Developing a Routine

After a much needed sleep, the crew awoke refreshed and ready to take on Henley. The goal of today was ultimately to develop a routine that we could follow for our first week of training. A pleasant breakfast was followed by another ride down to the race course where we had our morning practice. The Eight rowed three laps on the course and mainly worked on building the stroke rating and learning more about the new river. The Thames is relatively small in Henley, and it is only three lanes wide. The racecourse takes up two lanes, and there is one lane for crew shells from the finish line to the starting line. In the practice lane, Johannes, our coxswain, must navigate with large motor boats passing by and crews stopping and starting in front of and behind us. Occasionally, a pesky single will try to navigate around us when we're stationary; regardless, we have tried to make the best of our cramped practice space.

Afterwards, the crew was given a budget per diem, which we must spread out over three lunches in the town of Henley, and sent off for 90 minutes to eat and explore. All of us decided to eat at a restaurant call Zizzi's that was advertising pizza. We spent most the time figuring out how to budget our money and deciding who was paying what, and ...oh yeah, we had some pizza too. A quick trip to the grocery store filled out the remainder of our time.

The crew then returned to the Manor at around 3pm to rest for two hours before we returned for our afternoon practice. Unfortunately, many of us decided to swim in the pool and battle each other with pool noodles, which understandably made us more tired. But it wasn't a total loss, it was a learning experience and we've decided that we won't swim until after both practices are completed from now on.

The afternoon practice was more challenging as the boat the rowed three laps over the race course again and rowed two 4 minute pieces at race ratings. The spare's pair also rowed for the third time on the Thames, and Chris says that they have been making progress and are ready to take on some other pairs in practice tomorrow. Once again, we headed for the Henley showers and found it slightly more manageable this time as the cold water no longer came as a shock to us.

The evening has been calm. We ate a nice dinner and made one more trip to the grocery store for snacks. We expect to sleep well tonight and heighten our focus tomorrow as race day gets closer and closer.