Easter Weekend Recap

The week of Easter has come and gone. 

Friday morning:  We had 1 quad, 1 double, 2 women's singles (including me), and 2 men's singles out on the water.  The workout was 3.5 main lake loops of steady state at 20-24spm. 

I have no idea how all the other boats did, but this was me in the single, coming up the slide, slow and steady: arms out, body over, balance, hold onto the set, balance, wobble, wobble, CRASH!  Right before the catch, I would lose the set of the boat and all the balance in the beginning of the recovery disappeared.  At higher rates, it is easier to set the boat because your blades are in the water more frequently, but at slower rates, the recovery becomes a larger portion of your stroke.  I added balance and stability to my long and never-ending mental list of things to work on. 

Saturday morning:  There has been a tradition on the women's team to do an Easter egg hunt on Easter weekend.  This year, the tradition lived on.  The way I see it, the main point of the Easter egg hunt is to trade your eggs in for chocolate!

We had 1 eight, 1 women's double (me), 1 mixed double, 1 women's single, and 1 men's single out on the water.  During the warm-up, we stopped at awkward moments, made sharp turns, backed our boats around, rowed up to the wall, and asked passerbys to reach into the lake--anything to snag these brightly colored plastic eggs (which were unfortunately empty because the chocolate was sitting back on land in the boathouse) before the other boats. 

The main workout was 3x1,000m pieces.  In the double, we only did two pieces and had to go in due to time.  If you are rower, do you ever have a "favorite" boat or a boat that you did best in (or maybe it is not a boat, maybe it is the erg?!)?  The double is one of my favorite boats, which also include the single and the pair.  The secret to the single is that there is only one person to blame--youself.  The secret to the double and the pair is that everything takes time.  It takes time to learn to row together; it takes time to match up the catches, drives, power, finishes, swings, handle heights. 

At the boathouse, Saturday morning and afternoon was dedicated to a work party--cleaning out the boat bay, doing maintanence on the boats, scraping crap off the launches and docks, and fixing one of the docks that partially sinks anytime you go up and over heads with a big boat. 

It was amazing to see so many Lake Merritt members come out and volunteer their Saturday to help the club.  I was greatly relieved to find that we had members with real carpentry skills who could fix up the dilapidated dock.  I studied engineering in school with an emphasis on the "studied."  Need to pass an engineering class?  No problem!  Need to machine, drill, hammer, nail something?  No idea!  I know what an allen wrench is only because that is usually the sole tool needed to put together Ikea furniture. 

Sunday morning:  Easter day!  I am not super religious so I spent Easter day doing work--5x2,000m.  There were 3 women's singles, including myself, out on the water this morning, and we each did our own workouts. 

I have actually done 5x2,000m race pieces in the single before, but the whole time, I was negotiating with myself, coming up with all the reasons why I should do only three pieces, why I should go in early, why I should paddle the pieces.  If I were a cartoon, you would have been able to see my two inner voices fighting each other, all the way until the end of the fifth piece. 

The pieces were not always smooth, especially with the wind blowing down the finger and into the main lake.  By the end of the workout, I was pretty sick of the wind, the lake, the turn at the dam, everything, but I got the pieces done.  And that was what I wanted to do on Easter day.