How did Navy manage to gain 40 seconds on my boat and end up in first place? Grrr... Anyway, that was a freakin awesome race. We rowed the best we've rowed all season. I was a bit nervous because my back has been killing me all week and I wasn't sure what rowing woudl do to it. I was supposed to row a 2k on Thursday, but I went down at 5:30am to row it and found that I still couldn't bend forward without pain. I slept on the the floor Thursday night to see if that would help, but I don't think it did. I've been taking Alleve and streching it out a lot and today it finally seemed a bit better. During the race it hurt some, but I did my best to ignore it and row. The good news is that now, a few hours later, it doesn't seem to hurt at all. I can stand up without pain shooting down my leg. It's still a bit tight, but hopefully if I continue to stretch it and relax, then it'll go away. This is so cool that it's actually better after rowing. I thought it would be a lot worse. I'm sure not going to complain.

My Aunt Sandy and cousin Nikki, or Nicki, came to the race. I haven't seen my Aunt for probably 7 years or so. That's just a guess. I have a great story about how I got to see her today. She had called me on Thursday to find out when my race was, and since it was at 5:15pm she said that her and Nikki would call me on my cell phone and find me after the race. There were a ton of schools there today and I never got a call from her, so I wasn't sure how she was going to find me. After the race was over and we were rowing back to the docking area I said a short prayer that she'd find someone from the Army team that could direct her to where we were and that I'd get to see her. A minute or so after that I Iooked out of the boat (I know I'm not supposed to do that) and saw CPT Windamyer (wrong spelling). We all yelled and said hi to him. Then, I saw a woman and a teenage girl walking down the path. We were pretty far away and I could'nt see their faces, and I haven't seen my aunt in years, or my cousin in a year, but I knew right away that was them. They saw CPT Windamyer and I saw them point in the direction of the Army crew site. Then, I yelled out "That's my Aunt Sandy!" Jamye, Amber, and I started yelling out her name and waving (yet another bad thing for a rower to do while rowing). She looked over and waved, and I waved, although I doubt that either of us could see each other's faces. When my boat finally made it back to the dock and got off, Anne came running up and said "Kate, I found your Aunt" and there was my aunt and my cousin standing there wearing the same color clothing as the people that I had waved to before, so I'm guessing it was them. I only got to talk to them for a few minutes, but it was really cool to see them again. Hoepfully they'll be able to come to the Dad Vail regatta in the spring and bring Dan as well. He had a hockey game today and so he couldn't come.