Racing updates

So, Sunday 14th November was the annual Fuller's Head of the River Fours race, held between Chiswick bridge and Putney in London.  This was my first experience racing at Fours Head and I raced over the 7.5km course with a Reading University crew in a quad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_scull).  We had a good race but the results didn't reflect as good a result as we were hoping.  We were the fourth fastest women's crew, out of 500+ total crews, including mens boats, and different classes of boats, including coxless and coxed fours.   It is notoriously difficult to steer the Thames and stay in the fastest section of the stream and during the race we did get warned by a marshall for being out of the stream, so this will have had some effect on our time.

On a more positive note, I raced at Caversham lake today at the GB Rowing Trials Sculling Assessment.  It is held like a regatta, with a 1900m time trial, semi finals and then finals over the course of one day.  This is all done in singles, and is invitation only depending on results from October Trials.

I came third in the time trial, (four seconds off Emily Taylor in first place, 0.35 seconds off Vicky Meyer-Laker in second and 7 seconds ahead of Lindsay Marshall in fourth) but I didn't race it particularly well, so tried to learn lessons from that to take into the semi-final. Always helpful! 

There were only 18 women racing and six lanes, so they would usually hold two A/B semi-finals, two C/D semi finals etc and that would have meant that there would be two A/B semis and a straight C final.  However, GB Rowing wanted to give everyone three races so they ran three semi finals where the top two went into the A final, middle two into the B final and bottom two into the C final.

The top three women were split over the three semi-finals and I won my semi easily.  The final was looking to turn out to be a three horse race, but after the time trial and semi final Emily Taylor, winner of October Trials and the time trial this morning, withdrew from racing.  I was pretty frustrated as I was really looking forward to some side by side 2km lake racing against her.  Still, I had narrowly been beaten by Vicky Meyer-Laker in the time trial and it was time to fight back.  I flew out of the blocks and found a really strong rhythm which I had lacked in the time trial.  By 500m gone I had a solid lead on Vicky and by 750m gone I had clear water.  My lead was maintained throughout the final 1250m of the race, increasing to about two boat lengths at one stage and dipping back to about a length and a half at the finish. 

Thrilled to win, and was very pleased with the way I raced it but wish we could have had the full competitive line-up of athletes.  Half a day off tomorrow, only 90mins to do so I will go for a run for 45 mins and then on the bike for 45mins.  Looking ahead, my next event is our 2k ergo's on sat the 27th of Nov. The FEAR has already set in!