Well it's now official. Rowing is now over. I just had my rowing banquet the other night and now I am no longer affiliated with rowing :) I had to come up with a speech because I'm a senior. It ended up not being so bad and I had a good time. I don't know what else to say about it. Four years of hard work and all I got was an embroidered blanket and trophy oar. That's what I got as a senior gift. They're actually really nice and I like them. That is all. I can't talk very well today, so I'll stop rambling.
Well, my 4 years of rowing have come to an end. Last weekend we went up to Sacramento for the last race of the year, the WIRA (Western Intercollegiate Rowing Association) Championships. Knowing this was our last race ever, Brad and I planned on having a good time while we were up there. Unfortunately, because of the amount of teams with a JV boat, we had to have heats before the grand finals. We had a head on Saturday and we missed the cut by like 5 seconds. That race was won by OCC, followed by Gonzaga. Univ. of Puget Sound beat us by like 5 seconds or so to take the last spot in the finals. We had a pretty decent time of 6:28.9, which was one of our faster times of the year. We were bummed that we didn't make the finals, but we didn't have any hope of getting 1st, so we felt good knowing that we could get 1st in the petite finals.
So Brad's mom drove all the way up to Sacramento to watch our race, and she wanted to take us out to dinner. So in our attempts to hide the fact that we were ditching the team dinner, one of the guys in our boat was found out and we got yelled at for trying to ditch. So we just didn't eat at the team dinner and went out to dinner after. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed spending time with the rest of my boat seeing as it was one of the last times I'd get that oppourtunity.
Seeing as Sunday was the last race EVER for Brad, Joe, Jimmy, Kevin, Jeff and myself, we decided to have a little fun in the last 250m. We came up with a little 'chant' that we would yell during the home stretch. It was great. Everyone stopped what they were doing when they heard us come down the course. Apparently it was really loud because we were in lane 1, nearest the shore. So we won that race by a lot and had a good time doing it. Now rowing is over and I'm happy once again :) Now I just gotta find out what to say during my senior speech.
We had a race against a bunch of teams on Sunday at the Newport Regatta. Our race was against UCLA, SDSU 'A', SDSU 'B', UCSD, OCC, and us. Here are the results.
2nd Varsity 8: OCC 6:19.5 UCSD 6:25.9 UCI 6:36.6 UCLA 6:40.3 SDSU B 6:46.0 SDSU A 7:01.5
Looks like we didn't so well. Wasn't our best race of the year, but on the upside, we only have one race left; next Saturday/Sunday up in Sacramento for WIRA. I'll have some picturs up later.
Last weekend the UCI crew team took a trip down to San Diego for the Crew Classic. This is always a fun event and we have fun every year we go. I still remember when I was a freshmen, there was so much rain that one of the boats sank as it crossed the finish line. Anyways, on to the results. In our first race on Saturday, we raced against Washington, Oregon St, San Diego St and UC Davis. There was a lot of really rough water and we did pretty bad. We ended up fourth in the race. Which actually was the place we were 'supposed' to finish, but the time was pretty bad. The time from the race officials was 7:18, which seemed to us to be REALLY REALLY bad. But as I just noticed from the Jamco website, they clocked us at a much more respectable 6:53. Of course 6:53 is still not good, but given the racing conditions, it's not horrible.
As for the second race on Sunday, we raced against UCLA, UC San Diego, Santa Clara and San Diego St. We stayed up for almost an hour and a half the night before going over the race in detail with our coxswain just to make sure he knew what to do. We were so pumped up on Sunday because not only did we want to win, but we wanted to beat UCLA to make up for our close loss to them a few weeks ago. We ended up in lane 1, which was supposed to help us quite a bit if the wind/current got bad. The race got underway, and just like we expected, it was neck and neck the whole way down. Up to about the 1200m mark, all crews were within 2 seats of each other. At the 1500m mark, we made our move to put us in the lead for good. After an awesome sprint towards the finish line, we edged out SDSU for the victory. It was awesome. What made it more awesome was the face that on top of the face that my parents drove down and fed the entire team, Heather and her mom drove all the way down from Irvine just to watch this one race, and they were treated to a great race. RegattaShots.com should have some pictures up of the race soon, and I will have some pictures up soon that my Dad took as well.
So we raced OCC and UCSB last Saturday. It started out kinda shitty cuz I was still sick from the end of the week. We didn't do so well against OCC but we did manage to beat UCSB. So that wasn't so bad. I don't think many of us were expecting to beat OCC anyways. So it's now Monday, and I'm still kinda sick and now we have to practice twice a day until Friday, when we leave for San Diego to race in the Crew Classic. On the plus side of rowing twice a day, I'll have a nice golden brown tan by Wednesday. Of course that means I'll also have 3 different forms of skin cancer by then too. :)
So we had a race on Saturday vs UCLA up in Ballona Creek. Despite a harsh week of practice and a tough practice on Friday, we were confident that we could beat them. I have to say, it was the closest race I've ever been in. Right off the starting line, no crew had more than a 1-2 seat lead. Constant lead changes, a bear claw at the 1200m mark and a very fast finish resulted in UCLA winning by about this much...
<-------------UCLA-----------> <------------UCI------------->
Sigh, those are the races you'll never forget. I believe the "official" result was UCLA by 0.01 seconds, or 6", however you want to count it. Of course, looking back on the race there were a few problems that shouldn't have happened, mostly due to our coxswain. Hopefully those can and will be fixed before we race OCC this Saturday.
Here are two pictures of us rowing against the SDSU lightweights. Actually we're so far ahead you can't even see them in the picture. :)
And here we are vs UCSD.
2V8:
UCI 6:46.4
SDSU lights 7:05.8
V8:
UCI 6:30.0
SDSU 6:30.3
LMU 6:46.2
Last week we (UCI 2nd Varsity) beat UCSD in Newport by about 7-10 seconds. Not too bad, it was the last jersey I needed to complete my collection of all the teams we race throughout the season. On Saturday we're gonna be in Ballona Creek to race the SDSU lightweights. We SHOULD win and remain undefeated this year so far.