Boston Marathon 2010

Lincoln Stamp End Lock - Boston Rowing Club

River Witham

31 miles (50km). 4 hours, 42 minutes

At 5:30am, I departed for Lincoln rowing club in the company of 9 other crazy rowers. For the second time, I was to row the Boston Rowing Marathon in an VIII. Two other rowers from our club were to row the same distance in a pair.

We arrived at the rowing club, and unloaded the boat while one of the other rowers took the trailer to the other end of the course at Boston, before getting a lift back to Lincoln. This is a logistical nightmare for organisers, as the start and finish of the race are so far apart! As one of the organisers, I had to draw a diagram in the end so that I could get my head round where all the cars and rowers should be at any one time!

The weather did not look good. It was tipping it down as we put the boat together, and showed no signs of letting up. But as we pushed off at 10:56, the rain began to let up. By the time we reached Bardney's Lock, 13.5km further on, it had let up completely! The lock is the most stressful part of the race, with crews competing to get out and back in again as fast as possible. Once back on the river we settled into a good pace, averaging about a 2:30-2:40 split, so we were getting through roughly a kilometer every 5 minutes or so. The km markers are really the only way to know how far you've gone as there are few landmarks on the Witham! James is a great job of keeping us focused and rowing well. He also provided musical interludes by playing rousing tunes via an adaptor down the cox box speakers. We rowed to Smoke on the Water, Don't Stop Me Now and the Ride of the Valkyries! Every 10km or so we had a break to take on water and food, but otherwise we just kept rowing.

I enjoyed this year's row more than last year. The actual rowing was better, the cox box lasted the whole length of the race, James's coxing was really very motivational and kept us better focused, and best of all we finished the race 20 minutes faster than last year!

Picture taken by Mel's brother on Will's camera. Taken form Will's flikr album

The crew from left to right and top to bottom: Mel, William D, Freya, William C, Jo, Anne, Joss, me, James. Six of us (Mel, William C, Anne, Joss and me) did it last year as well! Tom and Andy rowed the pair.

I survived without any blisters, and most people manged to avoid getting too many. Today, I just ache all over - especially in my legs!

Also see Will C's blog, with even a graph of our splits: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/09/boston_marathon.php

Bumps, day 3: ladies day

A day for the ladies: W1 and W2 both bumped up, so W2 are now on for blades tomorrow. Great stuff.

The men fared less well: M3 rowed over (twice) being sandwich boat. Still, the exercise is good for them. M2 rowed over, after closing to within a length of Cantabs 7 but losing it on Grassy. M1 went down about at the White House, painful.

Blogs:

* William (M2)
* Amy (W2)
* Paul Holland for the Cmabridge News.

Also, there are loads of pix on various facebook pages (the pix here is ripped from Jo Crisall's album. It is actually a pic from yesterday, but I haven't seen any from today yet). We should make some kind of collection thingy.



[Extra pic added, one of Ivan's says Amy, W2 from Wednesday (day 2)]

Bumps, day 2

[M1 coming into the gut, chasing City 3 and being chased by Cantabs 2. Not a great pic (sorry) but you get an idea of the distances]

Results:

M1 - down 1
M2 - up 1
M3 - up 1, then row-over as sandwich boat of division 3

W1 - up 1
W2 - up 2

Bumps blogging so far:

* William (M2)
* Amy (W2)

Pix from...

Jo C: Video of W1's bump

Me: mostly M2 posing, and Men's first division.

Chris Woods: M2 and M3, conveniently uploaded to the clubs website; I can never work out how to do that :-)

JET:

* M1
* M3
* W2
* W2 bows

Bumps, day 1

Results

M1 - Row Over
M2 - Row Over
M3 - Down One

W1 - Row Over
W2 - Up One

Video of W2 Bumping City 8

Bumps blogging:

* Amy (W2):
* William (M2)

Known pix:

M1:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204845

M2:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204792
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204792

(and, for reference, the 25-26 bump:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204789 Note no pix of
30/31 cos they bumped out. 27 look grim:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204790).

M3:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204732
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204733
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204734 :-(
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204735

W1:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204819
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204820

W2:
http://www.jetphotographic.com/showphoto.php?id=204727

M2 bumps preparation

Bumps preparation from an M2 viewpoint: I'm sure M1 and the Ladies can speak for themselves. So: a couple of weeks ago we too part in the Xpress head (see previous report) and we were, to be honest, a bit rubbish. Full results are here but, in brief, while M1 did well (9:19, 12 seconds down on City) we took 11:20 and got overtaken by a Cantabs crew (Gunning) who we had reason to suspect would be near us in the bumps. This was disappointing. Actually it was worse than that but this is a public forum.

Yesterday was the CRA Timed Race, and in true CRA style the results aren't up as I write this, so I refer you to my bootleg copy. Now (admittedly on a shorter course) we're less than a minute down on M1, and more importantly *we* overtook someone (a poor 99's third crew: alas it won't be 99's 3 in the bumps :-). Perhaps more importantly we beat the Cantabs crew (pretty sure it was the same one, it had AM stroking it again!) by 24 seconds of real time. With their Vets time adjustment they beat us by a few seconds of reported time but we don't care because, aha, there is no such adjustment in the bumps.

According to the CRA charts, and the assumption that they are Cantabs 8, they are the crew ahead of us on day 1, which would be promising, but I've known the charts to shift a little in the run-up. So who knows.

Anyway, lets play pretend: suppose all remains equal, and we're 24 seconds faster over 2,200 m. Boats are 90 feet apart [1] so call it 40 m on the safe side. A boat goes at 5 m/s let us say, so that is 8 seconds, so we need 2,200/(24/8) ~ 700 m to catch them. Hopefully I've got the maths right there, and I think I've erred on the safe side. That is perfectly doable, but given the chaos of the bumps almost anything could happen ahead of them in 700 m, so we have our work cut out.

Things we can do to get faster: bed down, obviously. That was our first row in the Corpus boat, and we weren't expecting a bow-rigged one, or one rigged so low. The blades were nice though. We didn't quite have our full crew. And we still have a bit more training to do (none of this affects any of the other crews, of course :-).

X-press Head Race

Four Chesterton boats took part in the 2010 X-press Head race. The results were as follows:

M1, IM3 VIII, 9:19, 2nd overall
M2-3, novice VIII, 11:20
Women's novice VIII+ 11:43
Women's novice IV+ 12:34

Helped along by a tailwind the newly formed Chesterton M1 beat the club record for the head course by 9 seconds, not bad for a scratch crew. Lets see what we can do with a bit of practice.

Wallingford

Chesterton sent two IV's (well, all right, one-and-a-half, since there was some crew overlap) to Wallingford regatta on Eton's rowing lake. Despite poor weather and some excitement at the start we had a good time and achieved passable times. Read the full truth at Stoat.