Last Head Race: cue "Aww moment"

Not really, though.

It's been a sweet week, all in all, marred only by the death of my camera. It was kinda trippin' ever since the Inauguration, probably from exposure, but last week it decided to kick the can, like some Brits wish Jane Goody would already. At least I do. Oh, too soon? Nevermind.

This week has also been a bit hectic as I've been trying to finalize plans for my Easter holidays. I'm heading to Amsterdam after chilling in London for a while, then back to Bristol, up to Cardiff, back down to Bristol to fly to Frankfurt, go visit my friend Boris in Mannheim, then to Jersey to visit my awesome flatmate, Suyin. However, getting to Europe requires a Schengen visa, which probably should have been taken care of since last week, but after a run around with a German "consulate" which was down the street from my library, I ended up having to send my passport off to London for visa processing. Maybe I'll just have my children born in Singapore so they won't need to worry about visas when they're off travelling the world. Just a thought.

Anyway, today was my last head race for my time in Bristol, as well as the time my boat raced together. After rowing training in April, we'll be switching out two of our rowers for some of the rowers from the second VIII for regatta season, which is a sprint season with races having a standard length of 2000m. It's guts out, everything on the table, and usually pretty gruesome afterwards, but always a good time.

Today we rowed at Kingston-upon-Thames, right near the Hampton Court Palace, where King Henry VIII reigned from, and the ghosts of his dead wives still haunt the stairwells. It's a grand piece of architecture, but unfortunately, we didn't have time to take it in. We launched from less than 500m off the starting line, but we had gone for a short warmup row a little before. We queued up for the start, the adrenaline started pumping, we turned and we started. We had a bit of trouble finding our flow off the start, but we settled into our rate pretty well at 30 strokes per minute. Within the first 1000m, we overtook the boat that started just before us, and we set off down the course with some really good strokes making some good speed.

It was a really long course, around 5km, snaking around from the Hampton Court Bridge, past the Hampton Court Palace, and finishing past the Kingston Bridge, near the Kingston Rowing Club boathouse. With about 1.5km to go, we fell apart a little bit, and I admit, it was definitely hard work. I slipped twice, missing some precious water, but we managed to get up to a 32/34 over our last 1000m, and really got it together. All in all, I felt it was a good race, not our best, but a good race. You can tell if a rower has really worked hard from the look on his face at the end of a race, and all of our boat had that face.

After trying to sit upright and catch our breath, we had to turn around and paddle the 5km back to our trailer. It was a bit ridiculous, since in the head races here, all the boats launch at the same time, but are sent off at different times, so before the race, you can have an excess of one hundred boats on the river, and it gets a bit messy. On our way back, we saw this firsthand, but not as bad as we saw at Reading Head. The course marked for us on the way back was sticking hard to the banks of the Thames and as far away from the middle of the river, the race course, as possible. It was essentially a limp back rather than a paddle at the speed we were making with the mess of boats, but we made it back in good time, derigged and it was back home to Brizzle.

Now, I should be doing my Chinese homework or focusing on an essay that I've got due, but that's no fun if I did. I'm abroad, and having fun is what it's all about. Well, that, and actually studying. But with such little class contact time, and so much time for independent study and collaboration with classmates, I'm realizing that college isn't about taking classes, as necessary as classes are. It's about the people you meet and the things you learn from them that you take with you. This is where I pull the plug on my philosophical rant. Til next time, probably in London!