A QUARTET of indoor rowers took on the best in the UK and came home with a silver medal.

The team, from the West Wickham-based Phoenix Club, were competing in the South London Indoor Rowing Championships.

Normally these competitions are an all-out race over 2,000m but the format changes for this championship.

Instead, the races are commonly referred to as the 'bleep tests' described as 'a real test of fitness and not for the faint hearted'.

The competition started with everyone having 2mins 30secs to row 500m.

The pace is then increased by five seconds per 500m until it reaches 2mins.

At this points, the pace increases by two seconds per 500m until it reaches 1min 30secs.

If anyone is still in the race, the pace increases by one second and the last 4 standing in each event are awarded medals.

In the 40-49 lightweight (lwt), Peter Smith, 49, finished fourth having reached a credible 1min 42secs.

Jay Rampling, 48, in the 40-49 heavyweight (hwt) division did extremely well to finish on 1min 34secs, taking seventh overall.

In the same event Chris Marchant, 43, fought hard and narrowly missed the bronze medal but took the prize for fourth place, having reached an amazing 1mins 28secs pace.

Finally, the star of the show was Philip Young, 40, competing in the 40-49 lwt who took the silver medal in an amazing time of 1min 32secs.

Shortly afterwards, Marchant and Young took up the gauntlet of the 1,000m Relay Cup.

This was a knock out event and having come through the early rounds, the lads rowed valiantly to finish the day as team silver medalists.