Race Week

It's been a while since we posted about the weigh in and a lot has happened. Primarily, as most of you will have guessed, the Henley Boat Races took place 2 Sundays ago on a very cold, very wind swept Dorney Lake. Before the race we stayed in Henley for 10 days, in a big three storey house just behind Leander. The Blue Boat have been doing this for a good few years, so we can train on the water that we race on. Race week is so much fun, so we thought we would give you an insight into what living with eight  rowers and a cox in the run up to the biggest race of our year is like...

As we're tapering we only do two shortish outings each day, the first one normally about 10am- when it's actually light- woooo hello lie-ins!! Thus, you would think that we would have loads of time to finish all that outstanding work, write blog posts, finish that dissertation... but no. Somehow, time flies past and by the end of the week you have loaded some papers onto your computer and only written one sentence. Oops. 

It's impressive how much food the nine of us got through in a week. Even though we're doing so much less mileage, we seemed to spend the whole time we weren't rowing eating. The house had a massive aga, which we mastered usage of quite well (we won't mention that one half baked lemon drizzle cake...)  there were multiple shops and many shopping lists to be written, our individual food habits also became evident, there were multiple tubs of nutella eaten and seeds were written off by our coach as an unnecessary item, he had very different views on the jaffa cakes however! All in all, there was a solid effort to maintain our weight advantage, which we found at weigh in round two (which took place on the Tuesday of race week alongside the challenges for each race) to have extended to 4kg per person. Like we said, all muscle.

The classic HBR weigh in shot, at least we know how to smile!

One of the highlights of each day, other than the lie-ins and mealtimes was the daily arrival of post, and there was lots of it. Suddenly we all felt very loved as we received cards, exciting packages and words of wisdom from friends, family and ex-members of CUW. We managed to line the book case with our cards and the windowsill rapidly filled with flowers, it was like all Christmasses and birthdays came at once. There was also the event of making cards for the other crews, involving cutting up magazines to make "witty" cards, Farmers Weekly proved to be particularly useful this year, who knew how amusing a magazine it really was?!

Just a selection of the many, many cards.

There is also lots of time to be filled with what can only be referred to as niche chat, in jokes of the crew that generally no one else dares question us about, this year Mike the inflatable shark sparked some interesting questioning from our coach. Although it's fair to say that generally our coach chose to ignore the "niche chat" rather preferring to sit in the arm chair in the corner of the room either on his phone or "napping" to try and ignore us, however not all our comments passed him by, some being bought up by him at the dinner at the end of the week.....

Mike the shark- the epitome of niche.

Our evening entertainment involved watching a variety of girly films including Pride and Prejudice, Notting Hill and Mean Girls- talk about pandering to stereotypes!  

Mid way through the week we had a surprise visit; nothing like the shock of opening the door to find Matthew Pinsent standing outside! As the umpire for our race, he came to chat with us but had turned up a day early, probably a good thing as he missed out on the previously mentioned half-baked lemon drizzle. Further encounters included Tom James after the race, who seemed somewhat bemused when the entirety of the slightly inebriated CUW piled onto him for a photo.  

CUW- always winning the party.

Hopefully that's given you an insight into the strange world of race week, right now we've enjoyed a chilled out Easter and now it's back to training for summer (if it ever comes) races and into the throes of exam term...