Saturday April 6, 8:20 PM San Diego, California
We are all going to bed hungry tonight. Not hungry for food; heavyweight rowers tend to be fed like kings on these trips. We are all hungry for another chance at Stanford in the morning. It is not often in this sport that you can be bested by a crew on one day, and have an opportunity to turn it around, learn from your race and beat them the next day, but we will have to do just that in the finals Sunday morning.
We were all up by 6 AM today, had a light breakfast at 6:30, and took off for the racecourse by 7:15. It’s all business on race day. We checked over the boat, stretched out, changed and met up as a team at 8. After some words of encouragement from coach Myhr and a team huddle around our coxswain, sophomore Lou Lombardi, we waded back into the waters of Mission Bay and took off on the warmup. After a solid warm up we pulled into the lane 2 stake boat with plenty of time to spare.
9 am: “Attention, GO.” It was a quick start and we dashed off the line even with Stanford and slightly up on Oregon State. By the end of our high strokes Stanford had a two-seat advantage and by the end of our settle they were up a half-length. We were a little tight when we settled and didn’t quite hit it together the way we needed to. By the 500, Stanford had slipped out to a ¾-length lead. They stayed 2-3 beats higher than us on the rating through the first thousand as we hammered our base at 36. After the 1000 we held on at a length down from Stanford and were able to push back into some deck overlap by the time we crossed the finish line at 5:54.92, 2.65 seconds behind the Stanford crew and 10.3 seconds ahead of Oregon State.
We know we can get faster tomorrow. We didn’t have a bad race today and Stanford showed they certainly are a quick crew, but our second race on this course will be better. #9 Stanford is wholly focused on beating No. 3 Cal tomorrow and even though we will be in unfavored lane 4, we will hopefully be able to slide past the Sycamores unnoticed, until it’s too late for them to respond.
Since we got off the water this morning our entire focus has been on preparing for the next contest tomorrow. Even with the temptations of sunny San Diego all around us, we were sure to shut it down, relax and recover. We had a quick breakfast, napped at the hotel, had a bigger breakfast, and napped again. We returned to the course at 5 PM for an afternoon swing row. As we swung up and down the race course, Lou talked us through the race plan from start to finish twice. We came off the water recovered from the morning’s battle and ready for war tomorrow.
Next up: We race in the Men’s Collegiate Varsity Final for the Copley Cup against Cal, Stanford, British Columbia, Gonzaga and Oregon State at 9:50 local time.
