the day before

things are pretty high strung for the heats tomorrow. The lane assignments were supposed to have come out a couple of hours ago, so we keep hitting refresh to see if they are uploaded. We did 2 500m pieces this morning to get dialed in before tomorrow. Both were pretty quick, although the paddle and drilling in between were pretty frustrating because theyre were hundreds of boats on the water. All the 8+s 4xs and 4-s feel the need to show some huevos, so everybody is constantly playing chicken with each other. stressful. We were on the paddle after one of our 500s and the British 8+ came sceaming up behind us, almost colliding with us. The racecouse continues to have a pretty good crosswind, particularly in the late morning, so I think we can expect less than ideal conditions for racing. I think the key for us is to stay in the boat and row our own race; we have plenty of speed, and our greatest weakness is getting flustered or getting distracted.

If you want to check on how the heats went, go to worldrowing.com and click on results, and look for U23 results (or live race viewer if you are inclined). Oh dang, the heat list just came out: we drew
1 USA United States of America
2 CAN Canada
3 ITA Italy
4 NZL New Zealand
5 EST Estonia

I think it is a tough heat; Canada and Italy are always pretty fast, New Zealand won Junior worlds two years ago, and only sends the 8+ as a priority boat, and Estonia won gold in the same event last year. Lane 1 also catches the worst of the crosswind, so we will have to deal with that. We will see. The race goes down at 4:42pm our time, which is 7:42am PDT, and 10:42am EDT.

We had the afternoon off, so ive been sitting around the hotel. Here are some highlights of the past few days:
- seeing the Iranian women's team row with head-scarves on
- watching the Tour de France in German. The german announcers are no Phil Ligget, but its fun to watch anyway. It really makes me homesick for California because so much of Southern France, where they were riding today, looks like Sonoma County.