Final Day of Racing!

Sunday morning, after our practice, we ate and headed back to the course for some racing. After meeting with our coach briefly, we headed out about 30 minutes prior to our race to warm up.

Nothing dramatic happened whatsoever. We locked on to the starting dock, all the crews were ready to go, and the race started on time. Our goal for the first half of the race was to find our rhythm and to establish ourselves with the leading crews.

Lane 7, to our left dropped off quickly in the first 500 meters ( although managed to hang on decently through the rest of the 2000m). Our biggest competitors were to our right, in lanes 2 and 4. While we kept our eye on them, most of our focus was internal--if we rowed well and applied our power together, we knew we had what it took to stick with the field.

By the halfway point, we were up by over a length on the field. We took 20 strokes to defiantly open the margin, and successfully put ourselves in a dominant position. While we had used a lot of our energy in the first 1000m, we knew we could at least hang on. We kept on eye on our margins, and focused on keeping ourselves calm and together.

The margin opened slightly more in the last 500m, but our lack of sprint told how tired we were at that point. We won the race by almost 7.5 seconds, also helping clinch the team efficiency trophy in the process (calculated on percentage of races won).

Not quite an Olympic medal, but I'll take it!

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing me at piquantprose [at] gmail [dot] com.

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