Story
UPDATE:
On Saturday 4th December, Christ's College Boat Club including coxes, alumni, coaches and current members covered 1096843m on indoor rowing machines.
The reasoning behind our challenge can be found below.
We reached the million metre mark at around 5.15pm. The exact distance to Aiguebelette is 1095km by road so we decided to set a new target for 6pm, to reach the full 1095km. At 5.58pm we easied and counted up our totals and found we were about 5000m short of our goal. All 7 of us on the rowing machines did a last minute dash to complete 800m each to reach our goal. We finished this dash at 6.02pm, just two minutes past our target time. However, we did also (somehow) do 1843m too many so perhaps did actually cross the 1095km mark at 6pm!
It was an amazing day at the boat house. So many different people from different generations with different connections to the club taking time out of their Saturday (some from 6am in the morning) to help us reach our target! The club spirit was amazing and I really feel the day did wonders for club unity. Having seniors, novices, coxes, coaches, alumni etc all on the rowing machines beside each other aiming for one goal fostered a brilliant feeling of 'in it together'. Even after 4 hours on the rowing machines, some people still stepped up to the challenge when a rowing machine was empty to clock up even more metres towards our target.
Some statistics for the day are:
Total metres: 1096843m
Number of people involved: 63
Number of alumni involved: 9 (14%)
Average speed: 91.4km/hour = 56.8miles/hour
Most distance covered by a man: 57748m (Mike Upton)
Most distance covered by a woman: 50879m (Lucy Griffin)
I'd like to thank all those that took part and allowed the event to happen, particularly the alumni who took time to help us reach our target.
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Dear all
This year for the first time Christ's College Boat Club is having a training camp abroad. The pre-lent term camp occurs in early January, which often means that the weather conditions can result in the cancellation of a rowing camp organised within the UK. By going abroad we can be more confident in having conditions suitable for rowing and are therefore able to provide the best possible opportunity to our members to get the most out of the camp. The coming camp will be held at Aiguebelette Lake, France between the 5th & 12th January 2011. Two women's VIIIs and two men's VIIIs will be going, which, combined with coaches results in over 40 people participating. We are very excited about the opportunities which the camp will provide to the club. Not only will it give us the best possible opportunity to improve the level of rowing ability prior to the commencement of Lent term, it will also give the club members an opportunity to bond which is very important when it comes to race day and you need to have complete faith that every other member of the crew is pushing as hard as you are!
The camp has been supported by the Boat Club Steering Committee and also by Christ's College itself. Both parties providing technical support to the organisation committee and also contributing financially to the cost of running the camp. The participating member's are themselves also contributing over the half the cost of the camp.
In addition to the above financial contributions, members (old and new) and friends of Christ's College Boat Club are undertaking a sponsored challenge this Saturday (4th December) to row 1 million metres on rowing machines. We aim to complete the challenge before the commencement of the Boat Club dinner. We estimate we will need all 7 rowing machines going for 12 hours to reach the 1 million metre mark before the dinner. The distance is not arbitrary either, it is approximately the distance to Aiguebelette Lake in France from Cambridge! Current we have coaches, coxes, senior rowers, novice rowers and alumni members taking part in the erg.