Woke up ridiculously early at 04:30, I am obviously way too excited/nervous, I don’t need to be there until around 07:30 and it is only a 35 minute drive.
Dozed for the next hour before finally getting up at 05:30, made some toast and peanut butter/nutella (one slice of each), fed the dog and made sure I had everything I needed for the day before finally heading off at about 07:00.
Park up then go to find the trailer, the site is huge, it is a 15 minute walk from where I parked the car to the trailer, I arrived first so I unstrapped our coxless 4, then waited for the others to arrive.
Once they had arrived we took the boat off the trailer and re-attached the riggers and were on the water at around 08:30 for our 09:02 start.
We did our usual warm up then were stuck in a traffic jam, the event was running about 20 minutes behind, so we had fun keeping the boat out of the reeds and avoiding all of the other boats while the wind kept blowing us sideways.
Our first race is a time trial with a rolling start to determine which final we will be in (A through F), we had agreed that we would go all out in the time trial and hope for the best final we could achieve.
The start went well and we built the rate and pace, then settled into our rhythm for the remainder of the course.
They were only using 4 lanes for the time trial and alternating the crews across the lanes.
The next crew using our lane was catching us and ultimately we had to divert into the next lane with about 500m to go, as they seemed to have no intention of moving.
My SpeedCoach shows the 2,000m time at 7:24.8, although I have no idea what the official time was as they didn’t publish the time trial times.
Recover our lungs, take the boat back to the trailer and have some food to fuel back up while we wait to find out which final we have made it into.
2 hours later they finally publish the lineup for the finals and we have ‘made it’ into the F final with the 3rd slowest time and have lane number 5.
The F final is supposed to be at 11:56, but by now the event is running even further behind, so we end up boating again at 11:50 for our next warm up.
We do our usual warm up again, but this time also throw in a couple of practice starts, just as well as I nearly caught a crab on the first stroke of the first attempt as I knifed the oar into the water, still better now than when we do it for real!
We finally come round for our final and attach to the stake boat, there is a relatively strong cross wind that makes lining up ‘fun’.
All crews ready, ‘Attention’ and we are off, we had a good start, not last off the stake boat, (that was Liverpool University) but not first either, we caught Putney Town B within the next few strokes before we ‘settled’ into our race rate of 34spm.
We slowly pulled away from the Putney Town B and Liverpool University on our left and managed to stay with the Auriel Kensington and Putney Town A to our right until about the 1,000m mark when they started to pull away from us.
The marshall’s launch was in Auriol Kensington’s lane to our right and was arguably a bit close to us as we picked up a fair bit of wash from it.
I lost count of how many bouy’s I hit on the way down the course, our bow man was having a dreadful time with the wash and the wind and a boat that steers better in one direction than the other.
My SpeedCoach showed our time as 7:56.9, although our official time was 7:47.20
Recover our lungs again and then take the boat back to the trailer to leave it overnight.
I then head off to take part in the Desborough Challenge with some of our leisure rowers.
I will be back for more of the same tomorrow.