Lightweight Eats

We row on the Oakland Estuary, situated between the city of Oakland and the island of Alameda. I rowed here in high school and know the waterway incredibly well.

Since I rowed here, the number of teams on the estuary has increased dramatically, as well as the number of boats. Yesterday's Head of the Estuary was an opportunity for a lot of those local boats to get out and race, so there were a lot of high school boats out on the water.

CRC entered a few boats: lots of singles, two pairs and two eights. We book-ended the regatta with our entries.

Once again, we trained through this race. Our Saturday morning workout was a toughie--a 5.6 mile run followed by a long to-failure workout (51 minutes of total work). After my poor performance at Head of the American, I knew I needed to experiment some more and see if I could race hard even with a tired body.

I made sure to get plenty of rest (the time change helped!). I also showed up, raced and left. This was a home race, which simplified matters, but I need to approach away races similarly.

My warm-up was a bit scattered. I launched later than I had hoped to and so I cut my warm-up a bit short to get to the start line 5 minutes before my race time. (This is pretty standard, if a little bit close.) Then, it turns out, the race officials were running late, so I had an extra 4 or 5 minutes to kill. I was very grateful for my 20-minute bike ride (so my muscles were really warm) and the warm temperatures (so they didn't cool down too much during the wait).

I started 4th of five women's singles (all from CRC). I'm normally fairly close in time to my teammate who started behind me, so I was anticipating some great racing. Unfortunately, she ran into some debris in the first 1000m and never fully recovered.

The last 3200m of the course is a straight shot down the estuary, but because the shoreline weaves back and forth it's incredibly difficult to steer. I held a pretty perfect course, kept my stroke rate high and powered through the muscle fatigue. Overall, a great race.

I placed third, I think largely because I steered the course well. I learned that a rested brain can make up for a lot of a fatigued body. I also learned that I should always look up the course map before the race--I  wish I had known some of the distance markers a bit better. One more race under my belt!