Boston Marathon 21 Sept 2014 ~ Not quite a Tea Party

The Boston marathon is reputed to be the longest rowing race in the world.. it certainly feels like it.

Starting at Lincoln rowing centre and finishing at Boston rowing club the route takes in 50km of the river Witham through the flatlands of Lincolnshire, not that there is any scenery to see from the boat; the river is more like a wide drainage ditch banked up on both sides.

Mark F, Mak S, Phil and Gareth at the start in Lincoln

From the start it was evident that steering was going to be an issue, with some close encounters of the worst kind with the bank on a couple of occasions. The problem seemed to be that I couldn’t have my foot in its normal position and keep the boat straight. This in turn meant I was sat very awkwardly and eventually got a dead right leg. By the time we had reached Bardney Lock at 13km it was difficult to walk. I think we stopped around 17km to adjust the steering and that was when the rudder cable broke, losing us about 20 minutes to rethread the cable. This did allow me to restore some circulation though. After this I did manage to steer a straighter course with a combination of steering and pulling harder to one side up to about 22km when we started to hit weeds in the river which effected the steering.

Getting out clearing the weed off the fin and rudder gave us an opportunity to change the bow man and Mark Foster took us down to the finish. This change of order coincided with a bit of a purple patch and we were soon down at Tattershall Bridge where we met up with Linden, Helen and Jade Hall and 32km had past.
We decided to try and get to 40km then take a drink and then finish in 2 more 5km stretches, the weeds had other ideas though and at times it felt we were towing a submarine. There was nothing else that could be done other than to stop and remove the weeds.

In the final 8-10km we were nip and tuck with another crew but eventually we left them behind and managed to stay ahead despite still having to stop continually to clear the weeds. When we were clear of weeds we got a good run on the boat and the final stretch was soon over and we could hear the P.A. announcing our arrival and finally the ring of the finish bell.

At the finish and still smiling.

We finished in a time of 5:09 but to be honest I was glad just to have finished.

Not quite a tea party but certainly an experience to be recommended.