Category: Kayaking

I’m trying to decide what kayak races to go for the rest of the season. I definitely want to go to Long Lake on September 26th (oh, should book a motel room now, shouldn’t I?). That’s pretty much the “capper” for the season. It’s 10 miles, and that race was my target when I set myself the goal this year of completing a 10 mile race (although I already achieved that in July at the Armond Bassett race).

But other than that, I’m looking at “Remington II” on September the 5th in Rensselaer Falls. It’s “only” 6 miles, and down river. The course description mentions a couple of easy rapids, and on Google Maps they look like they might require dragging through depending on how high the river is. It also doesn’t look like they have a huge turn-out, so it would probably be a battle between the Baycreek Team. They don’t have separate categories for Touring and Unlimited kayak, so I’d be up against Dan and the rest of the surf skis.

Dan forwarded some brief information on a race on September the 19th somewhere near Ottawa. It’s called “Small Swells”, and so far I’ve been able to find out next to nothing about it, except it has 5km and 14km courses and it’s run by the Ottawa River Canoe Club. (And the ORCC web site lists the race as being on September the 16th, which would mean I definitely won’t go.)

So those are my options. I think I’d like to do all of them, but it would depend on time and money.

Today Mike and I met up early to do another long work-out like we’d done on July 25th. A few differences this time: Mike only wanted to do 10 miles, and he wanted to meet at 7:30 so we could be done before it warmed up too much. When I showed up, I discovered a few more differences: Mike brought his EFT instead of his surf ski because that’s what he’s going to race next weekend at the Bear Mountain Challenge, and he left his wing paddle somewhere so he was paddling an ordinary flat paddle. Also, the river was running very fast, and there were a lot of chunks of wood in the water, like maybe lightning had exploded a tree or two.

Actually, all the floating bits of wood, large and small, was kind of ironic because when I’d made my breakfast smoothie I’d had a bit of an accident with a wooden spoon in the blender (don’t ask) so I was spitting out splinters of wood all the way up.

All these things added up to the fact that I wasn’t going to be riding Mike’s wake in the high 5 to low 6 mph range like last time. As a matter of fact, mostly because of the paddle, instead of riding Mike’s wash, Mike was riding mine. I was leading out at speeds in the high 4s, trying to tuck in as close to the bank as I could to keep out of the worst of the current, and Mike was having trouble keeping up with me. I kept having to slow down to let him get back on me, and then I’d look back a few minutes later and he was off it again. Finally, at about the 2.5 or 2.75 mile mark, Mike came up inside me and hung there with his bow just about level with my knees. I didn’t quite realize that he’d done it on purpose, but he had pushed me out from shore into swifter water, slowing me down to speeds in the low 4s, but he was also on my side-wash. That worked well until about the 4.5 mile part when I decided I’d had enough of being out in the strong current, pulled ahead of Mike and tucked in close to the shore and sped back up to around 5 mph. Like I said, I hadn’t realized that Mike had pushed me out there on purpose or I probably wouldn’t have done that to him.

One advantage of going so early was that the river was deserted except for a few rowers, and so we saw a lot of bird life, including a number of Great Blue Herons and one Little Green Heron. The disadvantage is that with me tucking in so close to the shoreline, I got a few spiderwebs in the face. I’m just glad that I didn’t see the spiders.

Coming back, with the advantage of the current behind us, we were paddling side by side, and easily managing speeds in the high 7s, low 8s. The second downstream mile (mile 7), I decided to really go for it to see how fast I could go, and I did it in 7:11 with an 8.9 mph top speed. After that I stopped for a drink to let Mike catch me, and we resumed paddling together. And as we were approaching the 9 mile mark, he said “You’re looking strong, so if you want to keep paddling go ahead, but I need to slow down”.

Compared to last time, upstream we were about 1.5 mph slower when I was in the shallows, and nearly 2 mph slower when I was out in the current, and about 1 mph faster going downstream. I don’t know how much of that was the current and how much was Mike’s paddle, but I figure if he’d been leading in the ski like last time, today we might have actually seen speeds over 10 mph at some point on the down.

Oh, and in today’s “The googles, they do nothing” moment, I discovered that my Halo headband doesn’t work as advertised at keeping sweat out my eyes. I had one eye or the other closed most of the way downstream because of stinging salt water in them. Since paddling with a wing paddle leaves me in a constant rain of water of my own making, I decided that the headband alone doesn’t work, and I need to wear a hat. So I splurged on the way home and bought another Outdoor Research hat. My previous one was wonderful, and I was sad when I lost it. I’ve put my name on this one, in hopes that if I drop it somewhere where I’m known, I might get it back. I considered putting my phone number on it, but I don’t really want to be advertising that on the outside of my hat, and “Sharpie” pen bleeds right through. Maybe I should just buy a couple of them. Every time I use that strategy to make sure I don’t run out, I end up never losing another as long as I live. (True story: after losing a bunch of expensive Stadtler mechanical pencils in succession while in University, I bought three cheapo plastic mechanical pencils, and I still own at least one of them.)

The full results are now up (although currently they’re on the front page of the Great Race site listed as “Results of Great Race 2008” and some places they have it as Roman Numeral XXX instead of XXXII.

In the list of teams that won awards, our team is listed as being 4th in M40+ in the Traditional Race, Kayak division. Before you say “yeah, out of four”, go check out the full results and see that we were 4th out of 16 in our division, and a pretty respectable 10th out of 49 in the kayak division. Even more gloat worthy is that my individual performance amongst all the “longshort course” paddlers was 14th best, 6th best kayak, and 1:25 behind my coach, Dan, only 2 seconds behind team mate Stephen B and 1:32 ahead of Paul D. Wow, I can’t believe I beat Paul D, especially since my first reaction after the race was “Man, I had trouble surfing out there” and his was “It was great surfing weather”.

