Fractions of seconds

All in all masters Nationals was successful. We won the team points trophy, which was a goal I'd had for us as a club, though not a goal we actively pursued. To pursue it, you need to win a lot of races (obvious). To win a lot of races, you have to enter events that are least heavily contested. In some cases, if you're the only entry, you get the win, and the points.

In our case, we went after the most heavily contested events, and still did well.

I was in our A (Age 27+) 8+ that won. It was our first gold medal in an open (non-club restricted) national event. I also came away with two silvers and a bronze, and my other two finishes were the wood, or 4th place. I can't complain.

Trouble is, I'm not pleased. We finished just 2 points out of winning the men's points trophy. Had we finished any better in any event, we'd have won it. And most frustrating for me is that several of my finishes we were down only by tiny fractions of a second. Witness the photo finishes:


That's my boat, lane 2, 0.07 seconds out of 3rd in the club B (age 36+) 4+.

Here we are 0.75 seconds out of 3rd in the open B 4+.

Here we are, lane 4, 0.15 seconds from gold in the open B 8+:

And here we are 0.6 seconds out of first in the club C 8+. (Age 42+)

And last year at Head of the Charles, we missed 3rd by 0.32 seconds. In a race 16 minutes long.

So I find myself asking what I can do to find another second of speed. I just need to get one second faster, and all of these results change.

I'm sick of being down one second. I'm going to let my whole team know that they can just start screaming "one second" at me when I'm training to get me to drop the hammer.