Run of the Charles 4/30

OK so its been a while since we have updated the blog on our racing/paddling so I figure the best time is now before we get to far along here.

We have been training as usual of course so I won’t bore you with all that talk, plus I don’t have any cool pictures or videos from those adventures so it’s best we skip over it.

Two Saturday’s ago was pretty much the largest professional canoe race that we have in Massachusetts, the Run of the Charles; it starts in Dedham and ends in beautiful downtown Boston on that dirty water we all love, the Charles River. Going into the race we felt great and well prepared for the task that lied ahead of us. About 10 minutes into the race was a whole other story. After a pretty good start where we found ourselves on some good drafts with some really fast teams Travis started to get a little twitchy up in the front of the boat. I knew this couldn’t be good but tried my hardest to ignore him and focus on staying on the wave that we were cruising along on. Now this race involves quite a bit of portaging which for all you none paddlers out there following the blog, that is when you get out of the boat and carry it  (while running at full speed during the race of course) around some sort of obstacle. Usually the obstacles are dams or other rocky areas that you just can’t paddle thru. As we got up to the first portage we were in a pretty good pack of basically 3^rd place thru 6^th place unfortunately Travis was cramping pretty badly in his legs so things weren’t looking good. The cramps continued throughout the day for him moving all over his body from his hands all the way down to his feet, while I felt surprisingly well. As anyone knows from paddling a canoe even for fun you aren’t going to get anywhere fast when one person is feeling well and the other isn’t, it’s a team sport and the team needs to be in sync. We did finish the race unfortunately in last place but we managed to stick out all 26 miles and finished in 3 hours and 48 minutes. We did have some of our best portages in this race and had a few good moments of drafting during the day so it was not a total loss even though you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at the results. T&T paddle on and hope the next race is better for us, that’s about all you can do after a bad day on the water. A good quote from Travis at the end of the day “Some days you’re the hammer, some days you’re the nail….today I was the nail”