Blog de Puree

First race in five years and it wasn’t pretty. I’ll start with the ugly. The ugly: I got smoked by 40 to 50 year-old men in the class bracket that started after mine, who rowed past me like I was out for a leisure row. My balance and course awareness sucked and my left forearm [...]

It’s been a long time since I’ve rowed competitively–the fall of 2001 to be exact. I placed third in the novice single class of the New Hampshire Championships. I haven’t been rowing all summer for nothing, and tomorrow I return to competition at the Slocum River Regatta in Dartmouth, Mass. With this 2 mile race [...]

Yesterday, I was schooled on the water by one of the better rowers at my club. We did one-minute intervals and I was able to stay with him for the first three or so. After that, he just smoked me up and down the river. It was pitiful! Even moreso because he is in his [...]

I had a nasty blister on my right hand after yesterday’s row, so I took the easy way out and hit the ergometer in the gym at work again. Jokes about my manliness aside, I had to grasp the erg handle rather gingerly today, to avoid spraying myself with lymphatic fluid or whatever that clear [...]

It turns out, my suspicions were right. Ergometer times and actual on the water times are vastly different. While rowing machines attempt to simulate actual water conditions, it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. While rowing today, I was buoyed by yesterday’s erg score of 20:58.5 and was hoping to come close to [...]

It rained this morning, so I decided to get in some indoor training for the rowing regattas I’ll be competing in this September and October. I went in to work early and made time to train on the rowing ergometer at work during lunch hour. There’s nothing like a 5,000 meter piece at full pressure, [...]

This week marked a milestone for me because I was able to start rowing. It was the first time in many years since I’ve been on the water. So I started slowly. After tying myself into the boat, which is basically fastening the velcro to the sneakers on the foot stretchers (where the feet go), [...]

Yesterday was the Festival Regatta, run by my rowing club, the Merrimac River Rowing Association (MRRA), and it turned out to be a great day for rowing. The weather was not too humid and the sun wasn’t too brutal and there was the slightest breeze on the water, making for prime rowing conditions. As a [...]