we can do even more if we row properly! In all seriousness though, from now on, the concentration needs to stay as high in our outings as it was in the warm-up for this race - we have big technical ground to make up and we need to make sure that we do.

Uploaded Monday 18th May, 13:46

We'd had two weeks doing significant amounts of technical work and it was really great to see that transfer into a positive race result. We showed that we're competitive with all the boats around us in bumps and showed a huge improvement from Head-to-head two weeks ago.

The start was good, coming off it at a solid rate 37/38 but perhaps we could have maintained that pace slightly better through the 2nd half of the race. To quote Freddie "The first 250m were great, but we need to man the f*** up". Maybe he's right, but equally we're yet to do any long pieces. If we look at how much everything we've worked on has improved over the last few weeks (sitting the boat, general paddling & our starts) I think we can be hopeful that in a few weeks time we'll be in a great position have a really successful bumps.

Uploaded Monday 18th May, 10:21

Not a race report: but it's worth noting that for some reason none of the marshals seem to care about Joe rowing at stroke with facial hair. Obviously Champs marshals are very progressive people who don't even blink at the sight of a bearded women.

Uploaded Sunday 17th May, 17:31