Heat recap

So that definitely didn’t go according to plan. For those who haven’t seen the results, we ended up 5th of 5 in the heats. The top two boats advance straight to the A/B semi final, and as we weren’t in there, we’re now headed to the reps on Wednesday. Today started out pretty well, everyone was under their weight, and as I was warming up I thought everything was proceeding pretty smoothly. Our water warm up was also pretty solid. Unfortunately, there was a pretty stiff head/cross head, coming off the starboard bow, but everyone has to deal with that. However, on the third stroke of the start I caught a half crab, getting my oar caught under the water, and I really think that impacted the rest of our race negatively. Even with that poor start, we were right in the middle of the field going through 250 meters, and actually held with the pack for much longer than we did in Lucerne. There was some confusion over where to call our moves, but in the end we just let crews slip away that we should have stuck with. During our post-race talk, we felt like we just hadn’t quite hit our rhythm, except for a little patch with around 750m to go, but despite that we were hanging with the top crews through 1500 meters. Even with only 500m to go, we were just 2 seconds out of a qualifying position.

Despite all of the improvements that we can make over our effort today, it’s still very disappointing. I was really hoping to be in a position to qualify directly out of the heats into the semis, but due in part to my sloppy rowing, we weren’t able to do that. This makes Wednesday a real do-or-die situation. We have to be top two in our rep. If not, we’ll be in the C/D semifinals, and that’s a position we’d like to avoid if at all possible. It’s going to be a real dogfight; everyone is going to be going full bore for a spot in the A/B semis. We’ve got a lot to work on, and not a lot of time. On the plus side, this was our first 2k together, and it wasn’t a complete failure. One of the bigger changes that we’re going to make is that I’ll now be calling the moves, and Taylor will focus more on the technical aspects of our rowing. This will just take a little of the load off of him, and clear up some of the confusion that we previously had over making the moves. It’s also a role that I felt pretty comfortable with during seat racing, and I think the other guys in my boat know that I have a pretty good sense of when to strike.

One thing I definitely have to keep reminding myself is that this is the highest level of rowing in the world. It’s not collegiate rowing, it’s not U23 or Junior Worlds, it’s just the fastest guys in the world. To even be in the mix at 1000m is something, and if we can implement the changes that we’ve been talking about, hopefully we’ll be able to really compete over the full distance. I’m trying to stay upbeat about the way today went, and we really do have another chance to get it right, which is nice. With the way our Light 8+ is racing, we know that the guys below us, the guys who were pushing us so hard through seat racing, have been turned into one of the fastest Light 8s in the world, so we have the depth. Now we just need to show that there is more than depth in the US, but also legitimate top-end speed.