Happy Thanksgiving weekend from England! Although this holiday slips by under the radar for most of the people in this country, a group of a dozen or so expatriates here at Oxford celebrated the holiday with quantities of food that were enormous even by rowers' standards. I have been in the country for over two months now, and I thought I'd write to row2k and try to describe what life is like for this oarsman 'trialing' for the OUBC.

One of the films in row2k's Rowing in the Movies, "True Blue," is actually the story of the 1986 Boat Race and a bunch of Americans that came to Oxford to row. The movie is a bit of a cult favorite over here, though in it the Americans star as the villains that don't even end up rowing in the race. I wouldn't say the movie is that bad in terms of how well it depicts the sport of rowing, but it definitely can't give you an accurate idea of what life here is like for an American.

Of course no two people will have the same experience of Oxford. So much of any college experience depends on the people one meets and in what one becomes involved. One of the unique aspects of the system here is the grouping into colleges. The colleges that make up Oxford are remarkably self sufficient - the best thing to compare them to would be the residence halls in Ivy League schools, or even the houses in Harry Potter. But these colleges each have their own grounds, dining halls, teachers (for undergraduates), sports teams, events and reputations. Though there are many university-wide clubs, (such as OUBC) most of life at Oxford is with one's college. Much better descriptions of the system can be found elsewhere. My college, Christ Church, is very big on formality. Each night a formal dinner is held in our the great hall, reminiscent of the dining hall from Harry Potter- in fact parts of the movie were filmed here. All the members of the boat club are spread among all the colleges, with only one or two trialists in any one college.

The boat club is incredibly well run and well-known by everyone in the university. Rowing is the biggest sport on campus, and nearly half of the people that come to school here will try it at some point. The Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is one of the only university-level sporting events to get serious television coverage in the entire country. Our first race of the year, the Four's Head of the River, is held on the same waterway as the Boat Race, but raced backwards in the opposite direction of the Boat Race course. The course is on the River Thames, between Mortlake and the Putney bridge in London - four and one quarter miles. The day of that race marked exactly two months that I had been in England, and it was a good day for our squad. We all raced as Isis, which is the nickname of the stretch of the Thames that runs through Oxford.

The weather on the Tideway was unseasonably nice for the race - a sunny day with little wind or chop in the water. Even with the gentler-than-usual conditions, racing the entire course was still a shock to the system and a great motivation to train harder for the next four months. The pace is relentless - a fact that is not easily captured by the videos of even the closest of boat races I had seen on the BBC.

It turned out that the weekend of the Four's Head weekend was autumn's last gasp. The next week temperatures plunged below freezing for days at a time, though overall I can't complain too much about the weather. September in central England was surprisingly sunny and beautiful. Our schedule of training is twice a day - in the morning training on land, then an afternoon row on the Thames in the nearby town of Wallingford. I have settled into the training regimen pretty well, and with the coaching here a lot more technically focused than the US camps were, I have felt some improvements already.

At the same time, I have been getting a start on my academic course: a DPhil (that's British for PhD) with Oxford's Cardiac Metabolism Research Group. This is is really the reason that I think I will stay at Oxford for some time to come. The combination of rowing and research suits me perfectly, and I couldn't be happier with the scientists and doctors that are supervising my research. My main task will be designing a study of energetics and metabolism using clinical MRI scanners - similar to a project I had done at Stanford and G.E.

The combination of learning new things through my research, new experiences in historical Oxford, and intense physiological training has made the days pass quickly. The last few weeks of Michelmas term (aka fall quarter) here will be spent preparing for trial eights just two and a half weeks from now. It is raced on the Boat Race course between two Oxford crews split into even boats. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas vacation always seems to fly by, and I'm sure this year will be no exception! Until then,

- Jamie Schroeder