12/11/06

Gold and Silver for Upper Thames Women at British Indoor Rowing Championships

Women members of Upper Thames Rowing Club excelled themselves at the British Indoor Rowing Championships last Sunday (12th November). This is the world’s biggest indoor rowing race and the largest indoor sporting event in the United Kingdom, with 3,000 athletes gathering to race at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham. Men and women competitors organised into different categories by gender, weight and age race over 2,000 metres on ergometer rowing machines.

Upper Thames’s Beth Jackson competed in the women's 30 to 34 years of age category, winning gold for the second year running, in a time of 7 min 10 sec for the 2,000 metres. Beth executed a controlled and powerful race, leading from 500 metres and edging away from her opposition through the middle of the piece before sprinting to the finish line in commanding form.

Mary-Ann Chalmers was next to race for Upper Thames. She was in the lightweight women's 35 to 39 category. Having won gold medals at the event for the last two years she was hoping to score a hat-trick. Again, a carefully thought-out race plan put Mary-Ann in the lead with 600 metres left but she ended up having to settle for the silver medal after a sprint finish from the winner (and UK record holder) Christina Nugent-Lee, this despite finishing in an impressive time of 7 min 29 sec which was directly comparable to the medallists in the Women's Lightweight Open event.

The competition takes place in a high-octane environment where entrants race for 2,000metres throughout the course of one day, providing a stage for indoor rowing enthusiasts to test themselves at a national level and assess their performance and progress. The rowing machines are properly called Concept 2 ergometers which readers will have encountered in their local gyms. Lined up in serried ranks in the vast cavernous Birmingham Arena they provide a valuable measure of rowing fitness and are a particularly useful training tool for rowers in the long winter months when it is too dark to get out on the water.

It is often cited that "ergos don't float" but a 2,000 metre race will truly test a competitor's mental toughness and raw power, although clearly watermanship is not one of the requirements for success.