Chapter 4 and 5:Power and Stroke Correction

I admit..i havent been consistent in blogging. well tts coz of Mayday! hahaha i'm still suffering from a hangover although their concert was a wk ago.

if u noticed, last wk's entry was dedicated entirely to Mayday and how 棒！their concert was. Their songs are still ringing in my head, and btw i had a bizarre dream abt em last Monday. lolx

To compensate, let me do 2 chapters at one go.

29 August 2009 Saturday (Chapter 4: Power~):
went for trg in a slightly groggy state coz i had night shift which ended at 8am. this basically meant tt aft my shift ended at 8am on Sat morning, i had a gd 4hrs rest at home before heading out to SDBA for trg.

trg menu today was focusing on anaerobic. speed work. smtg tt i 即爱。。又恨. reason why i hate anaerobic trg is coz i suck at it. ha my heart cant seem to react well to anaerobic trg. we did 3 sets of 8x30sec. aft every 30 sec, there'd be some sorta active rest in btwn. den we had longer rest in btwn the sets.

since i suck at anaerobic, u cld almost picture how badly i was left panting at the end of each set.

anw the gd thing abt speed trg, as its name suggest, is tt it's extremely speed-y. ha! the sets are completed in a blink of an eye. everytime i'm made to do speed work i always think "长痛不如短痛" and tt seems to help me get past the physical aspect of it. mind over body almost always work for me.

aft we finished speed trg, coach decided to go for endurance row. frm nicoll hwy bridge to sheares bridge and repeat tt again.

omg! for a moment i thought how deja vu it was. flashback to yr1 intensive trg period where we had to literally pull the heavy barnicles-surfaced(we call it orh-lua, dunno why)SDBA boat to sheares bridge and back. in those days, that alone constituted as warm up row only.

tiz time rd, the difficulty was tt it was 11 rowers on a big SDBA boat. though there's no tyre, it was equally tiring coz we had juz completed the speed trg prior to tt, and furthermore we are not youthful pple but pple working in office who are leading sedentary lifestyles!

it was by no mean feat tt we completed it. thankfully.

so tt sums up the trg on 29th Aug. btw right aft trg tt day, i went Kallang Leisure Park to wait for my 4 frens to go for the Mayday concert. i didnt bother abt image (since when did i..ha). i bought a drink at coffee bean and pretended to read a story book. in actual fact, i was laying my head down and sleeping. i was really that drained. accumulation of tiredness frm work and trg.

5 September 2009 Saturday (Chapter 5: Stroke Correction):
today's turnout was small. there were only 7 of us so we took a small boat. coach focused mainly on stroke correction. to be more exact, correcting my stroke.

well coz my stroke is slightly different frm the rest. front is ok, he needed me to perfect the ending part of the stroke. for a gd 30min or so, he explained and break down the stroke for me.

he focused on

Entry: how to obtain a gd front catch, the angle he wanted my blade entry to be.

Middle: where to pull the stroke towards

End: where to execute a twist to obtain a nice finishing stroke, recovery. then preparare for a pause in front in anticipation of the next stroke.

coach is actually quite lame. he was commenting how he was gonna coach the Sunday Dragons frm 4-6pm, and den Lisa quizzed him why Sunday Dragons' trg is Saturday and not Sunday.

His reply: coz the heats are on Saturday mah! if they want to be able to make it on Sunday, day 2 of race day (semi finals and finals), they muz train on Saturday instead. Muz qualify during heats which is held on Saturday!

the whole boat totally -_-^

2nd funny incident tt i have to say! (*raine dun be angry hahaha). When we were doing cool down, raine approached me and said tt they will proceed to the nursery to launch the small nus boat, so i can join em ltr once i'm done.

aft raine walked away, hak loon (my coach) said, "你也认识她？she belongs the one of the last few batches in nus tt was very 拼命. their batch is one of those tt worked frm bottom to being 1st"

i looked at coach and replied, "其实我跟 raine 是同样一个 batch"

there are 2 ways to interpret. muahaha. 1) raine looks like she's frm a more senior batch than me..meaning she looks old. 2) im very chui..unlike raine's batch who's v zai.

when i told the nus ex-rowers abt the story, we all burst out laughing. i guess he really thought raine looks like frm a more senior batch than me. lolx.