Concept2 Forum

11th place in the club singles at the HOCR!

Congratulations of an impressive result. I hear the wind was wicked during your event.

Thank you.

I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I am very disappointed in how the race went. Conditions were awful and I had a terrible row. Given my fitness I was expecting a much better result but my rowing just isn't up to par.

Thankfully I managed a 2nd place Saturday in the Director's Challenge Parent/Child 2x with my father, so that was nice. Also not a very good row but definitely much better than my Sunday row.

How did your event go?

I'm sorry you were disappointed. The names that I recognized in the club singles are people that I think are real studs.

Congrats on the 2x result.

I was less than thrilled with how we did in our event. We ended up 43rd in a 52 boat field. Our start was right when the weather started to go downhill on Saturday morning. The wind and rain started about 2 minutes before we did!

Having said that, the weather was not a real big factor in the race. Just a bit of headwind. If you compare the splits we were doing in our practice sessions to what we were doing in the race, we were a lot slower. I think it was mostly nerves, but if we had rowed as well in the race as we had in practices, we would been about 10 places higher.

During the race, it was massively depressing. A group of really fast boats started behind us. 5 of the boats that started after us finished in the top 15 places. They blew by us like we were standing still. I rowed most of the race figuring that we were going to be in the bottom couple of boats. But it turned out that there were some slower boats way ahead of us in the starting order that we never saw on the course.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am really glad to have raced. Now I have a marker I can try to improve on.

@Greg: What class of shell were you in, an eight? I didn't follow the HOCR this year, so I hadn't heard of any results until you started this thread. Was this your first HOCR? I have never been to one even as a spectator, but a lot of my fellow LBRA members have participated, and the ladies in particular have done very well in past years. I would find that course rather daunting with all the turns and bridges and other boats. At one time I had a video that was designed as a guide for competing in the race. No way would I have ever done that except in a coxed boat.

Bob S.

I raced in my single last year and I was thrilled to finish in the top half of my event. This year, I entered the senior master 2x event with a friend from my club.

The course is pretty challenging, but on the plus side, it goes by really fast because you are always dealing with turns, bridges or other boats.

Nice job guys! Armando, your dad must be a stud for you two to put up the time you posted.Greg, nice job. As a newbie I'm learning about all of the variables that need to be dealt with OTW. Poor navigation could add 300 to 400m to your row compared to somebody who nails it. And of course the weather. Time lost yielding to a faster boat. It all matters! Did you have sufficient meters with your partner so that the two of you were rowing "together"?

Edward4492 wrote:Did you have sufficient meters with your partner so that the two of you were rowing "together"?

That reminds me of the one master 2x race that I have had - at a national masters in Austin about 20 years ago. Just a 1k, of course - even so, at the bow, I had deuce of a time staying in the middle of the lane for the whole distance. I am sure that our blades hit the cable a couple of times. To top it off, we also rowed in a 4x and one of our mates from that boat cracked that our double looked like a couple of singles from the shore. We still managed a silver out of 4 entries, but it didn't mean much. I have also managed to hit a buoy dead on in one of the few 2- practice sessions I have had. I surely hate trying to use a footboard steering cable. I much prefer leaving the driving to a cox.

I also have the utmost respect for the guys that can master the 2-. It is by far the toughest shell to manage in the OTW flotilla.

Bob S.

Bob, I did my first ever race in a quad last week and our "crew" had about ten practice sessions. It was amazing how much we improved each session. And our "bow" was a youngster (27) who rowed through college and is currently a HS coach (and coaches me). The kid was masterful. He knew every line on the Schuykill, hit the bridges dead square. I couldn't' feel the boat being steered at all. And we had no boats to contend with. The boats ahead of us were gone and there was a big time gap behind us (no boats in sight) it didn't hurt that we had perfect weather. And with my little experience....I've always looked at a pair and figured it had to be a very challenging boat to row properly.

@ Edward: (with an apology to Greg for getting off thread) The really tricky part is making a turn around a pylon, like a famous painting of a pair from the 1800s.
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1984.1927
My pair partner had us go through that maneuver a couple of times. This was all just practice stuff with no intention of racing. My own previous experience had all been mostly in eights, but he had a wide variety of experience in all manner of shells. So he gave me a little introduction to the art of rowing a pair.

Bob S.

Edward4492 wrote: Did you have sufficient meters with your partner so that the two of you were rowing "together"?

We probably had about 10 serious training sessions together. That's enough time to get the basics right, but not enough for the boat to be a symphony in motion. My partner, Joe, is really good at adapting his stroke so we were definitely in time. The HOCR is a special kind of race. The traffic and the course are tough to prepare for in advance. I've raced it once, and it was Joe's first time. He was steering and for a lot of the race, he was not able to row at full pressure because he was trying to find our line or avoid other boats. The other impact of all that looking around and steering is it is very difficult to keep the boat set perfectly. If the boat isn't set well, you end up dragging oars and shortening your strokes.

Put all that together, and I think we were between 5 and 10 seconds per 500 slower in the race than we were in our practices. If it was 5 seconds difference, it would have improved our time by nearly a minute over the course and improved our placement by about 8 boats.

I'm new to all of this (OTW), looking at video from HOCR it looks to be extremely challenging with the turns, the traffic, and the weather. Lots of shots of boats banging in to each other and jockeying for position at the bridges. I guess that it's one of those events that you just have to do at some point. I'd like to give it a try....in a couple of years!

Note: Our boat was anything but a "symphony in motion". But we were so raw (me, two women 68 and 61 yrs old in our first race) that the improvements each session were huge. Our first sessions we could barely break 2:50 pace, by the week prior we did 4k at a 2:25 pace and ended up averaging 2:15 for the race. We were more or less in sync. A huge part of that was the 27 yr old kid driving it and stellar conditions. No delusions on my part; with out him it would have been a disaster.