Lent Bumps 2011

Happy Friday to everyone, the close of a week that has flown by, mostly with rowing.  But first, let's back up a bit.

Several weeks ago, I set myself a deadline of this last Monday for sending my supervisor an essay comparing two Tennyson poems.  The first half was fairly easy; I've already told you what I was basically arguing about his most famous poem, In Memoriam.  The second half, about one of his lesser poems (The Princess, which I'm starting to think was intentionally funny), was harder to make a statement about.  Still, I finally managed to send the essay off late Monday night, thus freeing myself to enjoy this week.  I meet my supervisor Tuesday, and I hope it will be productive.  Here's an illustration from an American edition of The Princess, which was later adapted into the G&S show Princess Ida.

Now, on to Lent Bumps.  This is a series of races, nearly one a day.  It's kind of like a simultaneous playoff series: 17 boats line up, equally spaced apart.  The order is established by some combination of how good your qualifying time was and where your boat ranked last year, if you had one at all.

Your goal is to "bump" the boat in front -- either with physical contact or drawing up alongside until their coxswain concedes.  Then those two boats move off to the side and the ones behind keep going.  In theory, the next boat can row past the two who are off to the side and bump the one that was ahead of both of them -- this is called overbumping.  When it's all over, they shift the order accordingly and the next day you do it again.

As you can imagine, this causes a great deal of chaos and is an imperfect test of proper ranking.  But it's kind of fun anyway.  Tuesday and Wednesday we bumped the boat ahead of us almost instantly.  As signs of victory, we got to row home with ivy wreaths in our hair, gleaned from trees on the bank (see photo).  Today the boats ahead of us weren't very good and bumped each other out before we could get to them.  This left a looong distance between us and anyone we could possibly bump.  So we just finished out the course and will remain stationary in the order for tomorrow.  This is called "rowing over."

But check it out, there's video of me rowing!  Our boat appears at 2:18 and goes out of frame for a bit before they turn the camera.  I'm in the bow -- i.e., nearest the camera, with white sleeves.  It looks like we're just having a leisurely day out, but it was so hard to breathe!

With that, I wish you all a good weekend.