Reality Check

You may have gathered that my last post was written in a bit of a sulk. I apologise. I'm over it now. It was written on the back of 2 rubbish paddles (the other one was me in a K1, just not on it at all) and a feeling that it's all getting too close and we haven't put in enough long miles. That last K2 paddle was meant to be all about miles in the bank and it wasn't and it seemed that in the course of a 2 hour paddle we had regressed 6 months.

But of course, we hadn't. After a few days we got back into the mystere. Originally we were going to K1 but we decided that we needed to do another K2 paddle so we headed out on Sunday night. The aim was to do a solid 90 minute paddle and include some good quality reps. After a warm up to Teddington lock we turned back and started doing our 4 minute reps but really trying to nail our technique. For me, it's all about the catch and setting up the stroke at the beginning as I seem to have developed a tendency to slap the water when tired so I've really been trying to get the paddle vertical and spear the water. I am better at this when I slow the stroke down so while the reps were about increasing our speed and aerobic workrate we were not going so fast as to become ragged. We were on our seventh rep when I felt what I thought was something hitting my BA and I saw someone running after us along the towpath. I assumed that it was someone throwing stones at us only for Ad to tell me that we'd snagged a fishing line. The fisherman wasn't particularly happy that we'd dragged his brand new, £120 carbon fibre rod into the water. Adam politely pointed out that we had 3 lights on the boat and he was practically invisible. Thankfully after a few minutes we were able to unhook us from his line and after a bit of gentle persuasion, his fishing rod appeared from the deep. No harm done. Anyway, 10 miles done with the best part of 28 minutes bouncing along at a tempo pace. If nothing else it was enjoyable. Last night we were back out again, this time in the laances doing more technique work. We were both clattered so after an hour we called it quits.