Deja-Vu

I've taken a sabbatical from paddling and barely been near the water since February. It was really quite disappointing to find that I was getting nowhere despite regularly putting in three or four excursions a week. I think that I'd have done better if some of them had been on the river proper instead of the byways of the Wey all the time.

I made the mistake of seriously underestimating how long it would take me to get to grips with the paddling technique. I thought that a year would be more than enough, but the old law of old dogs, new tricks has bitten me on the bum in a big way. Really I still haven't got it nailed yet as my speed on the water is so slow. I used to do a fairly considerable amount of running but now that seems to have been 'easy' compared to this.

I gave up on this year's DW entry with two months to go and it's been the longest two months as the weather has alternated between rain, snow and cold, interspaced with short periods of dryness. I knew when I quit that I wasn't going to have any chance of making even a token attempt at completing the course, but that didn't stop the occasional feeling over the last few weeks that I'd quit too soon and I might just have got up to speed if I'd kept at it. But I guess I did the right thing in the end. In fact the overnight race has been run in pretty good conditions, except that it's been the coldest Easter on record with overnight temperatures dropping to minus five degrees, which probably reflects in the drop-out of over forty crews.

I watched part of the race today as it went past Hampton and had the awful feeling that I should have been in it. I went down to the clubhouse to 'cheer on' a crew from the club who eventually finished at about 9.00 pm this evening.

On the bright side, the club coaching scheme is starting up again in the near future with a course for a BCU two-star award and on Sundays, an Improver's group. The first session of the Improvers took place last week with a short two-mile paddle on the Wey between Blackboys bridge and New Haw. After my lay-off I found that any semblance of fitness had deserted me again and the same old problems were re-occurring. So, no change there then.

This presents a bit of a problem as one of the criteria for the two-star course entry is to be able to paddle a two-hour journey, something I had barely accomplished before. As the course is in May, I’ve got about six weeks to get my fitness back to where I was before. I’m pretty sure I can manage that but I’m not so sure of the other requirement to ‘demonstrate an efficient paddling technique’. That might be ‘tricky’.

Anyway, it’s somewhere to start the summer and year’s campaign to get the plan back on track.