Your eyes are set on a goal.
Each stroke. Each pull of the erg handle. Each leg press. It’s for that goal.
It’s the mantra we say to ourselves halfway through a 5km erg test, when you’re questioning your life choices and why you decided rowing was the way to go.
At 5am in the morning, when it’s pouring with rain, your coach shouts it from the launch – it’s that checkpoint you’re aiming for, to lay down a marker, to beat your previous times.
And just like that, the goal is gone.
Silence.
A litany of races has been cancelled over the past few months due to bad weather. Fours Head, Head of the Lune (Lancaster), and Wallingford Head are among dozens of events not taking place this year.
No one can blame the organisers. They want races to run to have something to show for all the sleepless nights and hours spent planning. But safety must come first.
Speaking on The End of The Island podcast, Richard Phelps, Chairman of the Fours Head organising committee, said: “We are a race committee and that’s for a reason. We want to put a race on. We don’t want to cancel races. Our mission is to provide the best fours head racing in the country at any time in the year. It’s not in our mindset or our DNA to cancel.”
As an athlete, the long winter training block can be gruelling: the dark mornings, the bitterly cold rain, and the nights which draw in at 4pm.
But worst of all this year, there will be nothing concrete to show for the slog. Pieces and hard ergs cannot recreate the adrenaline and pressure of big races. And many coaches have been relying on these times to create a training plan to finesse the details for the coming months.
The cancellation of Fours Head meant the only chance to see Oxford and Cambridge clash before the Boat Race disappeared. This may be great for cinematic suspense, but for the athletes and coaches, it can be frustrating not to have a benchmark of where you’re at in the season.
At the Presidents’ Challenge last week, Oxford Women’s President Ella Stadler said: “Fours Head being cancelled was a massive shame. I think psychologically and physically a lot goes into it.
“We’d spent two weeks in the fours and we were all really excited. I was ready to show Cambridge how good we were this year. To have that cancelled 36 hours before we were meant to boat is so disheartening.”
Stadler explained that Oxford instead completed hard pieces in relay teams to channel the momentum, but that Trial Eights was a good focal point to work towards.
And the same applies to smaller clubs too. And amidst the lack of data to analyse, we risk falling into the same predictions of the “great clubs” rising to the top based on previous results and the underdogs getting forgotten.
But not all is without hope.
Just think of how special it will be to race again. Let’s just hope it’s a matter of weeks not months.
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