Here in Hood River I'm sharing a nice little rental house with four other people: Ted Burnell of Chattanooga, Tennessee; Will Schaet of Jacksonville, Florida; and Ulli Sherer and Michael Meredith of the Detroit area. It's an easygoing group of folks and we're having all the fun one could imagine.
The Columbia River Gorge is a section where the river is enclosed between steep ridges on both sides. The wind from the Pacific Ocean gets funneled through this landform and turns the river's surface into a playground for sailors, windsurfers, kiteboarders, and surf ski and outrigger paddlers. The Gorge Downwind Championships race will go some 13 miles up the Columbia River (i.e., with the wind at the racers' backs), starting at the mouth of the Wind River and finishing at the town of Hood River.
Those who are only casually familiar with "downwind" canoe and kayak racing tend to think that all a racer has to do is hop on a wave and ride it all the way to the finish line. Alas, it's not that simple. A typical wave has a life span of maybe 20 or 30 seconds at the most, and when it peters out the racer must find another one to ride. Catching a wave requires a hard five-second sprint, and doing a bunch of those becomes extremely taxing after a while. The most skilled downwind racer is able to keep these hard sprints to a minimum, using the momentum from one wave ride to carry him onto another wave. And so downwind racing requires a good eye for waves and a laser-like focus: the racer is constantly looking for the next good wave. It sort of reminds me of the slalom racing I used to do, where the top athletes were able to link together moves seamlessly; but where slalom racers are able to study the course and plan every move ahead of time, downwind racers must do it all on the fly.
I should note that much of the previous paragraph was informed by conversations with my long-time racing friend Chris Hipgrave, who is out here from North Carolina to race this week. He has been an assiduous student of downwind racing for a number of years, even flying to South Africa last winter for a clinic taught by some of the sport's top athletes, and he very kindly took time to explain some of the essentials and tell me what I might expect in the Gorge this week.
My biggest challenge for this week is to be rested and mentally prepared on race day. The event site down on the Hood River waterfront is quite a carnival atmosphere, with no end of distractions. And here in the arid West the sun is relentless. I've remarked on the triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures we're having here right now, how it's not nearly as unpleasant as the Memphis heat because of the lack of humidity. But this "dry heat" is deceptive, especially out on the water: you can be out there doing your thing, feeling perfectly comfortable and having big fun, but then before you know it, you're dehydrated.
I did not do a good job of managing my energy yesterday. I had to go down to the event site to get myself checked in, and then I spent too much time in the sun, wandering around and talking to people. I drank some water during the day, but not nearly enough.
Yesterday afternoon I did two runs of an eight-mile section of the course with Ted Burnell. For the most part, the first run was a barrel of fun. I felt comfortable out in the conditions, and congratulated myself for the time I'd spent working towboat wakes on the Mississippi at home. But I also was thinking about what Chris had told me and strove to link as many wave rides together as I could.
I remember something Lecky Haller, a two-time U.S. Olympian in whitewater slalom, once told me when he heard me wondering aloud, in anguish, why I couldn't perform like the elite-level racers did. He told me that while I might not be an elite-level racer, I'd had pieces of elite-level runs. That's exactly how I'd characterize my first run with Ted in the Gorge yesterday: once in a while I would link together a few good rides and want to shout, "Whoo hoo! I'm nailing this!!" Then, moments later, I would sit on a wave too long or mis-time my sprint to get on another wave, and find myself paddling up the back side of a wave and losing all my speed. I know the top guys in this week's race will be linking successful moves much more consistently. They'll make mistakes, of course, but their mistakes will be smaller, and they will recover from them more quickly.
As fun as that first run was, I was feeling pretty worn out in the last couple of miles. As we paddled in to the finish at Hood River I figured I'd put in a good day's work. But Ted said he was going to grab a quick lunch and then hop on the shuttle to get another run in. I said, "You're doing another run?" and he replied "Of course," the implied message being, "Come on! We've got all this travel invested! We need to be out there having all the fun we can get!!" And so, against my better judgement, I went with Ted for another run. And it was on this second run that my inadequate hydration and poor energy management really caught up with me. I managed a few decent moves in the first several miles, but then I was finished. Paddling against the Columbia's current with no energy left to sprint for waves, I was barely moving at all. So I paddled over to the Oregon side and limped along in the slacker water there. Though I never doubted I'd make it back to Hood River--I do paddle up the Mississippi all the time, after all--I knew it would be a miserable slog.
This morning I'm feeling as though I did a hard race yesterday. No matter how good the conditions might be out there today, I need to recover. Maybe I'll get one run in... we'll see. But priority number one today is to avoid the intense sunshine, stay hydrated, and take care of my body. I'm a little miffed with myself because it's kind of a rookie mistake, not managing myself better yesterday, but... you never stop learning, I guess.
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