| Lake Casitas Rowing Association, California, USA |
David Harralson (stroke) is US Masters National gold medalist J class (80+) is coached by Eric Gillette who medalled at World Cup in the US LM8+
Started off without RANDALLfoils.
Went through a bunch of drills until the boat balanced at catch and release.
I set a program on my CrewNerd - 300 meters, 30-second start delay. Stroke rate of 30. The boat seemed slow to accelerate and took forever to get below 2:20. I saw a best of 2:15, most over 2:20. For perspective, at WRMR at Bled last fall, the gold medal split for the J Class (80+) 2- was 2:22 or so, so this was gold medal pace in an old, slow boat. Our boat age was 81.
Eric came over with our other pair of oars with RANDALLfoils installed and we swapped. The first half of the first run felt good, but then we ran into a headwind and the last half was a struggle and Eric said we looked tired (well, by that time we had been out an hour and 6,000+ high-intensity meters). We turned around and rested a few minutes this time and did the last piece back. This was good, I saw a 2:09 with most of it between 2:10 and 2:15.
On the way back, Eric took video of us. A relaxed 26 and 3/4 stroke and pressure (I could not get more forward than 3/4 slide in that boat since I hit the front stops. I have my standard bow splash at the catch (not bad this time since I was rigged so high in the heavyweight boat) and Don was not comfortable with his oar up off the water, but otherwise, it looked OK. I love watching video, and learn something each time. It does look like the foils have my oar at almost the perfect height/depth, but my normal rowing style is just barely submerged anyway.
So, it looks like the foils give us a 5 second split rate improvement, like we saw the last time. I could feel no difference between foil and no foil. The boat just goes faster.
