Some joker's vehicle alarm went off that woke me up. I had a glance at my clock and it was showing 9.25am. F*CK! I thought we were going to be late for our dragon boat session. Jumped out of our bed, on the heater, woke Lily up, rah rah rah... by the time we were ready, it was 9.40am. As if dragon boating wasn't enough of a race, we had to race against time before that. Grabbed some pre-packed cheese and biscuits, pressed for the lift and for some reason it took so much longer to reach our floor. Our race against time didn't stop there.
As we were heading down to 2nd floor, the lift stopped at least 5 floors and tenants came into the lift at their leisure time. What are heck were they doing up so early on a Sat morning??? I have to admit, I have never valued every second so preciously as this morning. Our floor finally came, rushed out, got into our car, drove off as quickly as we could, overtook safely slower cars in front of us, made a couple of short cuts and BANG! We were there at 10am sharp. ON THE DOT!
Why did we have to go through so much trouble and stress to make sure we were on time? One, dragon boat is a sport where timing is very important, both before and during the boating and we intend to keep it that way and two, whoever is late, the whole team will be penalized by doing a full 2 minute plank (below) at one go.
Plank might seem easy for some… but when you have done 1.5 hours of intensive dragon boating, it is a killer and 2 minutes feels like forever. I don’t mind doing it but I surely will if we are the cause of the penalty. Lucky for us, no plank this time around.
The temperature was 9 degrees this morning. It was bone chilling, especially when there’s wind blowing. There wasn’t much cloud this morning, clear blue skies, sun was out, enthusiast dragon boaters, I knew from that moment that we were going to have a good session. There were a couple of newbies but majority of us have been doing it for a solid 10 times. Went into the water, arranged our seating based on our weight to stabilize the boat, by 10.10am, we were off.
We were doing more intensive training this time around, as most of us are experienced enough. We did a quick 200m race (actual race distance) to see where we were at. 1:01:28. This is a good timing considering we had some glitches when changing our strokes. I am not going to bore you with all technicalities of dragon boating. The point is, we can still improve our timing and be competitive when it matters. I think the next race is in December 08. I am already looking forward for this race after all the hard work and preparation. I am sure Lily feels just the same.
Some of dragon boating photos:
2 comments:
Now we know who has been busy taking photos instead of paddling! I would throw in 100 push ups on top of the plank.
Have a good week ahead.
slacker
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