North East Indoor Rowing Championships

Newcastle University Boat Club made the short trip down a windy A1 to take part in the North East Indoor Rowing Championships in Durham. With the (now removed from their website) bold threat from Durham University Boat Club, that they would dominate us on their home turf ringing in their minds, our men and women were fired up for a strong performance – and they didn’t fail to deliver. Despite still recovering from the excellent Jim London Dinner only four days previously, plenty of our rowers scored impressive personal bests – in one instance knocking 17 seconds off their previous record.

In the men’s heavyweight category, Sam Arnot delivered the best score of the day with a powerful 6:00.5, and Newcastle’s men filled plenty of the top slots; the lightweight men filled postions 2-5, whilst in the heavyweight women event Nicole Lamb was the fastest NUBC woman of the day, finishing her 2000m erg in 7:14. In the lightweight women category, Gemma Hall scored a personal best of 7:19.4, which was not only the fastest time of the day in her category but currently ranks her as the fastest BUCS lightweight women in the country.

In the beginner events, the novice women demonstrated good strength-in-depth, whilst the novice men also put in a strong performance. For both novice squads, their first 2k test is always going to be a steep learning experience but it was impressive to see them pushing themselves so hard.

Focus for our GB trialists switches to the 2nd compulsory assessment on Saturday 17 December, held in Boston, Lincs and is a 5000m time trial in singles and pairs. For the rest of the club, training continues as usual until the end of term, before switching to the Christmas training programme.