Once again, I’m writing a post for an event that occurred months ago…

My team rowing team here in sunny, Southern California (Southern California Scullers Club) made a trip to the east coast to compete at USRowing’s Club National Championships. Personally, I competed in the Lightweight Men’s Senior Double (LM2X) and the Open Weight Intermediate Quad (M4X).

To clarify, in rowing there are two weight classes for Men (and women). The open weight class is bassically anything over 160 lbs (165 in Fall seasons). The lightweight class is <160 lbs in spring/summer and <165 lbs in the fall. Also, to clarify intermediate and ‘senior’ events. Intermediate events typically have less competition than the ‘senior’ events. This is because the Senior events enable you to qualify for the Elite events (Elite nationals, world championship trials, etc.).

With that said, I was extremely pleased with my performance. In the Senior LM2X my partner and I placed third. We had a strong start and in the first 500 meters we were in the lead over Malta and Vesper who got gold and silver respectively. Not bad after training for less than a year.

My doubles partner teamed up with another lightweight and a heavyweight guy to form an open quad for the Men’s Intermediate Quad. At first we thought we would have some stiff competition in the heats/finals since we had three lightweight guys and a single heavyweight (openweight) guy in our boat. We breezed the our heats, winning easily and went on to the final. In the Final we had a great start and ended up first with open water on our biggest competition, the Potomac Boat Club. Pretty much it was us and Potomac battling it out all the way down the course and they finally clipped us with a few hundred meters to go at the finish. Considering we had a bunch of ~160ish pound guys against solid heavyweights (180+), I was happy with a silver; but they’ll be no excuses next year.