rowing
stoat | December 13, 2009The mighty Chesterton Men (Ralph, James H, Chris W, Dave B, Me (special guest appearance on strokeside), Michael S, Andi R, Mike PJ; cox James T) powered to victory in Saturday, though admittedly not in the prestigious "best fancy dress" category but in the less hotly contested "novice M8+". I still don't really understand the category system (or care much) but I think it means we don't have any / many ARA points; and since this wasn't an ARA competition I think we still don't. Still I do (I hope) get a Pot. And we did beat the COWS.
Results (silly xls format, sorry).
stoat | November 22, 2009Spot the problem:
So, my Top Tip is, Don't drop your camera onto a hard stone courtyard. Apparently http://www.fixationuk.com/ may be able to help (thanks Andrew). Another Top Tip might be learn from your mistakes but that is just too hard.
In unrelated news, I finally got one of the coveted orange tee-shirts by running in the Cambrdige Fun Run round the Science Park. 7:04 which is quite passable, though it brought back the Old War Wound (those who kindly commented in rowing and running that I was probably fit enough to break myself were correct :-). In this pic, however (thanks William),…
stoat | October 25, 2009In training for Boston, I did a 1 hour erg cos the ladies were doing them, and sort of enjoyed it. And then we did Boston which was 50 km, but we weren''t really racing. And so I wondered how long an actual marathon (42.195 km) would take. And the answer is 3:20:58.4 (almost. I confess that I set the erg to 42125 because I forgot the true distance; I've re-scaled my time linearly which I think is fair). My split was down to a contemptible 2:25 towards the end before I "sprinted" for the finish at 2:05. I beat some of the folk at the concept2 sponsored marathon but I like to think that that is…
stoat | September 21, 2009 Subtitle: Snow white and the seven dwarves, though it is some time since I've been snowy white (even if I am wearing my SEH MCR 1988 top and my "these are older than you are young lady" rowing shorts) and some of the ladies are bigger than me. Left to right: Anne, Ev, Mels father (support car driver), Amy, Louise, Alan (trailer driver), Jo, Joss, Mel, Elissa (volunteer cox from Magdalene), Me. As you'll notice, they are female and I'm not. This is because they had a spare space and the men, as ever, hadn't quite got round to organising themselves. I was keen to do it, and also thought I…
edyong | September 15, 2009
You may have seen rowing before, but I guarantee you that you know little about the sport unless you went to university at Cambridge or Oxford. There you will find a subspecies of human known as the "boatie" who seem perfectly happy to gather en masse at godforsaken times of the morning to paddle about on a river. In the rain. In winter. With a hangover. Later, in the pub, they will spend innumerable hours discussing their training schedules, talking about "catching crabs" without a hint of irony and comparing blisters.
For those of us who wondered what could possess grown men and women to…
stoat | July 25, 2009On friday, the last night of the bumps loomed like the vast wall of black cloud I could see through the glass wall of our atrium. Fortunately the rainstorms were mostly over by 5 and even the Ladies second division got a clear row. Even more forunately the eventual results weren't too black. This time I even remembered to charge the cox-box so didn't end up hoarse (I'm sure I remember the good old days when only M1 had a cox-box and even then most of the time it didn't work).
Last night of the bumps traditionally sees crews, especially from the lower divisions, dolled up in war paint. Ladies…
stoat | July 22, 2009Ah well, it isn't looking like a good year. I've now gone down 4 places in 2 boats in two days... and none of the rows were very long. Ladies two, who I'm coxing, got taken by two fast crews fairly quickly; not a lot to be done about that, my coxing was OK in terms of steering and in terms of patter; they didn't row badly for their division, we were just too slow. M1 yesterday got eaten by City 2 rather convincingly; but at least we rowed well and were caught by a good crew. Today alas we didn't row well - crab off the start (not me!) and failed to recover - and got caught by a not…
stoat | July 18, 2009 Yesterday was appalling weather-wise: lightning and thunderstorms all day long and torrential rain. At work, the man in the yellow jacket showed up and stuck his head into the ceiling void - this is a sign of really heavy rain. He doesn't seem to do anything - its more like the seaweed you hang up curling; or the little figures in the barometer who go in and out; as an indication of the weather. This wouldn't matter much except bumps is next week and we need to get our outings in, and our roving reporter on the river bank (Emma in nb Kestrel) told us that the river was over its bank and…
stoat | July 15, 2009 For those accustomed to a daily diet of Stoat, my apologies. It is nearly bumps (next week) and M1 is finally getting its 5 outings a week in, so I've been fairly busy. Not only do I have to row, but I'm also faced with the onerous task of being sociable in the Old Spring afterwards. Its a hard life. I've been forced to row stroke side, and have finally become comfortable there, just in time to swap myself onto bowside when our injured hero returned. We are finally starting to live up to our menacing black boat.
