The Gorge Downwind Championships race will take place tomorrow. It's been understood all along that the race date would be either tomorrow, Friday, or Saturday, depending on how the wind forecast looked. Today the race organizers decided that tomorrow looks best.
Some of the best downwind surf ski racers in the world are here. Jasper and Dawid Mocke. Kenny and Sean Rice. Austin Kieffer. Cory Hill. Older guys who are still formidable like Oscar Chalupsky and Greg Barton. Top female racers like Teneale Hatton and Hayley Nixon.
How am I going to do? The best I can, I hope. It's always my attitude that when I'm in a race I'm going for first place, but... well, let's just say that anybody who puts $100 on me to win tomorrow will become an instant billionaire if I actually pull it off. Friends keep telling me "Just go out and have fun." And they're absolutely right. But I want to have a competitive effort I can feel good about, too.
Rest and mental preparedness remain my biggest challenges. I spent yesterday recovering from the beating I had taken Monday. I paddled for about 50 minutes right at Hood River in the afternoon, and I actually felt better afterward than I had before.
This morning the announcement came down that the race would be tomorrow, and so today would have to be another easy day. Once again I did a short paddle down on the Hood River waterfront. The wind was screaming up the gorge, and as I paddled into it the noise in my ears made it seem like things were crazier out there than they really were. After paddling nervously for some ten minutes, I realized that aside from the steady dose of big waves, there was nothing about the conditions that I don't deal with fairly often back home on the Mississippi. At that point I relaxed and felt good in the boat the rest of the time.
It would be nice if I could go into tomorrow's race with several more days of hard downwind training under my belt. But the truth is that even an entire week of such work is not going to turn me into an instant downwind star. I'll just have to go out and race like I normally do and draw on my nearly four decades of paddling experience to adapt to whatever the conditions might be.
It sounds like tomorrow could be a real circus. We have to be at the start, at the mouth of the Wind River on the Washington side about 15 miles downriver from Hood River, between 9:00 and 10:45, with the race to start "between 12 and 1ish." I can envision a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, and I'll have to do my best to stay out of the sun and conserve energy until the organizers finally fire the starting gun. I guess the next time I post here I'll be telling you how it all went.
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