Wallingford Head 2014

On December 7th, some of the men’s squad travelled far up river to the Wallingford Head to take on the majority of the Thames Valley university, club and school crews. Due to entries filing up absurdly fast we only managed to send a small number but they acquitted themselves well, in particular the top end and intermediate guys in the IM2 and IM1eights.

The first division saw 3 TRC crews racing in IM2. For to of these crews it was purely as a warm up for their IM3 in the PM division, for the other crew it was to see how close we could get to Oxford Brookes on their own water. This lead crew in fact beat OBU by a fraction of a second but annoyingly, due to Tom Harvey’s last minute back injury, the crew was over pointed and not elligble for the ‘pots’. Nonetheless, a promising result.

In the afternoon division, a different combination took on IM1 and finished 2nd in that category, 8 secs behind a Brookes crew and just 1.4 seconds behind Imperial’s Elite crew. Not bad for a second outing and shows that our crews are at last learning to start hard, work the strong rhythm and are actually fit enough to last the course. In the IM3 our two crews gave a strong showing but lost to Nepthys and City of Oxford. Nevertheless this is promising for the New Year and a huge, huge step on from last years crews at this level.

Over all, we finished
3rd and 7th with the top end men overall (1st/18 in IM2 and 2nd/13 in IM1)
4th and 9th of 18 in IM3.

A useful day's racing and a good sharpener for the Remenham.