M1
Our first race in a new M1, we approached Winter Head as more of a full-course race piece looking towards Fairbairns. It took us until First-post corner to really click into ‘race-mode’ as a crew, at which point we settled into a solid r30, attacking out of each corner and taking huge chunks out of the Imperial Medical School boat ahead of us, whilst pushing off a FaT M1 behind. The overtake came around grassy, forcing Anna to take a wider line than usual, and racing up the far side of the reach spurred on by the other cheering Imperial crews. A wind to the finish saw us complete the course in 8:55, 7th fastest college boat and just a second off Downing M1, beating FaT and Christ’s. A great result to show for all the work we’ve been putting in so far this term.
M2
M2 has had a lot of improvement since the beginning of the term and it was the time to see how far we had come. Our starting position was not very comfortable being followed by Darwin M1, which were likely to try to overtake us. This would introduce an unpleasant complication so we were determined to hold them off. The start wasn’t very good, but we quickly got into our rhythm after the lengthen call. The first 1k of the race felt really fast and Darwin was nowhere near us. Just before the long reach we had to overtake a boat and despite some small crab trouble we managed to overtake them after a power 10. We started getting a bit tired due to having kept the rate at 30+ for the whole race and eventually Darwin managed to gain on us a bit, but we had a strong finish and pushed off. Overall, we had the FASTEST M2 TIME among the colleges!!! Keen for Fairbairns.