Well, off to race again in munich tomorrow. A good entry once again. It will be interesting to see if the work we have done is making a difference. Apparently we look better but you can't expect miracles in this business. It would be nice to combine a good row in the heat with a decent draw so that we don't have to do the rep. My caculations give us the danes again but it is the other crews that will be the important thing. Have the trip up to Cambridge to look forward to on the sunday and maybe some fun on monday too, not sure yet whether to have a bbq or just a few people round for dinner?
Hopefully afterwards we will have secured our qualifying spot for the team -interesting to see if they will just ignore that with the quad, and see if the crew is confrimed.
- posted by Nicholas @ 1:28 PM

 
Well a quick rowing update. i'll try, but no promises, to be a little clearer for the non-rowers amongst you! We raced at the weekend and came 10th. Not as good as we had hoped. However we seem to have got rid of being the slowest out of the whole field to the first 500m mark. Unfortunately we couldn't quite couple that with still having the fastest last 1500m. Generally we do feel that we are making progress in the right directions and we did easily beat some crews that were causing us problems last year. There were also a few funny results, perhaps partly due to a crosswind in the heats, which didn't favour us (And the Danish world champions ho only managed 3rd in the heat but won the final). but also in the other semi final (ours contained all 3 medallists) (but we still didn't win the B final so no excuses) The Poles who we beat very easily in the rep came through to take one of the final slots and the dutch, last year's silver meddalists did not.
I was told I had to have paragraphs, so here is one!
That result may be good enough to get us the BOA qualification, the coach and Team manager say that they think so but want to keep the pressure on. ANd for the moment there are no changes to the crews for munich regatta in 2 and a bit weeks from now.
So it is back to hard training, very stiff from starting to do weights again after a week off, and from crashing my bike while cross training on monday (no serious damage). And tiredness really kicking in today, which is fairly usual a few days after a racing weekend with 4 races in the space of about 30 hours and the first weigh-in of the year.

- posted by Nicholas @ 2:12 PM

 
Well it is the week of the first race in Poznan. This is where we see if what we have done in the winter has been worthwhile and what effect the change of crew will have. Quite a good entry, plenty of good crews but also opportunities. I think that we are all keen to give it a go and just enjoy it. Shame about the hungry days to go first!
- posted by Nicholas @ 12:33 PM