The story of #Janurow2015
The story of #Janurow2015
We made it….
February has arrived and that tells me that the dust is settling on a second #Janurow. For all those involved in the event is a pretty full on month, but thanks to many fantastic efforts we hit our collective target.
Reaching our target this year.
It is a strange sensation that grows throughout the month when all you seem to be doing is rowing. When you are on the machine you want to get off, and when you are off it you feel you should get back on! Well people certainly did get on as we collectively rowed our way to over 12.5 million metres!!
My personal input of metres this year was always going to be less than last year where I added over 1.1 million metres to the #Janurow cause. I knew I would need high volume, but I took a different approach to just grinding out metre after metre. The morning would consist of my main rowing session and was the focus for my training throughout the month. Later in the day I would top up my metres to ensure I hit at least 20,000m per day, mostly rate restricted. This, combined with my weight training, running and cycling made for a pretty tough month! In recent years, February 1st hold a special place in my heart as I can get back to normal training!! That said the high volume I did last year lay the foundation for some very fast times in the Concept 2 rankings. Let’s hope the same happens this year.
Some big metres at the top.
Behind the scenes is a massive effort and our aim following last year, and it will be the same for next year’s event, was to improve Janurow and make it a better experience for those involved. Well this was certainly the case as we had more entrants and online interaction, rowed more metres and had a better online platform to work from, amongst other things. We had our first teams enter this year, 4 of them and perhaps most notably the Exeter Chiefs’ staff who nearly doubled their pledge. There were also some huge individual efforts where people really got the rowing bug and blew apart their targets.
I was trying to find the stand out memory from this year’s even and obviously there are many, but on reflection it has to be the final 24 hours. Throughout the month we had been gathering momentum, but were always just behind target. With 24 hours to go we still needed over 1 million metres to achieve our goal, which seemed beyond us. This came down to around 250,000 with 6 or 7 hours to go after sending lots of rallying calls!! I had nearly given up hope as I sat on my sofa checking social media to see if everyone had logged their metres. However slowly, but surely the metres dropped in and about 10pm we passed our total. It was like watching deadline day during the transfer window in football. Couldn’t have planned a better ending!
The support this year was fantastic from everyone who was involved, both rowing metres, raising funds and the great effort behind the scenes which is often overlooked. Of course reaching our personal and collective target hopefully leaves everyone with a huge sense of satisfaction and achievement, but the main purpose behind these efforts is to raise money for those less fortunate. At the time of writing it is unclear how much money we have raised, but the 3 charities that will benefit are very grateful so please keep chasing any promises of donations.
I hope the support for #Janurow2016 is even bigger, but for now I am off for a run…….!