Tag Archives: race day

Concord Pacific Vancouver Dragon Boat Festival

21 Jun

Normally my posts are recaps of something I have done or seen but this time I’m giving you a chance to take part, via your computer screen, with something I will be doing this weekend. Oh the excitement! lol 😉

This weekend (June 22-23, 2019) is the Concord Pacific Vancouver Dragon Boat Festival. That is a mouthful! So from here on out I am just going to call it Concord, k?

 

 

Concord is the largest dragon boat festival in North America. The racing takes place over two days, Saturday and Sunday. Opening festivities are Friday evening but I have never been to those because I am always working. Teams come from all over the world to take part, for competitive teams it is a qualifier (think of how some marathons are qualifiers so runners can take part in the massive marathons, like the Boston Marathon), even if you are a rec team the festival is still a big deal. For my team, we race other races during the season but our big one, the one we say we practice all season for, is this one.

No pressure or anything. 😛

For those who can’t get to the festival to watch in person, or who want to avoid the crowds and ever changing weather, you can watch a live feed online, which is how you can (sort of) join me this weekend.

The link to the live feed is:

http://concordlive.ca

Races are from 8am to 6pm (approximately) and are about every 11 minutes. There will be an announcer explaining everything you are seeing, which is useful because it can be hard to tell when watching a race the order the boats cross the finish line. There is a whole reason behind that but it is too lengthy to get in to here, just know it involves buoys, water, and angles.

I remember from last year that after the weekend was over you could go back and watch the feed for at least a couple days, I don’t know how long it was left up, I just know I went and watched our races because I wanted to see what they looked like. I point this out so that any of you who are in drastically different time zones can take a look when it is over instead of staying up late and being half asleep while glancing at the feed…which I realize is me making a large assumption that any of you will actually watch but hey, a girl can be optimistic at times, right?

So yeah, not much else to say at this point, I’m going to go get my gear ready and meander my way to bed, I’m psyched for the weekend and hope we do well! If you watch, awesome! If you don’t, that’s cool too, but maybe send some positive vibes my team’s way, you know, for good karma points if nothing else. 😉

dragon_zone_twisted_hips_logo

Paddles Up!

 

 

 

 

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0.317

16 Aug

Last weekend my dragon boat team and I competed at the Victoria Dragon Boat Festival. So many things happen at these away races and I always struggle on how to write about them. Do I focus on the races? The food? The general merriment? The travel? Sometimes there is one huge thing that stands out, so it becomes obvious what story I want to tell, other times the entire weekend is fun and I wish I could find a way to talk about everything.

I thought I’d try breaking things down in to categories…maybe that will help?

So, the food!

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This isn’t all the food I ate over the course of the trip, there was dinner on the ferry ride home, and a random banana or slices of toast here and there, but the best food deserved to be photographed and shared.

Pictures of Victoria!

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I took some random, kinda touristy, pictures of Victoria while there. I can’t really tell you all that much about them lol I just took them because I liked how they looked.

General hi-jinks!

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So yeah, I realized I didn’t ask anybody if I could put their pictures on my blog and it is late at night right now so I’m not going to wake them up with texts asking, which means you’re stuck with pictures of me. Sorry!

Last, but definitely not least, is the actual racing!

Each team raced twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday. We had the option to race in something called Guts & Glory but it happens later in the day on Sunday and we wanted to be on as early of a ferry as possible so we opted out. It was nice to qualify though. 🙂

We won Bronze in Division A, or as this festival calls it, Diamond Division!

You may be wondering about the title of this post, 0.317.

0.317 is how far behind we were from the team that won Silver. So we were thiiiiiiis close to winning silver. Which for some people might make the bronze seem less special, or might make winning the Bronze sad, because instead of thinking we Won bronze the thought becomes we Lost silver. I get it, I do! So many races are won and lost by hundredths of a second and when you are on the losing side of that number it can hurt. To know that you were so close and didn’t make it sucks. It doesn’t help that when you tell people you won Bronze they dismiss it, or joke about you not winning silver or gold, or make any number of comments that I guess they think are funny. Weirdos.

