pre-race training

This is our race course...very beautiful. You can just see the finish line between the lighthouse-looking thing and the shore.

On Monday night, we were reminded why we were in Penang, and to quite tiring ourselves out with the touristing. You can bet that the Olympic athletes in Beijing right now aren't doing a huge amount of touristing and are instead concentrating on race plans, site visits, and short practices. So, that's our focus.

We've had 3 practices at the race course now. The first practice on Monday had us in the Asian-style boats that will be used in the concurrent Asian Dragonboat Championships, with our knees up around our ears, our seat under the waterline, and our armpits on the 3" gunwales. Needless to say, the boat felt like a tub, and the practice, although necessary to get out some of our heebie-jeebies, feel the heat, and visit the site, was tough going. We saw later that the Asian teams actually stand in these boats to paddle. Craziness.

It was a great relief to get back to our regular IDBF-sanctioned boats on Tuesday. They are not the BuK boats we use, so most seats are wider than people are used to, while Ivana and I are crammed in at the front. I found myself falling off the back of the seat every time I leaned forward for the catch, so I had borrow Judy's butt pad to help me stick to the seat. Today I wore my racing shorts and am happy to report that I either am getting used to eating my knees or the shorts are stickier.

The weather is hot. Aaron said 'So, this is what walking on the sun feels like' when he visited the site today. We are sucking back the water and electrolytes, and many of us (including myself) are dropping our buffs in the water as soon as we get in the boat and then putting them on our heads wet. The first practice felt awfully hot, but we are getting used to it, and by the end of the second practice I was feeling great. There was a bit of a wind today to help cool us off and we count any time the sun goes behind a cloud as a blessing.

You can see there weren't many clouds out today. We will walk this hill each time we race, between the 1st marshalling tent at the top (behind where I am taking the photo) and the 2nd one at the bottom, near the docks (that white spot on the left side of the photo).

Tomorrow is the 2K race. Even though this is our favourite race since it involves strategy, turns, and overtaking other boats, we're all apprehensive about it since it is 5 times longer than a regular race and takes 10+ minutes of agony to complete. The boats will go off one at a time for this race, 12 seconds apart and the final placement is based on time. There will be two heats of 10 boats each, and Montreal Women (our current best competition that we know, but we only know 4 of the 20 boats in our category) will be in the other heat from us. So, we'll have to try to overtake as many boats as possible in our heat and then wait for the next heat and hope that our time is good enough to top those boats too. We're heading out 4th from last in our heat, which is an excellent spot to be in...we'll get the thrill of the chase, but hopefully we won't get too involved in the mass pileups that can happen around the turns near the end of the race as the faster boats catch up to the slower boats.

Our race is at 4:10pm, which means it will be 4:10AM in Ottawa and 1:10AM in Victoria/Vancouver. I don't expect anybody to wait up for the race results, and likely it will take a few more hours before we'll be able to post them.