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Jun 15 2015

Morava Championship – Rest of Sunday Summary

Lenka

Won the B final in the double and qualified for the Youth Nationals. There were 4 boats in the B final and the first 2 would qualify. Lenka stroked this with the “lead from start to finish” tactics, winning by a few lengths. There was a nice fight for second place, with Hodonin rowing second place for 1000m, only to be overtaken in the final 500m by Otrokovice.

Good for Laura and her to experience rowing in the lead. They enjoyed this race. Qualification secured.

Romana almost got them disqualified for following the race in the coach launch. She was at a long distance from the racing lanes and didn’t shout any instructions. Still, at one point she was in front of the referee launch, so that was a concern. Luckily the referee was a reasonable person.

On to the single B final. Lenka was not looking forward to this one, rowed at noon in a 35 degree heat, with the quad only 2 hours later. Romana agreed that she would row it at a 25spm. In the end of the day Lenka rowed to (non-qualifying) 4th position, going up to 27spm in the heat of the fight.

She had a disappointing race in the quad. Their team had expectations to win, but in the end they were over-classed by 4 girls from LS Brno who are rowing at international level, and also Olomouc overtook them. A spark was missing here. I guess 3 races is quite a lot in these hot conditions.

Dominik

His race being at 4 o’clock, our son Dominik decided to spend most of the day swimming in the lake. Not exactly ideal race preparation but I wasn’t going to prevent him. He had qualified himself for Youth Nationals, and it would be torture to keep a 11 year old indoors for the sake of a rowing race. In hot summer weather like this, when you’re that age, you should be making fun by the water.

His 500m race was good for the first 250m, then he suddenly reduced pace. He also stopped 2 strokes before the finish line and had to be told to cross it. Came in last position.

He commented that he had the oldest boat.

Sander

Read about my adventure in the double in another blog post.

I was really tired after that. Still had to walk around on the club helping various others getting on the water in time. Also, spent some time and energy discussing our line-up for the Masters Nationals and for Hazewinkel.

Being at 72.0 kg on my own scale I had to be careful eating and drinking.

Then, at 1pm, I hopped on the bicycle to ride to the LS Brno club house for the weigh in. My upper legs protested vehemently, so in the heat of the day it was a very hard 2km ride.

I weighed in at 71.6 kg on the official race scale.

I can be brief about this race. My plan was to hold 2:00 to 2:05 pace in the light headwind, but it turned out to be too ambitious. My legs just didn’t cooperate. I was rowing in the back with the referee boat and as I wasn’t out of breath I was able to speak to him but I just couldn’t push any harder for the pain in my legs.

Covered the course in 8:38 measured on CrewNerd. I can do that in a training, a couple of times.

Finished last.

skif

|Start|Stop_|Dist_|Time_|Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|max HR|DPS|Remarks
|00000|01556|01556|15:21|04:56.0| 18.5 | 133 | 158 |05.5|warming up
|01556|02053|00498|02:01|02:01.5| 30.3 | 172 | 179 |08.2|2km 1st 500
|02053|02553|00500|02:12|02:12.0| 27.7 | 178 | 179 |08.2|2km 2nd 500
|02553|03055|00501|02:15|02:14.6| 27.5 | 179 | 180 |08.1|2km 3rd 500
|03055|03536|00481|02:10|02:15.1| 26.8 | 180 | 181 |08.3|2km 4th 500
|03536|05979|02443|26:35|05:26.4| 18.0 | 121 | 180 |05.1|cooling down

My final race of the day was a fun race. As one of the old guys was afraid of a heart attack, I took his place in the “historical eight”. Here’s how they looked last week in Prague:

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We wear 1940s rowing clothes and row in a lapstrake built wooden eight, with wooden oars with long, thin blades.

Of course we rowed way behind the real eights, but it was fun anyway. The referee was taking pictures of us and the speaker made us row a special round in front of the crowd at the finish.

acht

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May 17 2015

Praise from World Cup Rower

Saturday

My sister and brother-in-law are in Vienna for a theater festival. Romana had to get up early because of the Junior Regatta. In fact, she was so nervous she was up at 5am. So I found myself on the erg at 6am. Did 5km steady state, then the CTC, then another 5km steady state.

The CTC is 2 minutes all out. I figured I could do 630m if in Personal Best form, which would be 1:34 pace. The plan was to row it as the first 2 minutes of a 1km row, though. I knew I wasn’t in PB form. So 616m it was (1:37 pace). It’s interesting how much further a 2 minute is than a 500m.

