Happy New Year from all at Queen’s Rowing! Our athletes took the well-deserved time to rest and fuel up bodies (more so in some cases!) and are now back at training, hitting the ground running!
Last semester we welcomed in our new batch of Novices. The recruits spent their winter training enjoying the annual events of Tub champs and Winter Sprints against Trinity College Dublin as well as the social side of the clubs annual dinners. The dinners are a great chance to get together wearing something other than training kit and meet alumni rowers, have a good feed and win some prizes in the raffle! We are pleased to have so many Novices with us in the new year and look forward to sending them to their first events to represent the club and university in the coming months. Thank you to the marvellous Novice managers for supporting and organising the novices, and we hope they will go on to do you proud!
The final event of 2017, of course was the Lagan Festive head. The Men’s club entered a Senior 8+ with a time of 9.52.1 and an Intermediate 8+ with a time of 10.22.3 finishing 1st and 2nd respectively. Also entered were 4 Novice 8+’s with the best results 7th and 13th, as well as an Intermediate 2X- finishing 17th and Intermediate 1X of Caolan Baldwin finishing 34th.
On the 23rd December Queens Rowing held a bag pack fundraising event in collective with the NI Childrens Hospice. We raised £1770.88 to be split 50:50 between the charity and the club. Thank-you to all our volunteers and to all those who donated!
To kick start the new year, all Queens athletes took part in an intense training camp. Whilst the EAP athletes ventured of to Seville in Spain for the good, warm conditions, the majority of the club stayed to face some stormy conditions on the Lagan. However, neither the weather or amount of training sessions fazed the Queens athletes, as we spent the final session of each day mixing boats with the Senior and Novice athletes. We feel this is a very important exercise to help the teams bond, as well as give our novices an idea of the skill level they should be aiming for. However, when the seniors encouraged a 19 minute piece to ‘accidentally’ become a 25 minute piece, our Novices really got to know what a head race may be like!
We look forward to updating you soon on January’s highlights.