6 years ago...

So I just went and signed into my old live journal account. Here's what I was doing 6 years ago on September 23, 2002. It's hard to believe that it was that long ago that I was in Pittsburgh...

I got my first race as a rower under my belt on Saturday! What a very UNORGANIZED day it was. We get to Cleveland to the trailer, and realize that we have no idea what boat we will be rowing in. After hunting down Donald we figured that out, got it down and rigged. We then went to register, were told we already registered but didn't know who did that for us. We had no bow number...ended up making our own. We had no coxswain (who goes to a race without a cox???)...but after searching the area for anyone who was willing to cox for us (which was unsuccessful) we found someone who said she'd do it if she absolutely had to. She came over to the trailer after we got our 1st call...getting ready to cox us out, and didn't have a cox box...We didn't have oars either. We get down to the docks, and a highschool cox volunteered to cox for us, and we hot seated oars from a masters boat. And we finally get out on the water to race.

We're rowing to the start and I think we had the best warm-up I've ever seen--we started off rowing by 4s, we continued to row by 4s, we kept rowing by 4s, and then about 30 strokes or so till the start we decided to row all 8. This was the 1st time the 8 of us all rowed together. The race wasn't bad. I felt bad sitting 7 seat, I felt like I kept messing everything up, I missed a couple strokes, got a couple lovely new blisters on my hand :) But all in all I had a good time!!! We ended up finishing in 4th place.

I missed out on the unloading of the boats. They wanted us to be down at the boathouse 6am Sunday morning. Um, no thanks...Sunday's (and Saturday's) are my only days to sleep in, so there was no way I was getting up at 5:15am to spend 30 minutes down there to put the boats away. My next race is October 5th...You guys should come to Pittsburgh and watch me kick some butt!!!!