I got out on a boat for the first time for a couple of weeks. This was a good thing as I've slightly lost the impetus in my exercise regime since doing the Half Marathon. I've hardly been running at all and when I have I have found myself exhausted at the two or three mile mark and since I did the lung busting 2K test with Pinsent last week I have been very reluctant to get on my ergo: it hurt me and I'm not sure I can forgive it and take it back.
I think part of this is due to the fact that I suddenly had work to do last week, with a lot of frantic writing for the radio pilot. How people with proper jobs manage to find the time to train for the Marathon, God only knows. They probably aren't also trying to learn how to row, but evenso.
So it was good to be out on the water, with a team of people and be forced to put the work in. We were in a four, with me, Helen, Emma and Wheelie (one of our experienced rowers) and Aitken squeezed into the cox's seat. Matthew Pinsent had come down to see us in action, despite the fact that he is training hard for the Olympics at the moment. It is good he has his priorities right: the false Oxford-Cambridge boat race is more important than any other event. It is the most prestigious event in the rowing calendar. Other oarsmen look at us with envy when they realise that we were chosen and they were not.
I had been worried that I might have forgotten everything I had learned, but early signs were encouraging. My blade was even leaving puddles in its wake, which is apparently a good sign. I was fine as long as I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, but Matthew and Martin kept bombarding us with information and new things we had to be doing. I tensed up a bit and started making mistakes.
After the millions I have earned in "Richard Herring says 'Relax Your Shoulders'" T-shirt sales you'd think that my shoulders would have been the most relaxed in the crew. In fact any discovery that my shoulders were tense and raised would be akin to Dr Atkins being found to have been grossly overweight at his death with his mouth crammed with chips. I am sorry to inform you that Martin told me that I was hunching my shoulders up so much that I looked like Quasimodo. He asked me to demonstrate how my shoulders would be if I was trying to look like Joe Cool out on the pull, whoever Joe Cool might be. This was his elaborate way of saying "Relax Your Shoulders", so I did, though I actually feel that Quasimodo is a more appealing, honest and attractive character than this Joe Cool person, who is pretending to be something who is not and who is so uncool that he thinks he has to have cool in his name in order to make himself appear cooler than he is. Women can see past humps and distorted faces to see the inner beauty of a man. Which is probably why I haven't got a date for Valentine's Day this year: all the hunchbacks have bagsied the best women. I suppose I could go out with a hunchbacked woman who lives in a bell-tower, but the problem with that is that I am not particularly interested in inner beauty. I like beauty on the outside, where you can actually see it. If there is ugliness within then I'm not that bothered, as long as it stays where no-one can see it and is masked by outer beauty. A woman might have the most beautiful spleen in the world, but unless she's prepared to hack it out and wear it on her dress as a kind of broach, so my friends can all see it and be jealous of me for having such a fine spleened lover, then I'm sorry, I'm not interested. You can call me shallow. That would be preferable to being called strange.
I didn't labour this point as time was limited and I understood that Martin was just saying I was tense. I will forget about Quasimodo and Joe Cool and beautiful and arousing spleens and just try to relax. To relax my shoulders.
