Back in the Game

The 24 hours after the Waterside A were spent in gloomy reflection of our performance. The upsetting thing was not the fact that we had capsized four times but the fact that we knew we could paddle so much better than we did. There was quite a bit of rough and tumble during the race and I made the schoolboy error of being drawn into it, rather than just doing our own thing. As a result I wasn't really putting myself in Adam's position who had never experienced this type of race before and instead of helping him relax and concentrate on his paddling I succeeding in making him more nervous which ultimately proved to be part of our downfall.
Anyway, it's done now and we need to put it behind us; it was a bad day, end of. The two major changes that we are making as a result of Sunday is that we now have a Discovery to paddle and we will not be taking the start at the Waterside D race. Having done the D last year and knowing that the conditions will be similar to the A, only over twice as long, it seems sensible that we paddle the D route on our own at some point. We've also had a couple of kind offers to do it with a few other crews so we may well do that instead. The D race is nowhere near the same conditions as the DW (it's just over the same part of the course) so it seems sensible for us to do our own thing, in our own time, as we will in the DW.

So on Monday we headed out into the Discovery just to do a short session to get back into a boat and get the bad taste out of our mouths. There was quite a bit of swell as we pounded up and down between Walton and Sunbury and it even started to snow a bit but we were fine and we could both feel the additional stability that the Disco offers. Last night it was a long 2 hour paddle on the Wey and I could tell that he was more comfortable as he spent most of the paddle taking the mick out of me rather than sitting in grim silence, concentrating on everything that was going on. The other telling thing was  that during the paddle we didn't put down one, single support stroke. It was our most pleasurably, uneventful paddle we've ever had, which is a very good sign. We'll save the mystere for next year!  ;-) The only problem I can see with the disco is that because of its extra stability I immediately stopped cycling my legs and pressing on the footbar and I must make sure that we don't lose that part of the stroke. As ever, something to work on.....

Running is going really well. :-) It's got that effortless feeling at the moment, rather than me grinding out the miles. More of the same please.
This weekend will be a long bike on Sunday morning, 4 hours ish and a long paddle Sunday night. Mrs Wheezy just about remembers what I look like!

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Cheers Hodge. We should have remembered to do our own thing, like you. Lesson learnt!