Yeah … more girls this race. More people to race with and more people to pace myself against. This was a pretty pleasing race with one exception that was outside my control.
So, the course for this race was pretty interesting and innovative. It was the shape of a lightning bolt with downwind and upwind stretches in a light-ish wind that was blowing out to sea. That course shape meant 23 turns in the 4 laps that made up the 6km race. Not 2-3, 23! That’s a LOT of turning and every one of them creates opportunities for lots of unpredictable things to happen. Make a mental note of that.
There are a bunch of different ways races can start. This one was a water start. So we are all in the water up to our knees with our boards at our side. When the hooter goes, you push the board forward, jump on/stand up as quickly as you can and paddle quickly. Being awake the hooter’s a good idea. Don’t drift off like I did. Then once we are all off, there’s a lot of choppy wake created by all the boards and paddlers. So practising paddling with a good rhythm in choppy water is a good way to get used to those starts. And you can get a real good glide in some of that wake.
So I was nicely in touch with most of the women on the run up to the first buoy .. behind a bit, owing to being somewhere else in my head when the hooter went, but nothing calamitous.
And then we get to buoy turn number 1. So with 24 competitors all getting round the buoy at pretty much the same time you can imagine the congestion. Bit of waiting to turn. And as I’m turning the buoy and aiming to get round fast to keep in touch with the other girls .. bump. My board was hit by another competitor’s. Bump is followed by water, followed by several apologies, followed by ‘are you ok?’. I’m fine apart from the swimming.
This isn’t always the end of the world if you can get back on your board quickly. You get quite good at that and it becomes almost a reflex as soon as you hit the water. Not this time though. Our boards are tangled up while the other paddler is still turning and then somehow my leash got caught up with that board too. This is not a quick remount. More like watching on in painfully slow motion.
So there are a range of ways you can respond to this … throw in the towel at the first buoy, get angry, or channel some frustration and chase down the next paddler in front of you. So back on my feet (bit cool now but that’ll wear off) and let’s get chasing whoever the next person is in front of me. It would be misleading to leave an impression of calm logic here. There was a fair bit of emotion in stabbing that paddle into the water. Perhaps some of that venting then helped focus me back on the next paddler and getting back into the race as best I could.
With so many turns over a 6km course, the competitors all thin out quite quickly. And there are a few different ways to get round those 22 remaining buoys before the beach finish line.
The quickest way is called a pivot turn and involves walking back on your board to push the nose out the water and then spin it round with big sweep strokes.
Balance is required for this especially in choppy water. The other, more conservative way to turn is a cross bow turn where you put the paddle across your body and into the water and use your body to pull the nose of the board around. Doing this quickly often means walking back on the board too to lift the nose a bit and get the nose spinning quicker.
It’s fair to say I’m still working on really fast, efficient pivot turns (especially under pressure). So given I’d had a nice swim at buoy #1, I took the more conservative option of cross buoy turns to make sure there was no more swimming. I’d made up a bit of ground on the paddlers in front of me so didn’t want to risk throwing that away.
I said at the start this was a pretty pleasing race, despite coming 5th (of 5 female paddlers). On reflection, there are some things in races that you can control and other things (like bumping boards) that you can do nothing about. So the ground made up on a few other paddlers was a good effort with what I could influence.
PS In case you are worried about any injuries to my board, it’s fine. They’re remarkably robust.
