Fun while it lasted

Racers gathered at Alton Slough on the Mississippi River yesterday morning with the intention of racing ten miles, doing five laps of a two-mile loop.  But right as I was completing my second lap the race was called due to lightning.

I had checked the forecast at www.weather.com before I left the motel, and it predicted slim chances of rain before noon.  But a check of the Internet radar showed some heavy storms moving east from the Jefferson City area, and when I arrived at the race site the sky looked like it would let loose well before noon.  In the pre-race meeting, race director Bryan Hopkins said the race would start on time, but that the Corps of Engineers, whose rangers were operating safety boats for the event, would call the race if lightning moved into the area.

We lined up and the gun went off, and I found myself with plenty of company in the first few hundred meters even though I had sprinted hard off the line.  After making the first buoy turn, two tandem kayaks and I began to separate from the pack a bit.  I found myself in a stiff competition with Jim Short and Dylan McHardy of Springfield, Missouri, and Ron Ladzinski and Mira Doneva of Olathe, Kansas.  The pace was fairly brisk and I found myself working hard to stay on my competitors' wakes.  I wasn't exactly on the ropes, but by the time we were finishing our second lap I was wondering whether I would be able to hang with these tandems for all five.  Then the sirens went off, calling everybody to shore, and the question became moot.

We gathered in the park pavilion and discussed what to do next.  One option was to try to resume the race with everybody where he had been when the sirens had started, but since that could not be done truly fairly we decided to do the whole race over, this time over two laps instead of five.  The plan was to start the race about seventy minutes later, but a heavy rain began to settle in and the storm became ever more severe, the Internet radar showing no let-up, so eventually the race organizers decided to send us home.

Medals were awarded based on each racer's position at the moment of the stop-command.  I had been in second place overall, right behind Dylan and Jim and right ahead of Mira and Ron, but since I was in first place among single kayakers, I got myself a first-place medal.  It wasn't really fair, of course--there's no telling who might have mounted a surge and taken me down later in the race.  But the race organizers had medals to get rid of, and there was no fairer way to hand them out, so there it was.  After getting thoroughly drenched while carrying my boat back to the car and strapping it down, I drove away generally happy to have gotten a good workout and paddled in a somewhat different part of the country from most of my race settings in recent years.

As I drove south through the city of Saint Louis, the rain eased and finally stopped.  I found a place to park and had lunch consisting of an apple, celery, and some crackers.  Then I stopped for dessert at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, a Saint Louis institution since 1929.  At the suggestion of the radio announcers for Cardinals baseball games, I tried the lemon crumb concrete.  It was mightily good.