Monster Erg

The pain-train that IS the monster erg is my ROWING anniversary!  Something that is both painful, graceful and motivating all at the same time is a very good rowing analogy. The winter before I moved to Victoria full time I took a weekend off studying and drove back to Canada to show my stuff against the other local guys (UVic, Gorge Rowing, VCRC) and any other national team member. That first erg test PR was 6:37 for 2000m. Race plan was for any new personal record, but 6:30 is what I wanted.

I showed up bright and early and eight lightweights from the National Team arrived shortly after! These are the VTC lightweight guys (Victoria Training Centre) that I look up to immensely. Instantaneous motivation for this race. I had my plan and was going to stick to it. The race organizers were 45min behind schedule so I had a solid hour of warm-up which may be important in future events.

I was able to score Dylan Cunningham, a teammate turned cyclist, as my personal motivator and he was excellent; yelling at me almost every stroke and keeping  me strong.

I missed the starting signal - I was tying my shoes, typical! So, I immediately was behind by probably 1-2 seconds. But, I had my race plan all sorted in my head so I just locked into my technique. I wanted to hit 1:35-1:36/500m split for first 1200m, then pick it up where I could to 1:34 split and in the last 400 drop it to 1:32 all out... For the actual race I hit dead-on for 1200m, the next 5oom was an increase to 1:34, but the last 300m I just maintained - I couldn't see straight and was mostly just closing my eyes and pulling all out - I felt I slowed a bit in the last 300 that I need to work on next time.

My time in the end was 6:25.1! I was in 5th place. Four National team guys were ahead of me and by a few seconds but I was a second or two ahead of the four other VTC (Victoria Training Centre) guys.

1 Terry McKall victoria training center 06:15.7

2 Tim Myers victoria training center 06:17.5

3 Mike Lewis victoria training center 06:19.6

4 Morgan Jarvis victoria training center 06:21.8

5 Derek Vinge victoria city rowing club 06:25.1

6 Rares Crisan victoria training center 06:26.0

7 Simon Gowdy victoria training center 06:28.8

8 John Sasi victoria training center 06:32.9

9 Zhongming Huang gorge rowing and paddling 06:39.2

10 Matt Jensen victoria training center 06:39.3

11 George Kostaros university of victoria 06:42.3

12 Hugh Wallace university of victoria 06:49.8

VTC LM Monster Erg from Malcolm Howard on Vimeo.