rockin it

...and still hanging around the deutchland. It has been somewhat frustrating that I have experienced virtually no german culture. We are pretty far out of the city, and havent had the chance to walk around brandenberg. I am hoping that we will get some time later, we will see. I think I will try to make more effort to interact with rowers from different countries. So far we have just been taking the team bus from our hotel to the racecourse and back. I did meet some Kiwis today who didnt seem very friendly towards americans, as well as some Belarussians who didnt speak very much English.

We did our last long hard pieces today with a 1250 and a 750. We pulled pretty good times, although the boat didnt feel as fast as it has. I think we will perform much better when we have a boat next to us. This was certainly the case when we pieced the senior A rowers; we really stepped up our game. Heats are still three days away, and the final is 5 days away, so we still have some time to fine tune and get everything clickin. Conditions are so much better than last year. Last year we didnt touch our boat until 36 hours before our first race, and didnt row a complete boat until the semifinal. We've already had three rows, which have all been pretty good. As I mentioned before, the weather could definitely be a factor on this racecourse, but our boat is handling adverse conditions pretty well, so hopefully it wont affect us. Around 200m of the course are well sheltered around the 1000m mark, where the water is pretty flat. Everwhere else we get some decent chop much of the time. Everyone will try to move in the middle stretch in the good water. We will try to win the race there.