Boston: a personal view

My "public" post on the 2013 Boston rowing marathon is End of an Era on the club blog. These are some personal thoughts. I won't make this post private, trusting to obscurity to shield me from offending anyone. Nor will I repeat what is there; this is the other bits.

What's to say? Mostly, how hard it was to organise the thing. We started off with high hopes of getting M1 together for one last hurrah, and JH wouldn't have agreed to come down were it not for that, but CW and AS were out from the start for health, WW was regrettably on holiday, so we were down 3. DR had to pull out due to "taking his daughter to uni" - that one, hmm well, Dave is a good bloke so I'm rather reluctant to criticise. But I had to drop my college 30/20/10 year reunion, which I did because I'd committed to the race. In fact scratching around for new people wasn't too hard, just a bit stressful. TW came on board OK, indeed enthusiastically, but then had to drop out. In the end we ended up with KH and UB and all was well, but... the sheer volume of email and faff!

Here are my hands, after the race (remember I wore the very thin orange running/sculling gloves during the race, to stop the plasters rubbing off). Mostly to show me next year where I put fabric strip on beforehand, and where I got plasters. You can;t see the worst blister, which was on the inside of my left thumb. The main point of all this was that the blisters didn't stop me pulling, though they came close to doing so. As did my left hand/forearm getting close to seizing up. But ultimately the main constraint was mostly strength/endurance, as you'd hope.

After that, I could also add how good it was to have done it, now its done. We rowed well, and it was a great end to the season. It would have been nice to have had better opposition! (It would have been nice to have had a tailwind :-). Sad to say goodbye to James Howard though. Not, I trust, for the last time; but he's gone now.

What about the transport stuff? That also added to the stress. Firstly, all that nonsense with IW and the Downing trailer and the Champs ladies and our ladies and Argh! What was somewhat more irritating was that I couldn't simply pay IW £150 of my own money for the trailering; everyone else would have felt obliged to contribute, but wouldn't have wanted to, I think. To-ing and fro-ing the trailer was OK, from my viewpoint. The difficulty, perhaps, was getting the crew into place and back. I do think that Boston RC could do better in trying to facilitate a "transport exchange" of some sort.

Times: this (not the club post) is a good place to say that my 5:10 last year in Joy, when deflated by 0.94 (a correction factor coming from the average ratio of the winning times of the masX scullers, X=C..G, between 2012 and 2013) comes to 5:30, which beats the ladies 5:33 in their 4+.