Lightweight Eats

As crazy as it seems, summer racing is over. When I left off, I was headed up to Princeton to race at World Championship Trials. If you didn't follow the results, we placed second, just 1.37 seconds behind the Riverside boat.

Our goal as a crew was to break 6:30, which we did, with an awesome time of 6:29.47. But, just like PanAm trials, we learned that wicked fast wasn't going to cut it anymore.

There were a lot of emotions, many of which I still haven't identified. I am super excited by our performance. I am disappointed to have not made the team—but less disappointed than I expected, which is confusing.



Whatever the emotions, we didn't have much time to process, as we headed back to the race course the following morning for the US Rowing Elite National Championships. All four of us tripled up, racing the light women's single, double and quad. (We were the only lightweight quad entered, so we raced in the open weight women's quad final and received our own medal.)


Overall, it was a great race. I placed 3rd in the single, then turned around and won the double less than two hours later. We came in second in the open quad race, but got a gold medal for being small! I came home happy but exhausted and in need of some recovery.

We had a taco feast:

Made some mojitos:

And ate veggies from our farm share:

And a week later, I got back in the car and went back to the swamp, a.k.a. Washington, DC.

Let me explain:
In April, US Rowing held the first National Selection Regatta, where I raced the open women's single. At the same time, the lightweight women's doubles raced. My doubles partner and I had only just tried our combination a week prior, and were not able to make weight for the race, so we didn't enter.

At that race, Devery Karz and Michelle Sechser won, and earned the right to race as USA1 at the World Cup 2 or 3—a series of summer races leading up to the World Championships. If they placed top 4, they would qualify automatically for the World Championships for the USA. Otherwise, the boat would go back to trials in early August.

Since Devery and Michelle elected to race at World Cup 3, in mid-July, we decided to practice the double in preparation for Trials.

Morgan and I raced and won the light 2x at Elite Nationals.

I headed down to DC on July 7th and got to work.

DC is hot and rainy, and exhausting. Practices were at 6am sharp—and parking was gone by 5:30am. The afternoon session started at 5pm most days, to avoid the hottest part of the day. But it was always hot.

We practiced and raced for a week, and by the 12th, Devery and Michelle had placed 3rd at World Cup 3 and I was starting to plan my drive home.

I'm disappointed that Morgan and I didn't get a chance to race our line-up. It would have been a great check point going into fall and winter training. However, I'm really excited that Devery and Michelle are going fast—we need them to place top 11 at this year's World Championships to qualify the US for the Olympics next year.

I'll write more about my upcoming plans in the next few weeks, but for now I am back in New Milford, sleeping, eating and recovering to prep for the next long training block.

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I'm never sure whether that hashtag is "what I ate this week on Wednesday" or "what I ate one day this week, published on Wednesday". I thought the former would be more honest: I couldn't choose the most conveniently healthy day of food from the week.