Relief

It has been a good week.

Mr Why? Senior has taken his first steps with his latest hip, with all the signs filtering down to the Big Smoke being extremely encouraging so far. I'm hoping to head north in the not-too-distant future to see his new-found mobility for myself.

Speaking of mobility, the programme I've been working on for the last year or so has been officially mobilised/launched/rebranded/reorganised/re-christened/baptised/etc. This required an away day at a conference centre playing buzzword bingo during listening to the morning's presentations before stepping in as a late replacement facilitator for the afternoon workshop sessions. I hate facilitating these things - it's always awkward to find oneself trying to limit the input of important people who like to talk a lot and encourage people a few rungs further down the organisational ladder to share their thoughts. Fortunately, the group I had was rather good in this respect, with it's most senior member doing a surprisingly good job of facilitating the session himself, leaving me the relatively politically safe task of writing neatly on the flipcharts. Another relief...

What else? Oh yes, I remember - training appears to be paying off. This is a relief otherwise I'd be taking a leaf out of other people's books and jacking in the notion that training improves performance. I reset my maximum weights midweek and managed to crank another 10% onto most of the weights. The next weights session will leave me in Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) agony for about 72 hours, if previous experience is anything to go by (but it's several weeks until we race again, so that's OK). This time, however, I will ensure that I move anything frequently used downstairs so that I don't find myself in the tricky situation of having to weigh the pros and cons of the pain involved in descending the stairs to get myself to the loo against the slow torture of an increasingly full bladder. (Life is full of such difficult choices...)

The last source of relief for the week is that I have now been out in a pair twice and not died/required the services of the lovely people at the RNLI. A couple of us had been toying for a while with the possibility of taking out a pair. We regularly find ourselves in the gym in the evenings when the water is beautifully calm and the skies clear and sunny, and figured learning to pair successfully would enable us to get off the ergs and onto the water a bit more often. When a suitably robust pair returned from repair, we seized the opportunity to take it out.

Somehow, I've managed to acquire the job of steering.

I now have renewed sympathy for the various coxless boats which have managed to crash into us or cause a near miss over the last few months. Steering ain't easy. It's a bit like having to learn to drive again, but without the luxury of having an instructor with dual controls. There aren't any quiet side roads, either, and instead you're forced straight onto, say, the A6. Also, boats don't have L-plates (though they perhaps should, particularly the way I've managed to steer these last couple of days...). Oh, and the other tricky things about this steering malarkey are that you're travelling backwards, and at the mercy of your crewmates to row at an even pressure. Handily, the river is fairly quiet at the moment, as my steering is not yet perfect. Far from it, in fact.

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal and after two reasonably uneventful outings in a pair, we've decided that it's a realistic ambition to win at whatever status we end up racing at the Pairs Head (a 4km time trial in October). We've therefore got just under three months for me to learn to steer (it's always handy to be able to steer when racing on the Tideway). This might prove a little ambitious, but it's great fun and also rather exciting to have a new project to work on, and something to keep me busy over the remainder of summer.