Maclean's publication

Hi everyone,

I've been meaning to do a bit of a re-cap of the event in China but haven't yet had the chance.... I had the Ottawa festival right after my return and am gearing up for Nationals in a few days. It's been busy... :)


BUT, I wanted to share some great press that Canadian dragonboat recently received.

Maclean's published an article called "18 Reasons why it's great to be Canadian", and they featured the Canadian National Dragonboat Team, and our results in Hungary 2013 as reason number 2. This is pretty big coverage for such a grassroots effort, so we're trying to share this as broadly as possible.

There is a great picture of the Premier Women's crew in Hungary last summer - see if you can spot me :)

18 Reasons why it's great to be Canadian

World cup done - now to get home...

Updates on this trip haven't exactly been consistent - finding free Wi-Fi has proven difficult, and to be honest, our days have been filled with racing, sleeping and foraging for food I can stomach. Thankfully, I filled my bag with protein bars from Canada - they're almost all gone ;)

Team Canada ended up with a respectable 3rd place overall (based on points) in the world cup - taking home two silver medals and three bronze. Our showing wasn't what the team or the coach wanted, but, considering how the team was brought together to race internationally, never having paddled together, we must accept that our results are good - all things considered. 

I must say though - it was tough standing on that podium and not singing along to the Canadian national anthem. For that reason, I'm going to step up my training to ensure that I'm on the National team for 2015 - and get to sing once more :)

We were supposed to have left yesterday, early morning, but our flight was cancelled and I am now hanging out in Beijing awaiting my outbound flight. If I had more time, I would go to the wall, but it just isn't feasible this trip. I've seen it before, but my travel companions haven't, so that would have been nice :)

Yesterday I spent the day wandering around Fuzhou. I spent a significant amount of time in a park adjacent to the hotel. They had a dragonboat museum there with the traditional teak boats. It was a sight to see, and a bit of an honour to pay homage to my sports beginnings. 

Later that afternoon, I was walking my some locale having tea and they invited me to join. I spent two hours chatting with them using a translation app on an iPad, and drinking white tea. It was possibly one of the coolest experiences I have had while travelling. It was great to have that opportunity because I was alone and not at the whim of travel mates. 

I will post some pictures when I get home, but for now here are some pics of our medals, and the locals who invited me to tea. 

Last day of racing

Today is the last day of racing at the IDBF World Cup in Fuzhou, China. This has been an incredibly interesting experience, and one where I'm learning a lot about team dynamics, managing expectations and kicking negative out of my head (and that of my teammates).

It's tough - our women's crew is not what our coach wanted - but we are doing our best.

This morning, we finished in silver position after the Philippines and before China in the 100m standard boat a final.

We just got off the water from the A final for the 200m relay. This is a tough race because pure putting teammates against teammates. In this case, it's our women who do a 200m race, and when they hit the finish line, the men have to race 200m in the opposite direction. It was head to head against China and we came in second by a few seats.

One of those heartbreaking races/ situations and now the women are psyched out or the final race of the day - a 500m standard boat mixed race.

Right now, we are waiting for the TV crews to ready themselves for our medal presentation ceremony, and trying to stay positive. It's unfortunate really. We are second place in the World Cup, and the mood at our team tent is collective dejection. It's different than my previous experiences - that's for sure.

Another item that we are contending with is having to race around television schedules. In some cases, they load us into the boats and leave us out on the water for twenty minutes before they start the race - this is particularly true whenever we are racing China. It makes it difficult to manage heat, water, mental and physical preparedness, but hey - the way I see it, we have been racing on cray jet-lagged bodies, so we really can't be much worse off ;)

The audience and crowd watching the races is incredible. There are so many people cheering us on, and we have made some friends with the locals. A man even brought us banana leave sticky rice after our last race that he made at home. It was cute.

Alright, enough for now. I will update when we have finished the 500m.

Bronze in the 200m

We have about 12 races today and we started our day off with a bronze medal finish in the 200m. First place went to China and second place went to Philipines.

We just finished our team pursuit race against team China. We won our heat but were assigned a ten second penalty which lands us in the bronze medal race. We are still seeking clarification on why we got a penalty and might end up in the gold medal race. More to one as I've just found out that there is wifi at the race site.

30 hours of travel + 5 hours of sleep + 5 races.....

‎I arrived in Fuzhou around 1am this morning as did my paddles (yay!), and we've hit the ground running. 

The first world cup in dragonboat opened this afternoon, and we have already had five races today including 1000m pursuit style team races around a 250m course, 400m relay races and 200m straight races. 

With each race, we get a bit more confident and comfortable paddling together, and we're hoping that a good night of sleep will help even more. 

The racing is good - very competitive (which is why we are here, really), but the experience is very different racing co-ed than it is single sex. Also, our boat has adopted a different technique for paddling, so it's all about meshing as quickly as we can.

The host hotel is nice enough, but I've been having a hard time finding food I can eat. It's going to be a lot of steamed book chop and protein powder over the next few days, I'm sure. 

It's about 9pm here, and I'm beyond exhausted, so this post is really just to update friends and loved ones that I'm alive and made it.

Going to China... again :)

It's been awhile (ha! I always start my posts off this way!).

This time around, I've been named to the Canadian crew who is going to Fuzhou, China for the inaugural world cup (http://dragonboat.ca/node/789). Initially the competition was to take place during the actual dragon-boat festival in China, however, we'll be attending toward the end of the festival so will miss the majority of the cultural events. 

The Chinese government has decided to host us, and will be televising the event (although, not entirely sure if that extends to international broadcast) - still... pretty cool! This will be the first time I have had costs covered by a host organization, and the ability to win money to boot!

However, as with most things in my life these days - I feel like this trip is one big rush... I leave Ottawa on Sunday morning, arrive in Fuzhou just before midnight on Monday, and begin racing on Tuesday. Considering the calibre of competition, I would have hoped for at least one day to acclimate and prepare for a serious time zone disruption - alas, it wasn't meant to be. 

I'm racing in Montreal on Saturday which didn't exactly leave me a whole lot of time to transition from racing with my club crew to getting into a "world cup" mode, however, I'm going for the racing and the experience - and hoping that our crew (who hasn't really ever paddled together), quickly finds our groove. To top it all off, because I'm working full time and on limited vacation time, I'm working right up until Friday evening - making preparations a bit more stressful than I would have liked.

The race format is very different than my previous attendance at world level events. I will be racing standard mixed crew, as well as small boat single sex (women) crew. I've got a total of 10 minutes of experience in a small boat, so again... the dice will land where they land during those races ;)

I will attempt to update as much as possible - though, I've heard that can be difficult due to the "great firewall" of China...