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...

Canada Premier Women dominated the 500m

‎I know that this post is delayed, but for what it's worth.....

Our 500m‎ races were fantastic. Wonderful. Powerful yet not panicked. Oh - and Premier Women came out on top or the podium - by a rather large margin of about 1 second!! 

Our first heat was exactly how a heat should be. Fast enough to get you top position in the final, but not so fast that you risk burning out. My nerves were on fire because I knew that after the 200m performance we had the day before(for which I still can't stop smiling)‎ - we had to prove that our win was not an accident - that we were meant to be on top. 

Needless to say, the heat was great and seeded us against China and US as our main competitors in the final. We had a very strong start and apparently we lead the race out of the starting gate and then turned on the power for our finish. Our caller kept saying "China is making their move, I need you now" and the boat responded right away with pure force of will striving to get us to the end of the race. With every stroke, our caller would yell "give me another seat" and the boat would respond. It was fantastic. 

In the end I believe we finished 1/2 a boat length ahead, which is huge in the main distance of a Premier boat at the ‎world championships. Our coach was ecstatic, as was the entire team. It's probably one of the best races I have had in my life, and I'm absolutely honored to have been a part of this National team experience in Hungary. 

Right now, I am in Budapest taking in the sites and the atmosphere. This city is quickly becoming one of my favorite in the world - more on that to come.

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In case you are interested in a little read, myself and two of my teammates were featured in a two page article in the Ottawa Citizen : http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/sports/story.html?id=ad94ad56-6fa3-47e7-b383-9b47641656a8

Canada Premier Women made history

The Canadian Premier Women made history today, beating team China for the first time in the 200m sprint distance!!

This adds another gold medal to the coffers - which places us with two gold and one bronze overall. Today has been a fantastic day!

In addition, teams are starting to get penalties for wash riding (after the 1000m fiascos, something had to be done - too bad it wasn't called during our race!!). 

So, this had been an incredible day of racing again. We managed to get our stroke rate up around 110 strokes per minute in the preliminary heat - it was fast but spinny so we decided to take it down for the final - which really benefited us in the end. It felt great, the boat felt awesome and everyone felt connected. We didn't know who won and had to wait for the replay to know for sure, but once we saw with proof that gold was ours, the boat erupted in celebration. There is really no other way to describe it. 

You see, the 200m has always been a dream to win - and we finally did it!

Tomorrow is the last day of racing where we will focus on the 500m distance. I will update later tomorrow or Monday with our standings. 

Go Canada!!!! 

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.