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This is the home page for Free Spirits, the virtual rowing team with a vibrant and supportive forum for anyone mad enough to use the Concept 2 rowing machine.  If you want to learn more about us, how to join etc, please go to the WELCOME to New Members thread in the forum or if you like to read up on things then there is a FAQ section, but here is a summary:

Free (as in liberated and gratis) Spirits is a fairly random grouping of people of all ages who train using the Concept 2 rowing machine.  Being part of the team is motivational.  Nobody tells you what to do, but there is a wide variety of activities to choose from if you are so inclined.  The aim of Free Spirits is to have fun, no more than that.  You are free to join and free to leave.  All we ask of members is that they respect the other members whether they row 100 seconds a month or 100+ hours.  The club is free to join but also feel free to make donations towards the running of the web site! 

Rowing around a piece of π

Every year we set ourself a grand challenge.  We have not been doing too well recently, narrowly failing to row around Jupiter’s equator in 2008 and similarly failing to complete 10 laps of the Earth in 2010.  This year our target is to complete 314,159,265m or π × 100 million.  This circular target was selected in honour of the wheel we love to spin and the five Olympic and Paralympic rings.

This graph shows how our weekly metres stack up against the metres required to reach our goal.  Red bars mean we did not row enough that week.  Green bars mean we did!  Each vertical bar is divided up in to sections – each one is a day’s rowing for the team.

If you join the club any metres stored in a Concept 2 rowing log are immediately added to our total.

 Some information about our more frequently used pages:

The forum: a meeting point for free spirits to discuss successes and blow outs, pbs and anything else that comes to mind.

The unique Free Spirits meter board: thanks to Jonathan Lemon. Track the meters you row and those of your nearest competitors in the league.  Some people may not ever look at this, and that is fine.  Others watch it on an hourly basis!

Cross Team Challenge commonly known as CTC: A monthly challenge for Free Spirits to compete against other teams.  September 2006′s challenge was chosen by Free Spirits: 4,000m in honour of several members who are approaching the big four-oh.

Nonathlon: On-line ranking normalised by age – compare yourself with someone 20 years older/younger by entering times for distances from 500m to a full marathon.  This is now cross-fertilised in to a “nonathlon challenge” in Free Spirits fun…