First Rowing Practice

It's 10:30 am and I've already been up for 4.5 hours. It's amazing how much time there is in a day when you don't sleep in till 11. The reason I've been up so long is that today was the first on water practice we've had for rowing. It was interesting, to say the least. We had planned to assemble at Keble at 6:40 and then ride down to the boathouse together. However, at 6:50 there were only 5 of us plus a cox'n and a coach. While the cox went to rouse additional rowers, the rest of us made the relativly brief ride down St.Giles and Cornmarket streets to the Christ Church Meadow, where most of the college boathouses are. It's not quite the Schuykill's boathouse row, but with 30 some colleges sharing the river the boathouses were numerous, to say the least. Unlike most colleges, Keble actually has their own boat bay, which was quite nice. The boats inside weren't new, but at least they weren't wooden. Apparently the really nice boats are up the river a ways at Keble's "training base" at Godstow. I'm not sure, but I think the 1st eight races a new looking M2.

The stretch of river we rowed on is somewhat confusingly named the Isis, even though outside the city the river is the Thames. It's about as wide as the hooch at SA's boathouse, and I would guess it's about 1.5k of rowable water from the locks at the south side to the bridge at the north. With 30ish colleges trying to share the same small stretch of water, it was very crowded, even this morning, and the general lack of boat handling skills on the part of the novice crews made for quite a few bumps and locked oars. Because of my height, or lack thereof, Julien (the coach for the day and captain of the team) put me in 2 seat. For some reason, I had it in my head that everybody was going to intuitively pick up the stroke more or less instantly and we'd be cruising the river all eight on the feather by the end of practice, blades barely skimming the water and taking the occasional power ten. This was, of course, not the case. We spent most of practice rowing by fours, finally making it up to full slide by the end of the morning. I'm not discouraged, since we made a lot of improvement over the course of practice. I got corrected for leaning away from my rigger at the finish. In my defense, the boat was rigged extremely low and the stern four weren't balancing the boat quite level. Plus there are some comparatively good rowers that have the same bad habit while racing (looking at you, 3 seat). Other than that it was a pretty successful outing.

Over the next few week I hope to move into the stern pair, but I won't be that bummed if that doesn't happen. We're only going to race once before I leave, at the Christ Church regatta close to the end of term. The format is different then anything I've experienced; its head to head racing in a double elimination bracket over the course of a week. With luck we'll get a good draw and advance through the rounds. We should have the personnel, seeing as some of the guys are pretty big. I just want to be in the top 8, and that should be doable. Practice today was a good start, and if nothing else it was nice to see the sun come up over the Thames/Isis and get back on the water. Now I've got 5 hours to wait until my tutorial. Amazing how much time there is when you get up early...