A weekend in Ghent, and what we learned
Racing abroad is mostly logistics with a race in the middle of it, and this weekend was a fair reminder of that. The trailer left on Friday afternoon, the first crew boated at eight on Saturday, and the last one came off the water in the dark.
Three of our five crews reached a final and one of them led it for twelve hundred metres. What went wrong in the last four hundred is the part worth writing down.
The warm-up
Every crew that struggled had been sitting in the boating area for more than twenty minutes before their race. The crews that went well had timed it so they arrived at the start still warm, which on an unfamiliar course means walking the marshalling route the day before rather than guessing at it.
- Walk or paddle the marshalling route on arrival day
- Twenty minutes is too long to sit — plan for twelve
- One person per crew carries the timings, not the whole crew
- Food after weigh-in, not before racing
We did not lose that final in the last four hundred metres. We lost it on the pontoon, twenty-five minutes earlier.
Tags: racing, travel