Saturday: The Frog Event

Every year, my rowing club has a closing of the season celebration, called “The Frog”. It’s a fun day, followed by a fun evening. There are two mandatory parts of The Frog. In the afternoon, we have an awards ceremony for our club’s best crews. Then, late in the evening, there is another award ceremony, called “The Anchor of the Year”. The Anchor is awarded to a person or a crew who contributed most to slowing down our boats (which should be taken in a very broad way). Usually, the Anchor is given to a good rower who decided to end his racing career, or to someone who caught a crab in a crucial race. All in good spirits, of course. The Anchor is a big trophy in the form of an anchor, and a 1.5 L bowl of beer, to be emptied in front of the crowd during the celebration.

As I entered the changing room in the morning, the Boys (11-14 years) were already nervously debating who would receive the “Boys crew of the year” award, and they were even preparing their speeches. It was fun to listen to. Actually, one of the joys of being a master rower in a rowing club is listening to the kids discussions in the changing room.

We’re a small club but we take rowing pretty seriously. Here’s a video from our weights room, where we regularly set up ergs in this “double” or even “triple” configuration:

A club’s spirit is hard to describe. Perhaps browsing through our photo pages will give you an impression.

Anyway. before the activities would start, I wanted to get a steady state row in. Carrying my single to the dock, I realized that this could very well be the last OTW row of this year. The water level is getting lower every day, and our dock is almost resting on it’s lowest possible level, which means that if the water recedes even further, we either have to pull our a temporary small dock or we won’t row.

Also the weather has changed a lot. A few weeks ago we had this ideal autumn weather. Here’s a picture that was taken from the other rowing club, on the opposite side of the lake, that pretty much captures where we were rowing:

But the temperatures have dropped and on most days it is either windy, or rainy, or both.

Today it was dry but very windy, so I opted for the river. The workout I did was a 4x12min with 1 minute to turn, which exactly fits in the part of the river that is rowable. (Past the castle, the water depth is less than 15cm and I am afraid of fin damage.)

A pretty good Steady State session, I would say.

Then it was time for “The Frog”. The first part was a Futnet (Noheybal) tournament, to which I didn’t participate. I am a complete and utter failure in all ball sports, and I would actually be risking injuring either myself, or my team mate, if I would have participated. Here is our Futnet field, part of the club grounds:

If you don’t know the sport, here is a (longer) video that shows pretty much how it is played:

At 4pm, the tournament was interrrupted for the crew of the year awards ceremony. Yours truly got the “Best Masters Crew” trophy. The “Best Elite” was awarded to Milan Viktora. Here’s a video from the spring head race where you can see the guy has a really nice rowing stroke.

As the evening progressed, the author of this blog had a few more beers (but he wasn’t awarded the Anchor trophy, luckily). It was a very nice evening, but he is not going to write up any details.