Michael and Rob and I were up bright and early yesterday morning. We had some breakfast, got our gear together, and departed from our house in Cascade Locks. We got a look at the race course on the Columbia River as we drove east on Interstate 84 toward Hood River: the wind was blowing as hard as it had all week, and it looked like some beefy conditions were building out there.
We left Michael's car at Hood River and crammed all three of us into the cab of my pickup truck. We crossed the Hood River Bridge over to the Washington side and drove along the course once more until we reached the start at Home Valley Park.
Registration was definitely down from past years by several hundred people, but there still seemed to be a healthy crowd of folks readying their boats and gear for competition. After the pre-race meeting with event director Carter Johnson, we all proceeded down the sandy trail toward the river.
Racers were started in waves. The small number of stand-up paddleboarders went first, launching from the beach. Then all female surfski and outrigger canoe racers started, along with all tandem craft. My fellow men's surfski racers and I were next, to be followed by the male OC1 paddlers.
The wind was screaming in our ears and huge swells were bobbing us up and down like wine corks as we all paddled into the wind for several hundred meters to where the race officials wanted us to start. I had an added distraction courtesy of my G.P.S. device: I'd pulled up the screen I wanted before getting in the boat, but the thing shuts itself off--"to save power"--if you don't actually start its watch for five minutes. So I had to sit there and fiddle with it, scrolling through a couple of menus before I found the screen I wanted, as the waves knocked me all over the place. Maybe one day I'll finally get the hang of this new gadget.
Once I finally had it all squared away I began to move into the pack of starters. A very short moment later the red flag went up telling us to GO!!!! There was no turning back now.
I had a lousy start. I tried to catch a run as soon as I could, but I was still a bit discombobulated from my technological distractions and all the pre-race nerves seemed to tighten their grip on me. It felt like hundreds of guys were opening a minute-or-more gap on me right there in the first hundred meters.
I told myself to calm down and just do what I'd been doing in practice runs for the last nine days. If there was something I couldn't do in practice, then I wasn't going to do it here on race day, either. I needed to go back to Step One and execute the basics. After all, the best racers are the ones who simply do the basics better than anyone else.
Among those "basics," as I learned them from Dawid Mocke in South Africa last year, are "Take one run at a time" and "Little runs lead to big runs." I started looking for small bumps I could hop onto and get my boat speed up. Slowly but surely, I began to link some bigger runs onto my smaller ones and find something of a groove.
The wind continued to be impressive. What I'd heard is that it was blowing around 30 miles per hour, with gusts of 40 mph or more. For the first time since my arrival in the Gorge, I could feel it blowing against my back even as I had a good run going.
That continued for maybe five or six miles, and then... the conditions mysteriously disappeared. I think we'd reached a part of the river where a mountain was blocking the wind. I was still looking for runs to catch, but suddenly they were barely there. Once this reality had dawned on me I started to shift into ordinary flatwater-distance-racing mode, and maybe I should have been happy about that since that's the sort of racing I mostly do back home, but all I could think was, "This is not what I drove across the country for!!!!"
The dead period seemed to last an eternity, but it probably wasn't more than ten minutes or so. Slowly the wind began to return, but it was another while before the conditions had built back up. By the time I was passing Drano Lake on the Washington side it was starting to look like the Columbia Gorge I've grown to love once more. This was when I really started to have fun. I was getting tired, but I was still able to sprint with lots of power, and I thank my coach Maks Frančeškin for helping me get that way this year.
From Drano to Hood River I felt like I was doing the best job I've ever done of keeping my boat moving in the downwind conditions. A couple of times the speed display on my G.P.S. device rose as high as 17 kilometers per hour (about 10.56 miles per hour); other times it was down below 11 kph (6.84 mph). But practically all the time I was getting some kind of help from the waves and not having to use that much of my own energy. My main challenge at this point was fighting through the fatigue and staying focused and keeping my boat on whatever runs I could find.
As I moved into the early stages of Swell City, the runs started getting juicier. Sadly, Swell City develops primarily over toward the Washington side of the river, and our finish line yesterday was hard against the Oregon shore. I began to angle toward the right as I moved into the course's final kilometers. The runs were now coming from my five o'clock and I had to be precise to avoid getting spun broadside. As I progressed from 2000 meters out to 1500 meters out to 1000 meters out, I nudged my nose more and more to the right until I was paddling almost in a beam wind.
When I did this race two years ago, I got out-sprinted to the finish line by a guy from Vancouver. The man earned it fair and square, but I came away with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth for letting it happen. This year I wanted to have a finish I could feel good about. With some 800 meters to go I started paddling harder, keeping an eye out for any help the waves might offer me. Ahead of me there were two boats, a white surfski over to my left and a red one to my right. They were far enough ahead that I figured catching them might be a long shot, but I went for it anyway. The waves were making no more than a 30-degree angle with my boat, but every few seconds I managed to get a little boost from one, and I tried to paddle as efficiently as I could and take every ounce of aid I could. I nudged a little closer. And a little closer. And a little closer still.
There was a row of buoys marking the final approach to the narrow finish chute where the electronic timing equipment was positioned; we were to paddle between these buoys and the bank. As we moved to within 200 meters of these buoys, we had formed a tight pack with the guy in the white ski first, the guy in the red ski second, and then me. I called up the last bit of energy I had and began to sprint. The waves were fully in our favor once more and and I was getting a brief ride, then another, and another. I moved in front of the red ski, then the white one, and kept the power on until I glided across the finish line with a time of one hour, 51 minutes, 45 seconds. The guy in the white ski, a man named Bruce Fincher, finished four seconds back at 1:51:49, and the paddler of the red ski, who turned out to be former Memphian Ilia Kolesnikov, clocked in at 1:51:51.
It was my fastest time on this course in three tries. My first race here in 2018 was more than 10 minutes slower, so I do believe I have made some progress as a downwind racer, and that's satisfying. My race this year was not perfect, but in the end I settled in and gave it a good strong effort, and I'm happy about that. I was the 121st fastest among 271 total finishers.
Austin Kieffer, a native of Asheville, North Carolina, who now lives in southern California, took the overall victory in one hour, 23 minutes, 3 seconds. 19-year-old Ana Swetish of Bellingham, Washington, was the top female finisher in 1:31:14. Other notable finishers include solo outrigger men's champion Triston Kahookele of Hawaii and OC1 women's champ Lindsey Shank, also of Hawaii. The complete results are posted here.
This morning I'm feeling a bit sore but not too bad. I have just two days left here in the Columbia Gorge before I begin my journey eastward back toward home, and my plan is to get several more runs in and just have fun.
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