Results and reports by Event

Lucy Lipfriend reports:

On Sunday, the CBC rowers took the ergs in an attempt to row 500,000m in honour of Anne Brewin.

Having encouraged a grand total of 35 rowers and coxes to row as far as they could in hour-long slots the only thing in our way was a 500,000m target. Sam, Qing and I arrived at the boathouse at the very sociable hour of 6:45am on Sunday morning to start us off. Despite liaising with Gripper when organising the ergathon so that we could set an achievable but ambitious target, I checked my phone and was surprised to see a message from Gripper at 10am; “I’m predicting we are going to fall short of the target” - not quite the positive vibes I was going for so I decided to ignore him. By this point it seemed that a couple of the boat club had become a little too attached to the ergs. Shamsher and Simon, two loyal M2 rowers, having already completed 2 ergathon slots each, decided they wanted to erg a marathon. By this time the boathouse was filling up, we had all four ergs filled at all times, people arriving early for their slots and staying after to encourage those erging. I was anxiously updating the spreadsheet every time someone got off an erg, doing more maths than I’ve done in the last 3 years to work out how far each person needed to erg to make the target.

Despite Gripper’s pessimism, one of the stand out moments from the ergathon was the overwhelming ‘one club’ feel. Some of the most experienced rowers were erging with ex-novices, the women's side with the men’s side, every single member of CBC stepped up.

We ended up reaching the 500,000m target well before the end of the day, we also raised over £2,800 for Sue Ryder, the charity nominated by Anne’s family. Anne gave so much to the club and this was a small gesture of our appreciation to her and her family.

Uploaded Wednesday 16th August, 10:59