By way of an interesting contrast, I'm also coxing W2. I think I'm probably not…
stoat | June 26, 2009A good outing tonight with the closest we've come to M1 so far - M1.25 perhaps. John-the-coach did an excellent job on us for the first leg then p*ss*d off to the pub when it started raining, which was probably fair enough because it was a real English summer thunderstorm and we all got soaked. Fortunately those of us who grew up in the Andy Nicol school of rowing (you f*ck*ng well square up early and your blade stays 2" above the saxboard whether the boat is down on your side or not) know enough to bring a change of clothes. And our first outing in the borrowed-for-the-bumps boat from First-…
stoat | June 15, 2009
Catz women catching FaT (I think) on saturday. Which was all jolly good fun but meant that I didn't get to row myself all week after monday. And over the weekend I felt somewhat ill. Coupled with pouring rain at 4 this afternoon I was not at all looking forward to being 6 in our "M1" crew for the X-press head today. However, despite light rain as we were boating, we managed to row really quite well given the scratch nature of our crew (well done Phil, especially; and James's first serious race as stroke) and rowing in a stiff boat was a delight, as was the raw arrogance of James T's coxing.…
stoat | June 13, 2009Tis the season to watch the young folks. Ah, those were the days.
Just after the 1 minute gun. LMBC, friday, destined to be caught by Kings.
Jesus II hard on the heels of Anglia; what you can't see from this is that they stuffed up their line on the corner. But they got them in the end.
Catz women happy.
stoat | June 8, 2009But it was worth it. Thanks to John for coaching and Emma for organising. Come in Andy Hurst, all is forgiven.
stoat | May 18, 2009At least not Kings I. But we did have a really quite decent outing tonight (rather more fun than the ladies on sunday; we rowed in the Champs head on sunday, which was an experience but not really fun. James H's take on it is here). We weren't exactly solidly balanced, but the wobble was small, not dramatic, controllable, and didn't get in the way of a decent stroke. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I was rowing strokeside, which is not my native side. We met up with CS at the head of the reach with his Kings crew and challenged them to a side-by-side race down to the railway bridge.…
stoat | May 2, 2009Chesterton RC ran the Head of the Cam race today (we really must improve our website some time). I got to help marshalling a couple of divisions, on First Post Corner and Grassy Corner, which was a good post as nothing tricky happens at those points. So I took an absurd number of photos (only div 1 up when I wrote this) in the sunshine, which was very pleasant.
The racing is head racing - i.e. just rowing the course, starting 30 seconds apart, no bumping or anything exciting like that. The first few boats in each division tended to be M1's for the Mays at around 9 minutes, trailing off into…
stoat | April 29, 2009I was a teenage rower, and now am a middle aged rower, so most of my exercise comes on the river, or on an erg (disregarding the 11 miles a day cycle to work, which is definitely good for me too, but that counts as base load). So today I did 10 km, which took me a fraction less than 40 mins, and the end of it I was sufficiently tired to do nothing but pant for 5 mins, and then my arms shook while eating lunch. But a few hours later I am fully recovered, I think.
The contrast I'm trying to draw is with running, which I'm getting into a little bit. When I run 5 km, I end up not truely tired,…
stoat | March 22, 2009It is spring, the daffodils are out, the hour has nearly changed, and longen folk to go down to the river again. In fact I've been rowing all winter (Emma blogged our last race in rather different weather), but this Sunday was the Cantabs "taster" session for junior scullers; and my son and a couple of his friends gave it a go.
I'm pleased to say that they were all very enthusiastic and by and large got the hang of it. Next week they get to untie the bit of string and get the freedom of the Cam. These are virus sculls.
I also found out where Chesterton's scull is - answer, in the four shed…
stoat | March 1, 2009And I'm not talking about me being appointed captain of Men's boats at Chesterton. No, the jobbery I'm talking about is the new house being constructed just by the Fort St George bridge. it's been a while a-coming, and when first laid out I was impressed by how small the ground plan was - how self-effacing, and in fact rather wasteful, I thought to my self. But now it becomes clear that this is only because it is to be a 4-storey steel-concrete-and-glass monster, badly out of place. It will be a lovely house to live in, but far too prominent. A WP:RS (i.e. a woman cycling by) told me it was…
stoat | January 17, 2009
First outing this year, on a day that fitted the description of english weather "all four seasons in a day". Happily that included summer, since I was down to shorts and a tee-shirt in the sunshine portion. We couldn't scrounge up eight people so went out in the IV of doom, which isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, just a bit hard to sit. And... it was fun. And we sat it, sometimes. And we even went back to do an extra reach because it was fun. Even when I got a blister in my palm from being on the wrong side.
stoat | August 13, 2008Not the Georgians and the Russians, though indications are they they too have pulled back from utter stupidity. No, this is far more important: rowing, and in particular the bumps. Background: those paying close attention on day 4 will have noticed the problem with Robs 1. It seems that the 10 minute delay on the start was a bit more than I'd realised: it consisted of the umpires telling Robs they had an illegal crew and couldn't row, and Robs refusing to listen (they even had the man they'd bumped out standing on the bank, so they didn't even have the excuse of no sub available). And the…