Lake Geneva again: the 10th anniversary edition

Ten years ago, I was a cox who could scull. Competently, but not fast enough to win any races. And after 20 year in the sport, I still had what British Rowing designates Novice status. Officially, I was the lowest of the low as an oarswoman.

But then I discovered marathon rowing.

12 reasons why the Great River Race really is great

In a fine example of that "six degrees of separation" thing, I got an email last Thursday evening from, let's call her A, who is a member of my skiff club. It was passed to her by a member of another rowing club she belongs to, now known as B. B had received it from C, who had taken a pretty scattergun approach after receiving a plea from D who had belatedly been told that the crew which someone else (not worthy of a letter) was going to provide for Saturday's Great River Race in London was not going to happen, and he needed five shipmates pronto. Owing to the C's broadcast, D had actually filled his empty seats by the time I replied, but by then D's wife (E) needed another rower for her crew as someone was ill.

And so it was that around 36 hours after I first got that email (and the lack of preparation was a guilty pleasure), I met what I was expecting to be a bunch of complete strangers under the clock in Waterloo Station on Saturday morning, only to discover that one of them was F, who I've known for nearly 20 years. Although, let's be honest, using rowing to prove the six degrees theory is no more scientific than using kittens to prove that wool tangles.

On and on and on: How we set a new 24 hour distance rowing Guinness World Record

I have no idea whether Sir Edmund Hillary thought "I HAVE to do that," when he first realised that Mount Everest had yet to be climbed, or even what went through astronaut Tim Peake's mind when he saw an ad for "International Space Station Crew Member" in "Out of This World Jobs Weekly" (yes, I'm making that up, but you get the idea). But I do remember gasping in delight when, over a year ago, whilst browsing the Guinness World Records site, I spotted that there was an existing record for the greatest distance rowed in 24 hours by a women's team. And, more to the point, at 229km it was eminently breakable.

It just HAD to be done.

If Disney did rivers: skiffing the Severn and Avon:

If Disney were setting out to create the perfect river, they would surely use the Severn and its dainty sister the Avon, as a model.

On a two-day skiff tour there, we found exquisitely pretty river banks lined with cow parsley and some kind of yellow flower (I’m a rower not a botanist, OK), quintessentially English church towers and fields of unicorns. Frankly, it’s amazing we weren’t surrounded by rainbow bubbles… oh, wait, we were…

When women first rowed at the Olympics

"What year was that?", you may ask. Was it back in 1948 when women first competed in canoe racing over 500m? No. Maybe in the 1960s then – after all, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in 1963? Wrong again.

Astoundingly, it was only in 1976, at the same time as the incredible gymnast Nadia Comaneci was achieving levels of perfection that had hitherto been thought impossible (and awakening my interest in the Olympics on a black and white TV), that women rowers took part in the Olympics for the first time. And they didn't even get to race the full distance.

Rowing without walls (but with tea and baby robins)

Read these words: "Rowing club". What did you just think of? A building? Maybe with a bar? And changing rooms? Lots of boats on racks (probably all racing boats, if you're British, though a mix of touring and racing boats if you're Dutch or from elsewhere in Europe)? Regular outing times?

Usually, you'd be right about all of those. But yesterday I was a guest at Langstone Cutters Rowing Club, which flourishes without having a boathouse at all (although they do have what could reasonably described as a strong relationship with the pub next door) and simply keep their boats on trolleys in a narrow strip of land, nestling among trees. What's more, geography dictates that they can only get afloat two hours either side of high tide, so the concept of "rowing is at 8am on Saturdays" isn't on. It was the best fun, and I rowed in not one but TWO types of boat I'd never been in before (or heard of, in one case).

Getting to the Heart of the Hart van Holland

"Do the Hart van Holland," my Dutch marathon rowing buddies told me. "It's in the Green Heart area and it's really pretty," they said. I looked it up. 90km: lovely! Long enough to make it worth the flight over there. I sought some crewmates, and finished up with a four-boat team of 18 which made up 10% of the total entry. Great!

Which made the fact that two of our crews, including nine, were stopped before the final timed section all the harder. Some of it was our fault. Most of it wasn't. Still, in the 70km we did complete we found out how you can get 40 boats in a lock, how to get through a passageway that's so narrow you can't get your blades out on either side, and what happens when you don't stick to the "swap the cox every 30 minutes" plan. We also saw some windmills.

The Ergo Marathon: An expedition to nowhere

Years ago, I coxed a crew which was interviewed for a student magazine, and we all had to put down our hobbies and ambitions. One bloke, with a wit unusual amongst occupants of the three seat, cited his hobby as "exploring the frontiers of pain", and his ambition, "to have a map next time".

Well, adventuring in the wilderness is all the rage these days, so if you're considering erging a marathon (and I've put the idea in your head now, so you can't not do it, [evil chuckle]), here's something like a map.

Harder or easier? Racing then and now

The strapline for this blog is "going beyond regattas and head races", so what is a post about racing doing here? Well, it's got in on a wild card because it takes a peek at the quite incredible "expedition" that rowing, and in particular women's rowing, has been on since the 1950s when entries in the Women's Eights Head of the River Race were frequently in single figures.

Since then, boats, blades, kit, training, standards and the size of events have been transformed. But have the young racers of today really "never had it so good"? Or does the very popularity of women's rowing nowadays, which makes it harder to win, mean that "the good old days" were actually better?

The hardest rowing challenge he could think of

When it comes to challenges of any kind, the enormity of the challenge is depends on the individual as well as what it actually involves. If you're rowing an ocean, the challenge is pretty much built in: there's no such thing as "taster" ocean. That said, the Pacific Ocean is a heck of a lot bigger than the others: I mean, you can position a globe so that it's all you can see. But when my friend John Beeden, who already had an extremely fast (53 days) solo crossing of the Atlantic under his belt, was planning his Pacific crossing, he deliberately sought a route that was proper hard.

The Grasshopper Book of Expedition Rowing

For those of us who grew up in English-speaking homes in the 1960s and 70s, long before the days of Wikipedia, our early education was shaped by Ladybird Books.

Extraordinarily, despite covering an extremely broad range of topics from Your Body, to Baby Jesus, via Ballet and The Beach (to name but four that I remember owning), there was never a Ladybird Book of Expedition Rowing.

There still isn't, but this is what one might have looked like. Particularly if their illustration department had been on strike.