It is a gorgeous sunny day here - the theme for this week where high's have been in the mid-70's this week. 

In honour of U.S. Mother's Day, I raced in the Cambridge Head to Head this morning.  The race goes both downstream and upstream, which could be disasterous as the Cam is a very narrow river.  It's a head race, which means that boats start one at a time in a certain order.  You get a running start, so boats are going full speed once you cross the starting line.  There are a few big corners on the course, but this didn't pose much of a problem for on-Cam rowers.  First is the downstream leg and once you get to the end of the course, boats paddle down a bit and spin to face in the upstream direction.  This part, I have to say, was very well-orchestrated because the race marshalls had the eights do a 500m loop where they rowed a bit further downstream, turned, and were able to move upstream to wait for the rest of the boats to finish racing.  Once the eights were off, it was just us small boats, and we were able to spin in place (small boats are 20-30 feet long and have an easier time doing this than the big boats which are close to 70 feet long) and headed upstream in racing order.  It's a neat race, because you get to see what the competition is like, so that on the upstream leg, you can use different strategies to challege the opposition.  I raced unopposed, as there was no one else in my division.  The rower in front of me was a massive 15 year old junior rower who has recently been selected for some international squad.  So, no competition there.  It was just me and the river.

I wasn't out there to win.  I was there to have a solid row and to get some more racing experience under my belt.  I think I did all right, seeing as I'd not trained very much because my dissertation writing took priority.  The race course was supposed to be a 2500m x2, but it seems that they decided to shorten the course to 2000 metres for no good reason.  I would have prefered the original course, because I tend to be better on the longer distances, but what can you do?  Adapt, improvise, move on.