The Gorge Downwind Championships took place the day before yesterday. We raced up the Columbia River (because that's the direction the wind blows) from Home Valley Park on the Washington side to the town of Hood River on the Oregon side. The distance is approximately 14 miles or 22 kilometers.
I completed the race with a time of one hour, 54 minutes, 40 seconds. Out of the 584 surf skis, outrigger canoes, and stand-up paddleboards entered, I was the 239th fastest. I was 147th among the 269 solo surf ski racers. Among the 222 male surf ski racers, I was 133rd. I was 37th out of 70 men in the 50-59 age group of my boat class.
To see the complete results, follow the link I posted Thursday night.
The Gorge Downwind Championships is different from any other race I do during the year, and I'm not sure I can give the kind of report I typically do for other races. So maybe the best thing I can do is just start tossing out some observations.
Downwind racing has a whole different skill set from the flatwaterish racing I mostly do. The idea is to catch a small wave (a "run"), and then use the speed you gain on that run to advance to bigger runs. When I paddled with Dawid Mocke on Monday, two of the mantras he kept repeating were "Small runs lead to big runs" and "When you get up some speed, take it somewhere."
I've been using my G.P.S. device all this week, and I've observed that when I'm not "on a run," my speed is typically around 6 miles per hour. Then I'll catch a small run and move up over 7 mph. As I move on to bigger and bigger runs, my speed increases over 8 and then over 9 mph. I think I've hit 10 once or twice. Eventually my run comes to an end when I stall out on the back of a wave--at this point I'm paddling uphill, basically--and my speed dives back down to 6 mph or worse.
Years ago I took a woodworking course from a really good teacher, and he explained that the most skilled woodworkers make their share of mistakes, but their mistakes are smaller, and they recover from them more quickly. I think you can say something similar about the elite-level downwind racers: they, too, will stall out on their runs, but they do so much less often than the rest of us, and when they do, it doesn't take them much more than a stroke or two to get another run going. And of course, they're achieving much higher speeds than I am. Thursday's winner, Kenny Rice of Cape Town, South Africa, took just over 84 minutes to complete the course, so his average speed was around 10 mph.
Steady-paced paddling simply doesn't cut it in downwind racing. Catching runs and sustaining them requires many bursts of explosive speed. So downwind racers must have different priorities in their training from those of ordinary marathon racers. Just as important is concentration, and that often makes the difference between winning and not winning. I understand that in the late stages on Thursday, Austin Kieffer of San Diego, California, appeared to be in control of the race, but a brief lapse in concentration caused him to lose the run he was on and leave the door wide open for Rice to take the win.
My own race got off to a sluggish start. The conditions were small in the first several kilometers, and I struggled to find bumps on which I could get runs started. It seemed like the entire pack of racers was pulling away from me, and every time I glanced down at my G.P.S. device, I was poking along around 6 mph. At one point I caught a good run and surged past my old racing friend Scott Cummins of Louisville, Kentucky, with whom I've always been evenly matched in our "ordinary" races back East. But a minute later Scott regained the lead and I flailed around as he began to pull away. I hit sort of a low point when I failed to catch a steep wave and water completely swamped my footwell and seat bucket. My speed plummeted below 3 mph. Self-pity began to set in: I'm just not good at this, I kept thinking.
By and by, as I moved upriver within sight of Viento State Park, the conditions began to build, and I found myself putting together some decent runs at last. My mood began to brighten. Just like Dawid had said, my little runs were leading to bigger runs, and soon I was getting ride after ride on beautiful glassy-smooth swells. Now when I glanced down at the G.P.S., my speed was in the sevens and eights a lot more often than the sixes. Suddenly I was motivated and I eagerly attacked every opportunity to "take my speed somewhere."
The limitations of my fitness became apparent as I passed Wells Island: my top gear abandoned me. But I was still able to paddle strong, and as the surf conditions gave way to smaller chop I tried to keep the boat gliding toward the finish line. In the last several hundred meters I was right next to a guy named Sean Hulscher of West Vancouver, British Columbia, and we had a spirited fight to the finish with him clipping me by one second.
My race was anything but perfect, but it was a lot better than last year's effort, and I'm happy about that. There are certainly aspects of downwind racing that I haven't even begun to learn yet, such as recognizing where in the river or ocean the fastest runs can be found. But that's just more stuff to have fun with in the future.
Yesterday I was suitably tired from the big race, but with forecasts predicting the wind to die down this weekend, I knew I should get in a couple of runs from Viento to Hood River while the conditions were there. So I did. There's an area of the river on the Washington side known as Swell City because of the big juicy swells that form there. (I would argue that it's also called Swell City because, well, gee... it's just swell.) We had to skip most of Swell City on race day because the finish line was positioned over against the Oregon shore, but yesterday I dove right in there, and it was sweet, especially on my first run. I was dead-dog tired, but the surfing was so, so good. Achingly good.
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