It’s Friday afternoon here in Gifu Japan. I’ve had a good 12 hours to digest the efforts of yesterday. As you’ll know from my last email, we had a couple of days resting up in preparation for the semi-final, we only did one row a day as a 4 kilometre row is just not worth the 3 hours worth of bus travel per day.

 

Thursday turned on a cracker day, we arrived at the course for a pre-race paddle and just cruised over the course, it’s been pretty wobbly, what with the 50 odd crews on the water and a bit of wash back off the walls in the last 500 metres. Things felt reasonably together though I was still a little nervous about the speed the Italians had shown in their heat which was 2 seconds faster than ours. I don’t mind nerves to much, just my body’s way of saying it’s ready to go, plus I was confident having beaten them a couple of times before.

The heat hasn’t let up since we got here and Thursday was no different, plus this time we were racing about 90 minutes later than Mondays push. In the end we took the same approach as the heat, cutting down our warm up a bit and stopping a bit more to keep the fluids up on the way to the start. In the blocks I was feeling pretty fired up, I didn’t want to have to fight through the field, so was amped to get a good push out of the blocks. Maybe a little to much, as when I jammed on the first stroke, George wasn’t quite ready for it and we headed off course a bit out of the blocks, however the overall effect was we again managed to get our nose out in front. It’s still a bit of weird feeling leading an international field out of the blocks, especially after years of not quite being able to foot it with the big boys, however I think I could get used to it.

 

By 500 metres we had about a 2 length lead and from there we did push the envelope to much, we still had to keep the pushes on to ensure we didn’t get caught up with the other crews behind us, it must have worked as we went through the 500 metre in 1:29 about 5 seconds under world best pace and 3:03 through the 1000 metre. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t have the pacecoach going as I’d imagine wasting energy to get a world best time and then not doing ourselves justice in the final would do all sorts of horrible things to ones psyche.

 

Italy did come back at us a little in the end but we we're holding through and still ended up with clear water. In the other semi, which was delayed because of an umpires boat caught on a wire, Croatia lead out South Africa closely followed by Canada. The Saffa’s ended up pushing through to take the win 2 seconds faster than oour race and by ½ a length with Canada another ¾’s down. I don’t know how hard they all went but I like to think they all stuffed themselves.

 

We had a bit of a sleep-in this morning and trained this afternoon, the weather has started to turn again, after a light tail breeze in the morning there were pretty strong headwinds by the time we got down for a training row in the afternoon. That pattern is likely to be the same tomorrow, so looks like any opportunity to get world best time next to our names is gone. I don’t think head winds are a particular disadvantage but everyone likes a quicker race I guess.

 

We’ve drawn the middle lane with South Africa and Croatia on either side. I’m ready for a bun fight and confident that if it gets down to similar margins as the final in Athens a year ago, the opposition is going find we’re not going to be outsprinted.

 

(P.S. More photos added as well)