Trials Report

Last Saturday (12th Feb), was the GB rowing Feb trials.  They were held at Dorney Lake, on the course where the Olympics will be held.  The first real opportunity to test your speed against those trialling for places in the 2011 team.  The trial was scheduled to be a 1900m time trial [Sat. morning] followed by semi finals [Sat. afternoon] based upon the ranking from the time trial.  The finals were due to be held on Sunday morning.  The semi's and final's were held over 2000m (the Olympic distance).  Due to concerns about the weather, the racing was all packed into Saturday.

I was racing with Tom Ransley (profile in previous posts).  We felt our time trial went ok but certainly felt we could make improvements.  We ranked 5th overall and I was reasonably pleased with this position.  Two hours later we had our semi.  We had some pretty impressive speed out of the blocks, this was a bit unexpected as we hadn't had any opportunity to test our speeds before hand.  Our speed lagged alittle in the middle and ended up in a dog fight to get into the A final.  Luckily we did enough and it made sure we placed top 6 whatever happened.  In the final we altered our race plan to ease off at the start and save energy to deliver a stronger middle section to our race.  This didn't really work out and we just ended up going slower off the start and the same speed through the middle.  In the last 500m it was very tight between ourselves and the pair of Cameron and Dan for the 5th and 6th placings; we didn't have a good enough sprint and ended up 6th (aka last).  We learnt alot on how our pair worked and compared to other guys, and we will know how to use this if we race as this combination again.

Overall we were dissappointed not to hold the 5th position from the time trial, and hoped to actually improve on that ranking in the racing, but it was still a reasonably good showing and we learnt something along the way.