Summer?

Weekend Recap:

The bus left the hilltop for Worcester, MA at around 7ish on Friday.  The bus driver was literally horrible.  We didn’t take any major highways and were swerving off the road and kept braking really hard and quickly.  We stopped in New Jersey at 11 and checked into a hotel for the night.  I pretty much fell asleep right away.

In the morning, we hit the road again.  We were not taking highways still and ended up getting pulled over.  We sat on the edge of the road for a good half hour.  Not fun.  Since we were driving slowly and wasted time on the side of the road, we fell behind schedule and had to go straight to the course to practice instead of the hotel.  The coxswains were getting weighed in shortly after arriving at the course, so I was guzzling water to try to make up for some weight.  (Unlike Lightweight rowers who have to cut weight to make a maximum, coxswains have a MINIMUM weight requirement.)  I ended up having to be sandbagged a little, but not too much.  

I was quite nervous about practicing on the race course since I had never been on it before.  It was pretty nice and easy to navigate except for the warm up area and one pinch at around the 1000 meter mark.  After practice, we went back to the hotel and then to a Freshmen team dinner followed by boat meetings.

My family used to live in Massachusetts, so SM&D flew into Boston on Saturday and stayed with our really close friends.  They drove to Worcester in the morning and so did my BEST FRIEND in the ENTIRE WORLD.  I was SOOO SOOO SOOO happy to see everybody!  I was really nervous in the morning before our heat, so it was hard to socialize though.

We launched and set out to race.  Unfortunately, we got 5th out of 6, so we were in the third level finals for the afternoon.  We raced pretty well, but knew where we had to make improvements for the next race.  My coach had a quick boat meeting with us, and then we headed back to the hotel for lunch and rest.

During our second race, we focused only on our boat and the race plan.  It was a better race than our first, but we got second, which meant 14th.  Our other HW boats didn’t do as well as we had hoped, but we have lots of room for improvement for next year!