races (riverine and road)

The only two sporting events I really give a damn about (aside from those in which I myself am taking part) are the World Cup and the Oxford-Cambridge boat races. The latter have been taking place this week, and the Boat Race itself was today. Sadly, the dark blues lost. At Henley last weekend, where the lightweights' and womens' boats compete, Cambridge won the women's heavyweight race, but Oxford took the rest. Allow me to register my irritation that the women's crews still do not have a proper equivalent to the men's long race on the Thames, with attendant televised hoopla and international acclaim.

Parochial rivalry and feminist ire aside, though, it was still a beautiful race. A skilled racing eight filmed from above could almost be mistaken for a single organism, some sort of many-legged mechanical insect skimming across the water's surface. Something of the grace and synchronicity of the sport becomes apparent, and reminds me why I love it so. There's still not a single day that I don't miss the river.

Here's an NYT piece on the history of the Boat Race: as the Cambridge coach says, it's "a one-off on a very unpredictable and uncertain piece of water....It’s the middle of spring on a tidal river in Northern Europe, we could see anything.” True dat. Back in 2003 I did the Women's Eights Head of the River Race (WEHoRR, yes, there are many jokes about the acronym), which takes place on the same four-mile length of the Thames, but in the opposite direction: from Chiswick to Putney Bridge. Thankfully, we were headed downstream (the Boat Race goes upstream) but it was still a challenging and marvelous experience. Hundreds of women's crews from all around the world join the race each year, and I nourish a faint hope of doing so again some day--one Dutch crew we saw near the start were in their mid-fifties.

Speaking of sporting events in which I am participating, this morning I did my last lengthy training run before the half-marathon--three loops of Prospect Park, about fifteen kilometers in all, which is the longest I've run in one go since October 2005. It felt remarkably good, and I'm now convinced that I can actually make it to the finish line next Saturday. The last 3 miles will probably be unpleasant, but my greatest asset as a runner is sheer stubbornness, and that will do. I hope the wind grows less bitter before the 14th.

(Images: the 2006 Boat Race, courtesy of the BBC; women carrying blades at an early WEHoRR, from the WEHoRR site.)