It happens when you win silver, people comment about you getting gold next time, things like that. *rolls eyes*

Instead of celebrating the medal we earned, the time we got, it becomes about being apologetic we didn’t do better. To that, I am calling bullshit. That’s right, you heard me.

We have been training for months, since February in case you were curious. We train in cold, in rain, in wind, in polluted waters, in poor air quality, in blistering heat, in hail. We train when we are tired, sick, injured, sad. We have been working our butts off for the better part of a year, and we’ll keep training because it is what we do. We train on the water, we compete in other sports, we go to the gym, hike trails, do all sorts of things to stay strong and keep fit, in part so we can bring a strong and useful version of ourselves to the boat.

All of that counts for something, at least to me it does, and I’m proud of our Bronze medal. We worked hard for that, we earned it! My team accomplished something in Victoria, we came together and showed that we could work as a team and earn some hardware. I am proud of all of them. 🙂

The Twisted Hips, Victoria 2018 Roster

Ok so I didn’t actually get permission from any of them yet to show the team picture so I’m just gonna cross my fingers none of them mind! lol

That in a nutshell is my Victoria weekend. We went. We ate a lot of food. We raced. We won bronze. I bought a hat that is over priced but looks so good on me. None of us got sunburned (that’s mostly a concern for me, the pale one in the group lol). We had a fun time. 😀

 

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Poor Little Bee

15 May

Yesterday was race day, yay! It was the FCRCC Knockout Race which means your team races three qualifiers then you go on to the knockout round which sounds pretty much exactly like it is.

There are 7 teams in the heat, you race, the last two get knocked out, the rest of you immediately paddle back to the start line and you race again. This happens for three races in a row. The final race there are only three boats and the pressure is on!

It is soooooooo much fun! 🙂

There are no medals for this race, just bragging rights.

We earned a tad bit of bragging rights since we came in second place in B Division. Not too shabby!

However, despite a day filled with racing, and fun, and hanging with the team, and repeated sunscreen application, and the joy of not being at work on a day I normally work the one big memory that won’t leave my brain is of…*dun-dun-dun*…a bee.

Yup, that’s right, a honey bee. Ya know, those cute little guys that are integral to our ecosystem and that are dying out? Those bees.

honey bee clip art

Might as well lean back in your chair and be comfy for this…

Some of us went to McDonald’s to get drinks, hey, it’s Summer Drink Days, don’t judge! I decided to try the lemonade, which fyi, delish! I didn’t quite finish it when we had to go warm up for our next race, the Knockout round, so I left it in the cup holder in the arm of my camp chair.

When we got back after our three back-to-back races I figured take one last gulp to finish the lemonade off and throw away the cup. Seems a fairly normal decision, right?

Well, note to self, next time look in the cup, and the straw! I take my sip of drink and something solid-ish is all of a sudden in my mouth. I thought it must be a lemonade seed and was kinda surprised cause this is a McD’s drink, so, not real lemonade, right? I mean, it comes out of a machine, it is processed in some way I am sure…but maybe I am wrong and there are real lemons involved in the making of this drink…who knows!

Not wanting to swallow a seed I pop a finger and thumb in to my mouth to remove it and what do I remove but a dead honey bee.

Yup.

Let that sink in a minute. I had a honey bee in my mouth.

My. Mouth.

*shudder*

What if I had opted to chew and swallow the “seed”?? Ugh, the thought makes me cringe. (seriously, cringing right now from having written that!)

I guess the lure of the sugar in the lemonade was too much for the bee to resist and down the straw it went, where it promptly got stuck and drowned, poor little bee. And then instead of having a proper funeral, or whatever it is bees do when one of their own goes down in the line of duty, I almost ate him! Then I threw him to the ground in a silent freak out! *shakes head at self* So disrespectful.

I actually do feel kind of bad. I don’t feel bad about killing certain creepy crawlies, especially if they are in my apartment, but I try not to kill them when I am outside and in their home environment. Plus the whole endangered thing! Oh the guilt! So I’m going to take some wild flower seeds with me when I hike this Wednesday and scatter them around, maybe some of them will grow, and help out the honey bees in that area, and karma will be balanced once again…or the bees have a little bee network and they now know I was indirectly responsible for the drowning of one of their own and the desecration of his body and now I’m on the honey bee hit list…

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