Today was the 32nd annual Great Race in Auburn, NY. The race consists of one person running, one person biking, and either two people in a canoe or one person in a kayak paddling. (I’m pretty sure they don’t have a category for single canoes.) The long course is 10 km running, 20 miles cycling, and (theoretically) 4 miles paddling. The short course, which I had no intention of doing, was only 5km running, 10 miles cycling, and 2 miles paddling. I had tried to put together a team with the Huggers Ski Club, but in spite of the fact that many of them are avid cyclists or runners, I couldn’t, so I put a notice on the Great Race’s message board and got together a team.

Putting together a team from the internet is like a blind date, but instead of wondering if the dinner is going to be awkward, you’re wondering if your team-mates are going to be either not a hell of a lot better than you or a hell of a lot worse. You don’t want to be the weak link on an otherwise strong team, nor do you want to be the only strong person on a weak team. But since it was my first race, and it was a blind-date team, I was really mostly telling myself not to care about team placing, and just worry about your own performance – I knew I was one of the better paddlers there and so I wouldn’t let down a good team, but you can’t know how the rest of your team is going to do.
Continue reading “Auburn Great Race, preliminary thoughts”

This Wednesday night was the last time trial of the season. It’s a shame they end when the weather is still so perfect, but I understand that the staff finds these things wearing and Ken doesn’t make any direct profit off them, so I guess we should be thankful for the weeks we do have. It was also the second annual “Huggers Regatta” for members of the Huggers Ski Club. Between the extra people the Huggers brought out, and the fact that the weather was great, we had 68 participants, which broke the previous record by 20 people! We’ve never seen the river so crowded.

I’m a member of the Huggers Ski Club, and I was actually a bit worried that my presence in the Regatta would make the other members of the club feel like there was no point competing, so when Rob approached me discretely and asked if I’d be disappointed if I were “disqualified” I immediately answered that I would not be. I don’t want to seem like I’m special, but I’m regularly turning in times just over or just under 19 minutes, and the next fastest member was 22.45 minutes with a bunch of them between 22.5 and 24.5, so it’s much more competitive that way.

Because the weather conditions were so perfect, Dan suggested that I try doing the race in a surf ski. I warmed up in the ski doing the course in reverse order, going up the creek first and then out on the bay. Even though it was a warm up and I wasn’t pushing it as hard as in the race, I was at least 0.5 mph faster on the creek, and I was thinking maybe this wasn’t a bad idea. But then I got out on the bay, and as I rounded the far turn I nearly tipped and after that I was a nervous pile of goo, paddling very timidly. I wasn’t sure that the extra caution I’d have to take on the turn and any boat wakes would make up for the extra speed I’d feel on the flats, so I decided to race in my own boat. I’m kind of kicking myself now that I did.

Once again I worked hard on the way out to the marker, and didn’t get the rest I hoped for from the tail wind on the way back. I passed numerous people on the way out, and saw a long line of boats coming out on my way back, including several team mates and my coach’s son Tom. My time for the half was 9.42, which is 0.09 minutes slower than last week. I felt much stronger on the creek, although I could really feel home much slower my boat was than the ski. Darn, you should never warm up in a faster boat, it just feels too discouraging when you have to compete in the slow one. Coming back down, I again saw many of the same people as I’d seen coming in from the bay, and I saw Hugger George M up ahead of me in his Pygmy Boat Coho. I tried like hell to catch him, and just barely got on his stern at the finish line. Compared to last week, I lost an additional 0.06 minutes, making my final time 19.05 compared to 18.90 last week.

One curious thing was that after the race, one of the Huggers asked me about the legality of something she saw. She said she’d seen one of the boats grab the buoy at the top turn with their paddle and pivot around it. Now I’ve put those buoys (actually a swimming noodle on a length of semi-rigid hose) in before races and taken them out after, and I can attest that they are not very firmly anchored – it always amazes me that we manage to get through an entire race without them being knocked out. For the one on the creek there, you actually have to search a bit to find some river bottom that isn’t hard packed mud so that the end will penetrate an inch or two to hold it in. I tried to convince her that there isn’t any way you could use the buoy to change your direction, and any pressure on it would yank it out of the river bottom, but she didn’t believe me. So I’m wondering what she did see. Jason Quagliata and Nicole Mallory did a run in a K2 (in 13.82!) and I’m wondering if the person in front did some sort of bow rudder move like a canoe would do to get around it, and that’s what she saw. Because I can’t imagine anybody else putting dragging a paddle on the inside instead of sweeping on the outside.

George M, the guy with the Pygmy Boat who I nearly caught on the line ended up winning the Huggers Regatta men’s category, and he took pity on me and shared his prize with me. That was really nice of him. And Rob’s wife Iris, who has the worst technique of any paddler there but has fitness to rival anybody on the racing team won the woman’s category. It’s lucky she doesn’t like paddling that much, because if she took Baycreek’s “Forward Stroke Clinic”, I bet she’d be rivaling my times in no time.

Jason and Nicole, as well as demolishing the course in the K2 also did individual runs, and Jason set a new course record at 14.02 (breaking his own record). Nicole’s father Jim did it in 14.68 one of the many times he did it, and Nicole did it in 16.53. It’s really a privilege to have such world-class athletes compete in our little event. It gives you something to admire and strive for. Especially when Jason and Nicole go to the Olympics in 2012, we’ll be able to say “I’ve eaten hot dogs and discussed technique with them”.