Montreal Trip to Bassin Olympique

Rowing

Jul 28

The athletes competing at trials and I went on a two day trip to train at the 1976 Montreal Olympic 2k course late last week. We left early Wednesday morning crossing the border at 7:30 AM and made it on site at 9:30. We rigged the boats and went for a light row to check out the course and shake out the cobwebs. The course is 7 lanes wide with no warm up zone. Luckily, we had the course mostly to ourselves aside from a few elite canoe/kayakers. The course was quite flat, but for the duration of our stay there was a moderate to strong crosswind that made for tricky steering and some inconsistent times. After some Subway and a short nap at the Hotel Le Dauphin we hit the course again for some 1250m pieces. We broke into two flights: one with the 4x and a second with the 2x, 2-, and 1x, which made for some fun racing in the small boats. At night we made a brief sojourn into Montreal for dinner. After, a lot of sitting in traffic we made it into the city and ate at first place we saw, an italian restaurant named Da Giovanni, which had simple, but good food.

Day 2 of the trip we started out with a full steam 2k down the course. The 2- and 1x went down the course against a u23 4x from McGill University followed by the 4x and 2x. After the solid piece we went for a delicious breakfast at Eggsquis. Before heading home we finished off the trip with one more hard practice of 250m pieces focusing on making the boat move as fast as possible over the distance. Most of these pieces we did four across with a staggered start making for some tight finishes between the different boat classes. All in all, our short excursion to Montreal was great training experience that brought us closer to achieving our goals at trials and we hope to return in the future for more solid work. Enjoy the collection of photos below.