Henley: Live to See Another Day

Ok!  So we had our first race today in the Princess Grace.  We had a nice, late race time which gave everyone a chance to hydrate, eat and sleep as much as they wanted during the day.  We had beautiful course conditions for racing with a lovely tail wind and fairly calm waters (even given all the boat traffic on the river).
I think there were some nerves in the boat as we were lining up to go–because of racing, because of inexperience, because of the unfamiliarity of the regatta, because of the effects of travel on legs, and other things.  But we lined up confident and ready to go.

Then we crashed.

Before we made it to the booms, we had some steering errors (in both boats) which led to some blades clashing, and then our umpire called our race.  No one was injured, and the equipment was also fine–save for some Chinese paint which ended up on Stesha’s starboard oar.  Bless my crew for responding immediately to my calls to KEEP ROWING while blades were clashing, and for Natalie for bravely trying to steer us out of the collision while fighting through the fray.  Fortunately (??) my mother happened to be riding in the umpire’s launch for our race, and she has video from the whole thing.  She let me borrow her camera tonight in order to post it on my blog.  Thanks mom!  Look for that video coming tomorrow…

With having already had the worst thing happen (a collision) with the best possible outcome (a restart), we lined up again and rowed a composed, mature race.  We could have let the first start ruin our racing for the day, but instead we rowed back up to the line cracking jokes about making the Row2k report (which we didn’t).  I think we’ve learned what we need to work on for tomorrow, when we will see Australia “B” which is a combination of their W2X and LW2X crews.  They will be tough–and so will we.

Also, if there are any other blog readers out there who are at Henley and want to say hello, I would love that!  I have met a few people already who are readers… it’s so fun to meet you!  Say hi if you are here!

Long Live the Dream,

–MK