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11/22/2001 Archived Entry: "Rowing"

Had a rowing race today. The afternoon started off well, then got progressively worse. After hopping into the boat and rowing down towards the starting point, we were informed that we were too late to take part in our race and so were disqualified. That's the end of the story.

Nah, not really. Once that happened, we simply took the place of the 4th boat in Trinity, who didn't have a full crew anyway, and waited there. And then waited a bit more, and then even more for good measure, moored against the bank in a tilted boat feeling pretty dejected and quite cold for the best part of an hour. Eventually we made it down to the starting point, where we waited some more, and then perhaps an hour or more after we first got out, we were up for our race - only 800m long, about 3 minutes. A sprint, really.

We started off pretty well and just before halfway we were a whole boatlength ahead. Right at that point, the fates decided that we were doing far too well and simultaneously three things went wrong. One, the person behind me fell off his seat and his oar swung over his head, taking him out of action for maybe eight strokes (20 seconds or so). Two, someone's seat fell off the rails (I couldn't help laughing when I heard that). Three, someone's feet came out of the too-big shoes on the boat footplate. So for roughly 20 seconds, only five people out of the eight were rowing. After that, we perhaps got up to six people, with the other two attempting to row despite not actually being able to use their legs.

As it was, even without a full crew we were only behind the other boat by two seconds, or half a boat length. We didn't win, but these things happen and we were absurdly unlucky with the whole defective boat situation.

Part of the problem, I think, was that we didn't even have our normal boat, which some of the women rowers had managed to crash earlier that day; had we had our normal boat, the seats would have stayed on and the feet would have been kept in their shoes. Moreover, two of our better rowers were out of action and had to be subbed.

Anyway, what the hell, we'll do much better in the longer race on Thursday.