Rowing in September (Part I)

02 Sep 2009 posted by Dave Holby

Current location – Palerique, Mexico

19331 km rowed… 20744 km remaining

Brilliant donations in the last few days have seen the money raised for Breakthrough just tip over the £10,000 which is marvellous. Had a mini panic at one point as we stuck on £9,999 – however I managed to scrabble together another 14 five penny pieces from around the house to complete a £5 bag and we were in business!

I was very lucky to meet the lovely people of the Basingstoke Writer’s Circle last Tuesday - Bruce, a good friend of mine, is working on a documentary for the rowing challenge and got in contact with Joan and the guys to see if they would write some poetry for the project. It was a fantasic evening and the poems they had been working on were superb, even giving the impression that I knew what I was doing, which I found hysterical but loved them for it. Here’s a photo of them just below and I’m hoping I can put their poems on the blog very soon.

I’m now hopefully just over two weeks away from the half way point of the challenge. The support from everyone is, as always, just brilliant but my limbs have just felt a bit heavy over the last few weeks and I think psycologically it will make such a huge difference to get to that half way marker – downhill all the way to the finish at the end of next year!

Huge thank you to John for making me a brilliant new seat pad for the rower – nicknamed by John as the ‘Crevice Cushion Deluxe’. Unfortunately he had some last minute testing issues and on discovering that there were no vent holes into the gortex cover when the seat took John’s weight, the escaping air had no-where to go and opened one of the seams down the side. With 20km remaining last Saturday, I did exactly the same – my hefty buttocks slapped down so heavily that the whoopy cushion effect and resulting release of air  nearly blew out half of Primark. I also had nearly two hours of very paranoid rowing after John convinced me that I’d spent a year and three months with my seat the wrong way round! Bless him for sparing my blushes by checking it out when he got back home to assure me it was okay .

A huge thank you too to Susan and Joost for donating via the justgiving page and Sam and Faye for their continued chocolate and fig roll support x