Well, a lot has happened since my last post. I didn’t expect to let this much time pass between posts, but to be honest I haven’t felt like writing. Our heat didn’t go as planned and it was a bit of a wake-up call. After that we were all very focused on racing and making any necessary changes. I forgot about writing. I didn’t even keep up with my journal.

I’ll start with the racing. I’m not sure if we screwed up the heat, or if it was the fact that it was our first race, but we were simply caught off guard. It was probably a bit of both. We’ve been training in a vacuum, only able to race boats like the eight, or the quad, or the coxed four, which gives us relative times and results that are open to variable interpretation. We were never really able to say with much certainty what our exact speed is compared to our competition. So in the heat we went out expecting to have to give a certain performance and it would be enough. There were several points during the race where we could have made some changes, or at least regroup, and made an attack. The most frustrating was during the last 500 meters. We were in second place and within a length of the lead; Germany was about half a length down. We should’ve pressed on New Zealand, but instead we fell apart, Germany walked through us and we finished third. Now we were off to the reps and hands were on the panic buttons.

After the race, our coach Matt Imes came up to me in the cool-down area and asked if I wanted to stroke the boat. He felt that the line-up (Me, Giuseppe, Matt, and Beau), was more natural and would race better. I think more than anything the chemistry of the boat was different in the new line-up. Combined with our new attitudes from being slapped around in the heats, it seemed like a new boat. The next day practice was much sharper and we seemed to be rowing with more purpose. Our race in the heat was too passive. The rep was another chance to be more aggressive.

In the reps we expected our main competition to be Ireland. They ran with the Brits all the way down the course, pushing them a little at the end. We were in the lane next to them and our goal was to get out fast, push the first 1000m and establish control of the race. It was a headwind, which was a change in conditions from the past week, and I think that benefited us. Americans are typically headwind crews. We were able to do as planned. Our start was much more decisive and committed, and got a length on the field in the first 500m. We were able to get into a rhythm, something we needed to boost our confidence. We pushed away from the field along with Ireland, which put us into the Semifinals.

At first glance, we thought we got the better draw of the two semifinals. It was Great Britain, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Belarus, and the United States. We thought we could beat several of the other crews and be one of the three teams to advance to the finals. We knew the Irish ran with the Brits and so could we. The Czechs won their heat so we expected them to be fast, but they were still an unknown. The French have been fast starters all season, but tended to fade and I felt Italy were yet to show their true speed. The other semi had New Zealand, the Netherlands and Slovenia — all know entities with legitimate shots at winning, as well as Germany and Australia.

I’m not sure we ever took a second glance until it was too late. We liked our chances and formulated a race plan. Our plan was to attack at the start, get out with Great Britain and push the crews that have been starting fast but tending to fade, or at least we thought. Our warm-up was going well. I was feeling good and the boat was running out. There was sharpness to our rowing. Going to the starting line I knew we were going to have a good race, the question was, would it be good enough?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under bryanvolpenhein. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.