Had a great time in Vienna, visiting Schoenbrunn and the zoo. IMG_1541 IMG_1540 IMG_1537

Sunday

Spent most of the day at the rowing club. The International Junior Regatta was held in Brno this weekend, so I had to see Lenka perform (2nd in the B final in the girls 4x-, didn’t make it to A or B final in the double) and spend some time socializing with the rowing crowd.

After the races, we went out in an eight. Slightly different constellation than the winning eight of last weekend:

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But the core team is the same. We missed a cox, so we grabbed one of our lightweight pair to cox us. Interesting to be coxed by a guy who just the weekend before has rowed the World Cup in the pair, and will be representing the Czech Republic at the European Championships in Poznan.

We Masters Eigth always have a lot of self-criticism during the training, mainly about rushing the slide. What was interesting was that the cox just praised us. We are apparently in sync, sending the boat nicely, etc. Good to hear that for a change …

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May 10 2015

Piešt’any – Open SLovak Championships – Day 1 long read

Friday

Left Brno around 11am. We took the shorter but windy road to Uherske Hradiste, then up into the White Carpathian mountains, crossing the border pass and then down into Slovakia through some valleys with scattered cottages that could have been from a fairy-tale. Then we drove into the valley of the river Váh towards the spa town of Piešt’any on the banks of the river Váh, where the Open Slovak Rowing Championships would be held.

One has to understand that Slovakia is a proud but small rowing country. There are 5 clubs in total, but about 8 Czech clubs and one Austrian club were participating as well.

A view of the race course in Piešt'any
A view of the race course in Piešt’any

Each of us did a brief 30 minute row and then we were off to the hotel, which turned out to be a lovely place with great food, great wine and a garden terrace to dine. Also they gave us bicycles, on which we could bridge the 4km between the hotel and the race venue by a very pleasant bike ride along the lake.

Piestany 009

Saturday

A day full of races. First to go was our daughter Lenka who had to be third or better in her single to qualify for the final on Sunday. When I took her picture at the 500m point she was in fourth place but she managed to secure a place in the final.

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I took the picture from the 500m because our son Dominik was already waiting for the start. Here he is in lane 2, at the moment of the start:

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I wanted to cycle next to him on the bicycle, but after 10m the chain fell off, so I had to spend a minute to put it back on, then chase him on the bumpy path. The chain came off one more time, so I saw Dominik finish third only from the distance. Here is a picture of our bronze winner:

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Then it was time for a quick lunch. At 13:55, the Masters quad was on the program. We had to wait for the 4- to finish (they came in 3rd place) to rig the boat with the quad riggers. A warming up run, and on the water.

The quad race was a 2 boat affair. Bratislava, the third contender, had withdrawn. They wanted to save energy between the 4- and the 8+ race. We had two guys in our quad who had already rowed the 4-, and so had our opponent, the local club Piešt’any. We were out of the starting block head to head with them. In the first 500m they managed to stay about half a length behind us, but then they started to fall behind.

My first Slovakian title. We each got a small “gold” medal and a bottle of “Schauma for grey hair” shampoo:

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Two hours later we were launching the eight. We were up against Piešt’any proper in their best boat, against Bratislava who had withdrawn from the quad race to save energy for the eight, and us. In exchange for a liter of home-made Slivovice we were allowed to borrow their worse eight and two of their Masters rowers who hadn’t qualified for their proper eight.

We took our Junior sculler as a cox. He is taller than I and has a bit more than 55kg.

Of course the race organisers had put us in the slower lane 1, with less tailwind and less current.

Out of the starting blocks we were half a length behind and drifting into lane 2. We were almost clashing oars with Piešt’any when our cox finally managed to turn the boat. We got our stroke together in lane 1 proper and started to make some gains. I was in bow seat, and we were one man behind Piešt’any who were leading. Bratislava was half a boat length behind us.

Apparently the cox called three strong 10s during the race but I couldn’t hear anything. We were driving from one end of the lane to the other. I later heard that the rudder was almost impossible to control.

At the 500m mark we managed to pass Piešt’any and clear a boat length. With 250m to go we were a boat length and a bit in the lead but in lane 3, Bratislava was suddenly making quick gains.

We pulled hard for another 25 strokes. The cox managed to not park our eight in the bank and we managed to pass the finish line a second before Bratislava. The eight, our least expected win.

The Piešt’any crew took their loss very sportly. They accused their men who had rowed with us of not having fulfilled their secret mission to slow us down. Who knows … In the end they invited us for a beer, which became two beers.

Then we all cycled back to the hotel and had a great dinner in the garden.

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