My Silver Medal!
Oh yah baby! We won Silver!!! wOOt! wOOt! 😀 😀 😀 *fist pump*
*sidenote: aaaaahhhhhh! I wrote an entire post about today and when I went and pressed Publish wordpress deleted everything but the picture! my second drafts are never as much fun as my first drafts, sigh*
Today I competed at the Stevenston Dragon Boat Festival, it was held in Richmond BC. 😀
The entire day was soooooo awesome I don’t even know where to begin! 😀
KL came to my place at 8am, I was awake at 6:20am after a measly 3 hours of bad sleep, ugh. Not the best start to a long day but oh well! I wanted to make sure I was up early enough to get ready and have time to eat a proper breakfast, my thinking was that starting my day with a healthy breakfast would help fuel my body through at least the first race and would help me eat properly for the rest of the day. I’m really glad I chose to eat breakfast at home cause when we got to the racing site all the food vendors and the majority of the food my teammates brought was unhealthy. At our tent we had timbits, donuts, cookies, banana bread, cranberry ginger bread, bagels…to be fair, we also had veggies (which I brought), some fruit – cause our coach made us promise to bring bananas (potassium = goooooood! lol), there was also a bit of grapes and a watermelon…so, ok, not all of the food was bad but most of it was!
We had to race in 4 heats, the first two were 200 metres and the second two were 500 metres. After the first race we all got back to the tent and dive bombed the food table, lol, this happens after every race! I don’t really understand why, like under 3 minutes of intense exertion has totally wiped us out and we must immediately refuel or risk faaaaading away. teehee. We had less then an hour until our next race so I nixed the idea of eating the salad I brought for my lunch and instead ate 1 C of strawberries and 1 light babybell, both of which I brought, lol. It’s weird, the entire day, I never felt hungry. When I did eat it was usually some fruit and I was only eating that to help keep me hydrated, shrug, ah well, doesn’t seem to have hurt me in the end. 🙂
The third race was to determine who qualified for the finals, for some reason if your team came in first or third you would go on to medal races but if you finished second or fourth you went to, um, shoot, what were they called? consolation races? that doesn’t seem quite right…basically, you would get to race one more time but not win anything, shrug. I don’t know why it wasn’t the first and second placed teams in those heats that went on to compete for a medal but hey, who am I to question? lol
For our fourth race all the competing teams were ready to go when an official called over the steerer and drummer from each team and they were all having an official looking convo. Then the official turned around and told us that two of the teams competing had “sandbagged” to get in to this heat and to make things fair teams had to swap steerers and drummers! There was a massive uproar! The drummer is the person who is responsible for keeping the team in sync, informing the team when we are switching to a different type of stroke and also they are the person who yells at us the whole way to keep us going – these people are NOT interchangeable! Turns out this was the officials idea of a joke, odd sense of humour that man has. *rolls eyes* A good side benefit to this joke was we were all riled up and ready to take that excess energy we had immediately built up to fight this unfairness out on the water. Sadly though, our team lost all that riled up energy because it took us so long to be able to get in our boat, by the time we were in our boat we were more worried about if we were going to miss our race! Ack!
Some of the teams are there for fun, they aren’t as competitive as the other teams, not to say they don’t work their asses off, they do! They just aim to have fun and enjoy the experience where as some of us (my team! lol) are there to WIN!! lol Some of the fun teams are geared towards making the sport accesible to people with disabilities. Like last racing weekend, there was a team that for every seeing rower there was a non-seeing rower. This time, the team that was vacating the boat that we were supposed to use for our race was a MS team. Not all the members have MS (from my understanding) but most do, those who have advanced MS were having extreme difficulties getting out of the boat. What normally takes a team about 1 minute to accomplish took this team closer to 10 minutes to do. Since the races are scheduled down to the second for start times this is a problem. I don’t want to sound like I am complaining, I think it’s great that the sport is open to pretty much anyone who wants to try, but this delay put us at a disadvantage within our division because all the other teams we were racing against were already sitting at the start line while we hadn’t even left the dock (which is at the finish line).
Usually, to get to the start line you row casually, you have to row 500 metres to get there and you don’t want to wear yourself out! You take your time, on the way your team will probably practice your starting strokes (that’s usually your first 30 strokes), then go back to rowing casually, this way you’re warmed up and pumped to go when you get there. You always want to be the first team at the start line because that means you have the most resting time before your race starts, you can relax, get in the zone, do what you need to do in order to prep yourself for what is to come. We were soooo late getting to the start line that we had to row faster then normal to get to the start line, then we right away had to turn around and get in our lane, as soon as we were turned the announcer was calling alignment and bam! we were off! We were yelling at each other right before the race started “no pain!” “no tired!” because of course we were all in pain, and we were all tired but we had to work past it, we had to act as if the next 500 metres decided everything – which they did, lol.
Just goes to show you what training and perseverance will get ya! Well, that and I told the team that bronze just doesn’t look good against my skin tone so we had to at least get a silver! 😉
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 
Congrats!
By the way, silver would look the best with my skin tone also 😀 I like your attitude 🙂
Thanks! 😀 I am still riding the high from the races yesterday, crazed! I always thought people that get really in to their sports were a little weird, I mean, not like you’re gonna win anything for it right? haha, I now get it!