Head of the Charles 2014 By the Numbers

By Doug Saffir

October 17, 2014

4 minutes to read

As far as sports go, rowing isn’t exactly a stats-heavy competition. It’s pretty much just a speed game – teams race against other boats and the clock, and the fastest time wins. But as exciting as minutes and seconds (and even tenths of seconds) can be, it’s natural for a sports fan to want to get in touch with his or her inner stats geek.

So we dug up a few of the weirder numbers associated with rowing, just in time for this weekend’s Head of the Charles Regatta. It should go without saying that you won’t be finding many of these on your stopwatch.

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∙This is the 50th year of the Head of the Charles Regatta. Races will take place on both Saturday and Sunday, starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 5 p.m. each day.

∙The race is going to feature more than 11,000 athletes competing in 61 different events using an estimated 2,132 boats and representing 36 states and 32 countries.

∙The course runs 3 miles (or 15,840 feet or 190,080 inches, if you prefer; or 4,828.03 meters, if you’re from Canada or something) along the Charles River and is marked by more than 350 buoys. The course will take boats under 7 different bridges, meaning if you could somehow be at every bridge for every race, you could watch a boat go under a bridge approximately 14,924 times. Exciting!

∙Depending on the level of competition, rowers race at anywhere from 30 to 36 strokes per minute. With races lasting anywhere between 15 and 28 minutes, any given athlete could row as little as 450 strokes or as many as 1,008 strokes in their given race (again, depending on the level of competition). With 11,000 athletes competing, the weekend’s races will feature between 4,950,000 and 11,088,000 strokes. No matter where the actual number falls, the Charles River is going to take a beating.

∙Regatta officials are expecting approximately 400,000 spectators over the course of the weekend. With such huge crowds, officials have enlisted the help of over 150 EMS volunteers, 1,500 other volunteers, more than 60 vendors (including more than 20 that sell food), and 200 porta-potties.

∙If you don’t know a coxswain from a sculler, but you still want to look like you know a thing or two about the actual sport, it might be useful to have the course records on hand. US Rowing set the men’s record in 1997 when their 8-man team rowed a time of 13 minutes and 58.9 seconds in the men’s championship race. US Rowing also hold the women’s course record. Their 8-woman team set the mark at 15 minutes and 26.572 seconds in the 2007 championship race.

∙Traveling the 3-mile course in that amount of time is even more impressive when you find out that teams have to row upstream. The Charles River moves along at a rate of 386 cubic feet per second. And while that’s relatively slow (the Connecticut River flows at 16,180 cubic feet per second, for example), that’s still a fair amount of resistance to deal with over the course of nearly 16,000 feet.

∙If you’re not a rower or are just afraid of the water or whatever, there are other ways to travel the course of the race. Google Maps won’t account for the myriad road closures in effect, but they claim you can drive from the starting line at the Boston University Boathouse to the finish line at Artesani Playground in just 10 minutes.

∙That’s pretty good time, but all the smart people leave their cars at home. For them, the MBTA is a decent option, though not ideal. There’s no MBTA route that takes you from start to finish and stays along the river the whole time. You’ll miss a good section of the race and it’ll take you at least 35 minutes to get to the end.

∙If biking is more your style, you probably won’t be keeping up with any of the boats. Google Maps estimates a 21-minute trip, so the only way you’re watching your team row the full course is if you pedal really hard.

∙Of course, some folks aren’t lucky enough to have wheels of any kind, so their feet will have to do. They’ll probably want to set aside some time for this one though, since their estimated travel time sits at 1 hour and 5 minutes. Brutal.

∙With two days riverside in Boston and Cambridge, we’re hoping that you plan on taking some memories home with you. And what better way to save those memories than with Instagram? We tested it out and it only takes about 34 seconds to post a picture on Instagram (add a 15 second “selfie buffer’’ to make sure you’re looking fresh). Races run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both days, giving you 64,800 seconds to take Instagrams over the course of the weekend. If you do nothing but that, you could come away with 1,905 Valencia-filtered shots of rowers on the Charles (or only 1,322 if you include yourself in all of them). So with 400,000 spectators expected, we’re looking at a potential 528 million selfies. Ready, set, go.