Earlier this week Martin said to me, "I really admire your bottle for doing all this training and a half Marathon in the same week, but I think you should think about it carefully." By Thursday I realised that he was right to be cautious. It took me a couple of days to recover from the Watford Half Marathon and I want to be in my best possible shape for the Boat Race on Wednesday. The consequence of all this is that I decided to pull out of the Half Marathon.
Martin was keen to get us out to row again today, but I said that I felt I had to at least do a 5 mile run to make up for the lack of training on the running side of things. His solution was to get me to meet him near the Molesey rowing club near Hampton court at 8.30am so we could go for a run together, before then going out for a row.
Thanks to his hypnotic powers I agreed to this insane plan. I just hope that Martin doesn't suggest we all drink cyanide after the race, because on current form I think most of us will do it.
Controversial journalist, Toby Young also came along for the run. We did around four or five miles through Hampton Court gardens and Bushey Park. It was rather charming and more importantly I had lots of energy and seemed to still remember how to run. I picked up the pace for the last few hundred metres and it all felt good. Toby did not seem to want to race me this time.
Me, Toby, Emma and Martin went out in an uncoxed four and worked on mainly technical issues. But things seemed about a thousand times better than the trip I'd had in a four just a week ago. A four is harder to balance, but we seemed to do OK. There was one slightly hairy moment when we passed the rowing club and all the other rowers on the shore started shouting at us and waving their arms. I looked behind me and we seemed to be heading directly for a big boat (a larger and posher version of the boat I'd been out on in Finland). At this point Emma's blade had also popped out of its gate (what a schoolboy error, that could never happen to me). Martin was very cool about it and he was right to be. We got nowhere near crashing. Luckily for me as I was in the bow and would have been pulverised.
I decided to have a quiet night in and watch a DVD and eat some ice cream (as a rower I have to eat 6000 calories a day. This is the best thing about it). Blockbuster had a two tubs of Ben and Jerry's ice cream for a fiver offer, so I thought I'd take advantage of that. I have a freezer, so the ice cream would keep in the unlikely event that I didn't eat it all in one night. I chose one "Caramel Sutra" and one "Caramel Chew Chew". When I took it up to the check-out desk the cashier commented, "Someone likes Caramel!" What is it with the shopping assistants of Shepherd's Bush? Why do they find it necessary to comment on my purchases in this identical way? And given they had this special "buy two" offer, it surely wasn't that unusual for someone to have chosen two tubs based around caramel. If I had fourteen tubs, all with caramel in them and was standing at the check-out, gouging out any bit of ice cream that didn't have caramel in it, then I think that might have been worthy of comment. But I wasn't doing that. I just had two tubs of ice cream, which admittedly both contained caramel and one DVD of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" which contained no carmel (at least in its title - it is possible that Sean Connery might be eating a caramel based confection at some point in the film, but if so it is not commented upon, either directly or in the actor and crew commentaries that come on the DVD). Had I hired out a compilation of all the Cadbury's Caramel adverts as well as the two tubs of ice cream then I think he'd have a point. But I wasn't.
I didn't make a fuss though, because he is right. Someone does like caramel. That someone is me. It's delicious. Much better than yoghurts. By miles.
