Amidst all of the excitement surrounding Dad Vail's week, I've been taking some time out of each day to reflect on this season. It has been a roller coaster of a ride, and totally different than any season I have had since I joined this sport. I want to take you back to the weekend of April 11th when the team travelled to Princeton, NJ to compete at the Knecht Cup on Mercer Lake. I never talked about this race because something happened to our boat that weekend. It was a coxswains worst nightmare...we missed our race. The regatta was unusually unorganized this year because Saturday racing got cancelled (for the most part), due to very high winds. This pushed almost all of the races into Sunday, forcing the regatta to be very hectic. My boat won the morning semi-final very easily, crossing the line about 10 beats (strokes-per-minute) than we normally would in a contended race. After taking the majority of the day to stay off of our legs, our boat returned to the course from the hotel around an hour before we had to launch for the final.
(Men's 4+ Knecht Cup)
As we arrived to the course, our teammates and coaches notified us that the regatta was delayed about a half an hour due to the amount of races they were trying to squeeze in. We adjusted our pre-race plan accordingly, and proceeded to warm-up when the time was right. Somehow, from the time we got to the race course to the time we started rowing up to the starting platforms, the regatta had caught back up to the original schedule. There was only one problem; we had no idea.
I had the guys running through our normal warm-up procedure and all of the focus was internal so none of the guys, including myself was that concerned with what was going on outside of the boat. As we took a break in warming up to get some water and strip down a layer of clothing, we began to look around and get a sense of what was going on around us. When we looked out onto the race course I could feel every heart in our boat sink into the bottom of the hull as we all realized simultaneously that the race we were supposed to be in, the final, the won we wanted to win; was already a quarter of the way into the race. Devastated is the only word that I can use to describe the feeling as the officials told us to row back to the docks since we missed our race. Not a word was said going back to the docks.
There is around 40 combined years of rowing in our four and not one of us had ever missed a race. I can only speak for myself, but I still have nightmares where in my dream my boat misses the race. I have had at least one every week since Knecht Cup. As a coxswain, I carry a lot of responsibility in terms of making sure everything is right on race day and I took a lot of the blame that day, even though no one else blames me. Obviously I have channeled it into a learning point in my career and another page in the story our boat is writing this season, but at the end of the day I still get flashbacks to the feeling I had that Sunday afternoon. I'm sure I sound ridiculous in saying all of this; perhaps you have to be in that situation to understand.
This is just one piece of the story that brings us into Dad Vails; look forward to reading more on the 'Road to Dad Vails' throughout this week!
Stay Classy,
B
No comments:
Post a Comment