Blog Success.

Well, we've already been together in Jersey for more than a month, and the blog is just now up and running. After some prodding this morning by Coach Hargis (who, very predictably, showed up at the boathouse at 5:30 with a trailer laden with boats), I resolved to do some actual work during my downtime today, rather than loafing and napping in my usual fashion. Through this blog, I'll make an effort to share some of our legitimate daily activity on the Junior Team, with a peppering of droll stories from my vivacious teammates mixed in.

A little more than a week ago, the coaches made the final cuts that yielded the 14 rowers and 2 coxswains who will be traveling to the Czech Republic for Worlds. Of the survivors, three are returners from last year's eight: Pat McGlone, Whitney Blodgett, and myself. Many of the others were new to the Selection process, but separated themselves from the more than forty athletes who were chosen for phase one of camp. Lineups are always subject to change, but the eight, four, and pair have all been finding rhythms with the personnel currently in each of the hulls.

Today, we continued our basic three-week workout cycle with 1900 meter pieces at 22 strokes per minute. Rowing at such comparatively low rates exaggerates the inconsistencies of each individual's stroke, so we do a fair deal of low-rate rowing in order to establish a solid base for when we get up to race cadence. After a few of these pieces, we finished the work of the morning with 250 meter pieces down the racecourse, pieces of a distance that I think represents one of our strong suits. This year's eight possesses a tremendous amount of physical capacity for an American junior boat, and the short nature of the 250 enables us to unleash our top-end speed because of the intense, concentrated focus that it entails. After going the full 2k of the course, we finished our morning with a crisp, 90% pressure cool-down row back to the docks of Caspersen Training Center. We then stretched our muscles, and shipped back to the Peddie School for 8:15 breakfast.