2009 High School Erg Sprnts

Saturday my rowing club hosted our annual erg sprint competition (6th year!) for the local high schools. What are erg sprints you ask? Basically an erg is an indoor rowing machine. Its primary purpose is to keep rowers (and others) in shape. It mimics what you experience out on the water or close anyway. While some erg all year round, most of us tend to use it most during the colder months when going out on the water is no longer possible. The thing about erging though - it's boring. Concept2, the maker of the erg, is always running various challenges on their web site to give us something to shoot for, to relive the boredom. Our erg sprints, we like to think, gives the high school kids something to train and shoot for as their winter training starts to wind down. Something to break up the monotony. To see how they match up with their counterparts from the other local high schools. They will begin on the water training the end of this month. My job for the sprints was the set-up and take down. A roadie of sorts. We hold the sprints at our local Golds Gym where we (my rowing club) and Golds have about 20 or so ergs available. We use only 10 for the sprints so we have to move the others out of the way and reconfigure how the ergs are lined up. We set them up facing each other to make the cabling to the computer easier. As the kids race, you can watch their progress up on a TV brought in for this purpose. Each erg shows up as a small boat that travels across the screen at a speed based on how hard and fast the rower ergs. Various information during the race is also compiled, stored and provided to their coaches. Here the ergs are set up and we're testing the connection.

In this picture, which as I remember is for the freshman girls, sit ready for the start. The girl on the far right, in the green shirt, ended up having some sort of what I perceived as a diabetic episode, almost fainted as they tried to push sugar into her via a candy bar. She didn't finish this race, but came back later and erged in the relays so good for her for hanging in there.

Here lightweight girls sit ready for their race. Lightweight girls weigh 130 or less. When Daughter#1 did high school crew the weight limit was 120 lbs. Lightweight boys weigh 165 lbs or less. When The Son did Crew, the weight limit for boys was 145 lbs or less.

Next up the senior girls open weight category. The two girls closest the camera broke the record for their category. Congrats to them.

Another picture of the lightweight girls during their race. It gets quite loud as the crowd gets into urging their racer on.

One of the final races before the relays, was the coxswain race. They race for only 500 meters as opposed to 1,000 meters for the freshmen and 1,500 meters for everyone else. These three girls (left to right) Molly, Devon and Katie also coxed for the men's side of my rowing club. They were a delight to work with and did a heck of a job for us. Molly finished first, Katie second and Devon fourth. Nice work ladies.

Finally I've included a video for your enjoyment of the start and first minute of the senior women's race. Just remember that after the video stops, they still have another four minutes of hard rowing to go. On Saturday we had no fainting, although two close calls and only one puker. Enjoy and congratulations to all that participated.

Hokie Hope

We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness ... We are the Hokies ...
-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor, poet, activist

This About Says It All

This picture sums up how we all feel. Its all so sad and tragic.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech ...
-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor, poet, activist

Aftermath

As you might expect, I've spent most of my free time keeping up with events at Virginia Tech. I didn't attend VA Tech, but I've been there numerous times. My first visit was in 1998 with Daughter#1 taking the campus tour as she considered various colleges to attend. I've sort of adopted it as my own as I have my other children's' college - Ohio and Radford. When you visit Tech you're struck by the beauty of the campus, its openness with the sinking drill field in the middle that divides the dorms from the classroom buildings, the building all made of Hokie Stone and most of all the friendliness of the people. Va Tech is located in southwest Virginia, a very rural area and is surrounded by the Blue Ridge mountains. It is the last place you expect such violence to occur.

So far I've thought the media coverage has been pretty fair if a little hard on the President of VA Tech. The one exception was Paula Zahn on CNN. As I watched her interview various people last night, her sole intent seemed to get an admission that the authorities had mishandled the whole event. Few took the bait, but it sure was annoying. I think they did the best they could given the situation. VA Tech is not a high school or middle school. Locking down a single building, like a high school, is not the same as trying to lock down an entire campus. You cannot simultaneously contact 35,000 people (students and staff). Not everyone is sitting in front of their computers reading e-mail. Most were either in class or on their way to class or driving to campus or sleeping. Plus since the first killings occurred in a dorm, a lock down of the dorms, given the gunman was not accounted for, were not a guarantee of a safe haven. And to the gun nuts who have called radio talk shows and claimed that if the students had the right to carry guns on campus, they could have prevented or minimized the horror, lets get real. 25,000 not quite adults all packing guns? That's a disaster waiting to happen. Its all a mess and fills me with an unimaginable sadness. Still I look forward to visiting VA Tech again in the fall and creating new memories.