Well just got back to my sisters (about half hour ago) and got a few moments so will blog this now while fresh - the main memory from today was pain :lol: - although that is offset with the chance to meet up with so many new and old erging friends - :-D The day started at 6am with a alarm and then a coffee and some porridge - jumped in a taxi at 7:30am and got to the venue about 8 - too early for the doors - apparently they open at 8:30 - oh well - hang around outside then.
Got in registered and then started meeting up with various folk. Eventually it was time for the first warm up - took a while to find a decent machine but got one that wasn't too bad. 5k warm up done and onto the race machine. One thing that I haven't mentioned in the run up was I don't tend to do well in morning rows - I had a disaster of a challenge series row last year on a Saturday morning - I tried not to think about it - Q was also conscious of this and we mentioned it after the race :lol:
The race started and I got off reasonably well and started to look to relax into it - through the first 500m a little slower than I wanted but still working OK - had a little look at the placings but really wanted to concentrate on my splits and calm myself through that middle 1k - I dug in and tried to stay away from anything slower than the 1:32 or lower (I will now admit my target was the English Champ record for the 30-39 which is still 6:03.6) I managed to get myself to about 800m left to go in pretty good condition and then started to look for a lift - not there yet - through 500m to go and again started to lift - hmmm not so much as I wanted - about 100m left to go the wheels started to come off and I had to dig in deep - the last stoke I pulled a 1:39 and collapsed of the erg in absolute bits - early morning erg struck again - 6:05.0 a PB by 1.0 seconds - but not as much as I hoped - screaming headache and legs in pieces struggled out of the race area - fell onto a erg - rowed for about 4 minutes then went off to hide at the back of the velodrome while I recovered the power of speech :lol:
I then had a wee while to wait until the Open 2k - it took a while to decide I was going ahead with it - but figured I had an outside chance of a medal (Figured Andy would come first with between 6:04 and 6:06 - Matt Van I thought would be around 6:10 so depended on who else was there. I warmed up again and got on the erg - plan was to go out about 1:33 and see what happened - it hurt - a lot - it was the closest I have come to HD'ing on a 2k - there was nothing there - and it hurt - a lot - but my sister was stood in front of me - so I couldn't stop - so I didn't - I tried to dig in at the end - there wasn't mush there and it still hurt (did I mention that? :lol: ) so 4th in the end - but not disappointed I think the top three guys deserved the medals)
So then we had the 500m to get through - plan - start and see what the other guys had and is I could find anything to throw at it - not much at the start and hitting 1:22/24's but again dug in - towards the last 100m I was in third - so switched on Beowulf and went through the last split at 1:18 and on that stroke I went from 2nd to 1st and took the Gold - good old Wulfy :-D
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