On sunday we went out for our first long paddle on the river in a very long time. We decided to keep it at 2 hours so after the usual mucking about with cars we got the mystere in the water at Shepperton to make our way back down river to the clubhouse at Teddington. While we had had 2 really good weeks on the Wey I was still nervous; all our paddles on the Thames had been pretty bad in one way or another and I just felt that this would be the same. Was it? Well yes; and no.
It took us a little while to settle but we were soon crunching out a fairly easy cadence at DW effort as we made our way down to Sunbury. We had an easy portage and then it was the pound to Molesey. As we progressed along the reach, the wind started to get more blustery and and a definite chop on the water started to throw our stroke off. It was not that we were unstable but the bumps in the water were causing us to either catch too much or skim the top, catching very little. As usual, my steering started to go to pot as I was fighting the rudder, the currents and trying to keep my stroke together. I was finding it really hard and had to stop a couple of times to get my head round it. I had told Ad before hand that if I started to back off then he had to encourage me to keep a good length stroke and I really focussed on pressing firmly on the footrest to get the boat as stable as possible. It worked, but I had to overcome the screaming voice in my head telling me to slow down.
In the meantime we had overtaken a group of rowers as they rested after a pound and as Adam and I started up again they began to gain on us really fast. A ladies 4 went by and then all of a sudden we heard another crew shouting at us so we kept our line, not at all understanding what they were saying. I should point out that we were not blocking them, or zig zaging or anything stupid but I just thought, 'hold this course and let them go by.' They couldn't see us, they go backwards for crying out loud, and we couldn't see them; it seemed like far the safest option to me. It was at that point that one of the female 4 decided to say something along the lines of 'They are ignoring us.' It was at that point I lost it. How the hell was I supposed to ignore them while they were bumping and jostling to get round, inches from us? Words were exchanged and black looks given. Picking a fight with a load of big rowers was not something I'd normally do but I was stressed and hacked off and in no mood to be talked at like I was on someone else's water.
Things improved as we portaged Molesey, with more black looks exchanged as we went past the rowing crews as they got their boats out. The inevitable happened as we approached Kingston and Adam's back started to give out so it was a steady plod for the last 20 minutes with a few twitches. It was a pretty stressy paddle but we didn't feel unstable so that was a massive improvement over all our other river paddles. I think for the first time we could see ourselves actually racing in the mystere.
Last night was our tempo paddle session with 3 x 15 minute efforts. we overcooked it on the first one and we were fighting a very stiff headwind that had our paddles waving in the wind but it felt really great. As Ad said, "If only we could bottle that one..." The second one was rubbish and we were just trying too hard, so we decided to have an easy paddle for 15 minutes before our final effort. This coincided with us having to go back under Kingston bridge which we have a real mental block about so we had a little wobble as we went under. When we got back, the Royal's club captain was there and it was really nice to have a chat to him. He was really positive about what we were doing and while we told him all that had been going wrong he gave us a few pointers and some good things to think about.
I read someone's twitter post yesterday, 'Being an overnight success takes time.' It's hard not to get caught up in the hear and now and focus on every twitch, support stroke and rubbish paddle, but we've come a really long way in a relatively short space of time. We are just not sure if we can get to where we need to be in the next 3 months.
Stick to the plan; have faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment