Yesterday, Dan, Mike, Paul D, Frank and I went together to a race in Ottawa called “Small Swells”. Steve B and Jim M met us there, having driven up the night before so Steve’s son Aaron could participate in the sprint races in the morning. Ok, first of all, a bit of background on the team if you haven’t been following along: Mike, Paul D (aka “Lefty”) and I often paddle together, not just at official team practices. Steve B almost never joins us, and sometimes doesn’t even do what the rest of the team does at team practices, but he’s at least a minute faster than me at the Baycreek Time Trials, so he’s obviously a better paddler in many ways, and he’s very focused and very driven. Frank also paddles with the team, but he’s over a decade older than the rest of us, and also not as focused on racing, so he’s just there for fun and isn’t going to be challenging the rest of us for the win. Jim is in a league of his own – he’s been a contender or medalist in the national marathon and sprint championships more than a few times. Mike, Lefty and I have been working a bit on riding each other’s wake and other race strategy.
Mike is sort of the unofficial race strategist of our sub-group, and his contention is that we should go out really hard for a half a mile or so at the start, and then figure out where we are, get arranged into flying V, and settle down into a good pace that we can hold, and help each other. Mike’s always been faster than me, and usually when we paddle together he does most of the pulling. At a recent club training 5 mile race, I tried to stay with him and the faster guys, and I blew up badly. Afterwards, Jim looked at my heart rate and GPS data and said that 160 beats per minute (bpm) was my lactate threshold, and when I’m up above that, I’m spending “poker chips” at a fast rate. So my strategy for this race was to follow Mike’s strategy, but keep my heart rate around 155-160 bpm and if my heart rate gets higher than that, I may have to ride Mike’s wash without taking my turn up front, or even saying good bye to them and just paddle my own pace.
So anyways, us old guys show up at the Ottawa River Canoe Club, and it’s mostly a bunch of teenagers, and they’re all really good. Dan’s friend Jodi shows up with a few others after paddling across the Ottawa River, which is about 2 km wide at this point. He’s older than the ORCC kids, but he still looks like the sort of people I used to see disappearing into the distance at cross country ski races – a perfect combination of strength and aerobic capacity. We all line up at the start, which is pretty crowded – there are about 25 boats in a space that’s barely 25 metres across -the dock where the starter stands is on one side, and there are buoys marking shoal water on the other. Just to make it worse, several of the boats are Outrigger Canoes (OC-1s and OC-2s), and to make it even worse, about 10-20 metres from the start, there are three buoys making a rock crib that you probably don’t want to paddle over, so everybody is going to want to squeeze over to one side or the other almost as soon as the start goes off.
At the start, they explained the course – 5 km up the river into the wind and waves to a buoy in a small bay, then back downwind and downstream and around an island that’s in the middle of the river, and then sort of across the wind and stream back to the dock. Obviously you’d want to keep in close to the shore on the way up to stay out of the waves, but it was apparent to me that after the turn you’d want to go out into the middle of the river to take advantage of the wind and waves at your back. After explaining the course, they started trying to line everybody up, and a few boats had to paddle backwards because they’d gone over the line. This OC-2 I’d been beside end up sort of sideways in front of me, and I yelled at them to straighten up. I don’t know if they were trying to line up to avoid the rock crib in front of us, but it was definitely pushing me back to the second row.
The starter said “start in 10 seconds GO” without any pause between the word “seconds” and “GO”, which kind of surprised the Baycreek group. Call us crazy, but we sort of expected about, I don’t know, TEN SECONDS pause there. The Canadians all took off really fast. I tried to hang on to the wake of the OC-2, but they were just too fast. There was a lot of messy waves and wakes, and I got slammed into Mike. But we got straightened out and I went chasing after the OC-2. My heart rate was 169 bpm, way too high, even taking in account Mike’s “go like hell for the first half mile” strategy. So I tried to not reduce the amount of power I put into each stroke, but to take a bit of a pause and glide at the portion of the stroke where the paddle is out of the water. It seems to be working well, and I looked over and saw Steve B on my immediate right. I didn’t see Mike and Lefty, so I paddled over and tried to ride Steve’s wake, but he was heading towards the middle of the river, far too much out into the wind and waves. Plus he’s pretty light, and his boat is narrow, so he doesn’t make much wake. After a few minutes, I saw Mike and Lefty over on the left, and they were keeping in the better line out of the wind, so I moved over to them. By now, my heart rate had settled down under 160 bpm, and I was feeling good. When I reached Mike, he was gasping a bit and said his heart rate was still 170 bpm, so I told him to drop back into my wake and recover, and that I’d take the first pull. But he didn’t seem to want to drop back enough to get any benefit from my wake, and he was level with me. I guess because he usually pulls when we paddle together, he just couldn’t shut off that habit when he needed to.
After a mile and a half or so, he said he needed a drink, and we should both pause to grab our drink tubes at the same time. I agreed, and we did. I tried to drink fast and get paddling faster than him so he’d be better positioned to ride my wake. But unfortunately his paddle hit his GPS when he started paddling again, so unbeknownst to me, he’d paused again to restart his GPS. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder, and so I don’t know if he dropped off at this point or got back on my wake. A little while after that, I got hit by a wake from behind that was actually overpowering the effect of the waves from the front – when the second one lifted my stern, I gave three or four hard paddle strokes in order to ride it. At this point I looked around a bit and noticed that I seemed to have gapped the others. The Canadians and Jim M were a rapidly diminishing cluster of dots on the horizon, and we’d given up all hope of catching them. Dan had apparently dropped out because of the stomach problems he’d mentioned before the race. But I had this gap on my team-mates and I didn’t really know about it. My heart rate was still at my goal rate 155 and I was making 6.1 mph, and I still figured it was only a matter of time before Mike or Steve went steaming past and I’d just have to try to hang on.
At the turn, I got a look back and saw that I still had a gap over Mike, Paul and Steve. The vast pack of Canadians (and probably Jim) were doing something I couldn’t understand, though. They were heading back up the shore of the river, instead of going out into the middle towards the island. I could only see one boat, possibly an OC-2, heading towards the island, and it was at last 1000 metres ahead of me. But that’s what I knew was the right thing to do, so that’s the direction I was heading. But I couldn’t help wondering why all these people who were at the same start line as me, and heard the same description of the course as I did, so why were they over there? Maybe there was a smaller island I hadn’t noticed that was closer to shore, and that’s what the starter had meant? I kept heading to this island. I had two thoughts going through my head: Either I’d win because I was the only person who went the right way, or I’d get some sort of booby prize for doing this huge extra distance. But I felt kind of lonely out there in the middle of the river. The wind and current were helping my speed up to about 6.8 mph, but I’m still not 100% comfortable in the boat, so I felt exposed, and there was no way I felt steady enough to try looking behind me to see where my team-mates were. One of the safety boats came by, so I yelled at him to ask about the course, and he didn’t know – he said he thought they usually use the island, but “maybe they put a buoy out this year or something”. Big help.
Dan came paddling out from the shore, and started yelling at me. I had to pause paddling to hear him, but what he was telling me was that I should be heading to the island, not up the shore. Well, it’s good to have it confirmed, anyway.
When the black specks of the Canadians up ahead got to approximately where I thought the ORCC should be, they suddenly swung out across the waves to the island. I gained huge amounts of time on them, but still not enough to get competitive with them, but at least now I could tell the kayaks from the outrigger canoes. On the way back from the island, there was one guy about 50 metres ahead of me, and I pushed hard to try to close distance on him but he pulled away. Evidently about this time, Mike had closed to about 50 metres behind me, and he thought for sure he’d close that distance on the me but he didn’t. As well as being across the waves and wind, there were a lot of boat wakes, and the water got pretty shallow, so it was dicey going and I had to brace a few times.
Anyway, I don’t think a single local person finished behind us. Jim won the event, which surprised the hosts quite a bit. He’d held on the wake of a K-2 paddled by ORCC’s two best young men, and they’d tried to shake him a few times but he’d held on, and then passed them in the last bit.
But I am still having trouble believing that not only did I beat Mike and Lefty, but I even beat Steve. It feels like a fluke. But I also wonder if I wasn’t doing the wrong thing by just going alone – maybe if I’d waited for some of the others, I could have given them a chance to recover a bit, and then they could have taken pulls and raised all of our speeds. But I felt so “on”, and the boat felt like the set-up was perfect, and I just went with it. Next weekend is another day, and who knows what will happen then?
Update: Official results are available. BayCreek team results:
| 1 | Jim M | 1:13:42 |
| 7 | Paul Tomblin | 1:22:15 |
| 8 | Mike F | 1:23:13 |
| 9 | Steve B | 1:25:13 |
| 10 | Paul D | 1:25:47 |
| 11 | Frank C | 1:34:49 |