On Sunday 19th November, the Ardingly Rowing Club Junior team made their way to LEH School for a days training with Gillian Lindsay, a silver medallist from the Sydney Olympics. None of us knew what to expect, but were all looking forward to it. We arrived by 10am and had a briefing about the conditions we would expect to find out on the Thames. Few of us had rowed before with a current, so we had to learn where to row in order not to loose control of the boat.
We were arranged into 2 quads and 1 double; one of us got to Cox each of the quads, which was a new experience for those chosen. It was also the first time they had used a Cox-box with a microphone. The box showed the Cox how many strokes we had rowed and what our stroke rate was etc. The morning was spent rowing up and down the river, with Derek, David and a coach from LEH who were giving us tips on how to improve our technique. The main points we picked up on were to make sure we leant back as far as we could which meant our blades stayed in the water for as long as possible. We also had to accelerate down the slide more to produce more power. After about 2 hours on the water, we all came into lunch and watched ourselves on the television as Derek had filmed us that morning. This was very interesting as we'd never seen ourselves row before, so it was a lot easier to see where we were going wrong and what we could do to improve our technique. After a break we went back out onto the water in the same boats and headed for the start line of the course for Hampton Head of the River. Once there, we made the final touches to our race plan and set off. It was a hard 10minute race, but after all the practise we had done that morning we felt that we couldn't have tried any harder.
Overall, everyone had had a fun and very useful day, and will take a lot of constructive advice away with them.
Our thanks are due to Gillian Lindsay and the team at LEH for making this day possible.
News item submitted by Georgina Coad.
 |
