Okay, this one isn’t going to be about freestyle or slalom or creeking or any other craziness. It’s all about making the USA Wildwater Junior Team and going to the ICF Worlds. I don’t know how I got this slot, because the race conditions pretty much sucked. 34 degrees, snowing and raining and a wicked wind blowing upstream in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado. Most normal people would have gone back to bed or just sat in their car with the heat blasting. Not me, so I guess I failed the normal test.
Wildwater racing is fun, hard, and the boats are massive at 4.5 m long. They’re also pretty unstable sitting still. It is a whole different technique in paddling them. You also cannot read and run with them and be successful. You have to plan your run, your turns, the flats where you’re going to pick up time. It is all about the time, the clock, the guy with the watch who is watching you. It comes in two parts; The Classic and the Sprints. You go full on in the classic for 3 to 4 miles. Sprints, you go more than just full on for about 350 to 400 m. The paddle is different and is what they call a wing paddle. The hardest part of a wildwater boat is rolling it. Something you’d better practice a lot and never forget how to do. The last thing you want is a race getting crushed. I think my Clipper holds maybe 300 gallons of water. Fun, huh?
Well, Team Colorado will be sporting 5 racers into the worlds. We’ll have our hands full because the Euro kids are pretty good…. but so are we 🙂