Only two of the mens masters group from my club were interested in competing at this event, so double scull it is.<\/p>\n
We managed 3 practice sessions together on Thursday evenings outside of our weekend masters outings in bigger boats.<\/p>\n
My doubles partner – Jonathan, is relatively new to rowing, having only started about a year or two ago at Burway Rowing Club (next club down the river from Staines), but joined Staines along with a few others when they left Burway for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n
The practice sessions mainly worked on balance and sorting out fixable technique issues, such as evening out oar pressures so I can stand a chance at steering, levelling out the boat and sorting oar depths, but most of all reminding him to \u2018relax\u2019!<\/p>\n
At the end of our final practice session, I was finally happy with us winding the rate up to see if we could keep the boat level at pace.<\/p>\n
Saturday morning, I go out with the Masters men\u2019s crew in an 8, then await Jonathan to load the trailer, only to find a text from him to say that he has been struck down with a fever, is awaiting a Covid test but he will not be down to help load the boat.<\/p>\n
I load the boat on my own (not that heavy with the riggers removed) and speak to another colleague as a potential substitute, just in case.<\/p>\n
That evening Jonathan has tested negative for Covid and is feeling much better, all good for racing.<\/p>\n
Come race day and as usual I was awake from some silly hour (04:00), Jonathan picked me up at 06:30 for our journey up to Bedford.<\/p>\n
We arrived at 07:30, way too early for our 10:45 start, the trailer had not even arrived yet, but this gave us plenty of time to walk the 2,000m course, study all of the bridges and bends and see where the distance markers were posted.<\/p>\n
08:45 and the trailer turns up with one of the masters ladies quad crews, the other masters ladies quad crew arrives a few minutes later.<\/p>\n Unload the trailer and re-rig the boats ready for racing.<\/p>\n 10:15 and we are heading down to the water to row up to the start.<\/p>\n We have a GoPro 360 Max on either end of the boat, full race footage below:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/12\/2023\/10\/Screenshot-2023-10-08-at-18.25.29.png\")
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