This year our team was made up of Kikunosuke (cox), me (stroke), Jon (3rd), Austin (2nd), and Takafumi (bow). The weather on the day of the competition wasn't the may west. It was quite windy with heavy showers at times.
In our first race there was 3 boats. We were going to go through to the next round no matter where we finished. It was really windy during the race, with the wind helping us down the river. We finished in 2nd place, posting a time of 2:01, which was actually the 3rd fastest time of the day and was a faster time the the winners of the competition last year! But of course it had a lot to do with the wind!
After an extended break, mainly due to the competition moving slower because of the weather, we were back in the boat for our second race of the day. There were 3 boats in that race too. We got off to a good start, and could clearly see that we were not going to have any problems in this race as the other boats were much slower than us. So we didn't push ourselves too hard and easily finished in 1st position.
Our next race had 4 boats and we needed to finish in the top 2 to progress to the next round. Unfortunately for us 2 of the teams in this race were very strong rowers. One had won the competition the year before, and the other had made it to the finals. So we knew we wouldn't have the luxury of taking it easy this time.
When the gun fired we started as strong as we could. But became very obvious to us that our start was our weakest point. The two good teams had great starts, and both got about a boat length of a lead within the first few seconds. We kept on their tails but never the ability to catch up to them. So we finished in 3rd place, and bowed out of the competition for another year!
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