Boat designs

Yesterday morning I did two sets of the May strength routine and paddled for 60 minutes.

For the last several days we've had what my friend Joe likes to call "chamber of commerce" weather--sunshine, clear skies, low humidity, lots of people out running, riding bikes, just playing in the parks... the sort of scenes every chamber of commerce depicts in its promotional brochures.

The water was calm down at the harbor yesterday, so I got out the K1.  As usual, I had comfortable stretches and unstable stretches.  As I mentioned in Thursday's post, my fastest time in those pieces I did in my surf ski from the monorail bridge to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge was 2:14; out of curiosity, I decided to see what I could do in the K1.  In the much less stable boat, I didn't feel like I had the hammer down like I did in the ski, and every forward stroke felt like partly a brace.  My watch was on my wrist so I couldn't really look at it while I paddled, but as I neared the finish line I guessed that my time would be 2:25 or 2:30.  Then I crossed the line and looked at my watch: 2:15.  Hmm.

I've always had the attitude that "It's not the boat; it's the motor."  I hate it when people say things like "Oh, Billy beat Charley because he was in a faster boat," and I sneer at people who are always buying new boats because they weren't having the race results they wanted in their previous boats.

But boat design certainly is not irrelevant.  There's an obvious speed difference between a surf ski and a sixteen-foot touring boat, and I guess the speed difference between a K1 and a surf ski, while less obvious, is nevertheless genuine.  I do a couple of races each year--including next Saturday's race at Little Rock--that are attended by Olympic hopefuls in K1s.  I've always wondered if their fitness and their power and their technique are really that much better than mine.  I expect that if we all raced in surf skis they would still beat me, for they are younger and their training is more elite-level than mine, but maybe they wouldn't beat me by as much.