Racing Rolls On

We've been a bit quiet on here for a few weeks which would seem fair enough since it's the holiday period after the end of the championship season but since we've actually been racing every weekend I thought I'd write a quick update.

The first weekend after the Worlds we were racing in Nottingham at the Paul McConkey Memorial Prem race. We went for a paddle on Friday to get back into the groove and were pleasantly surprised to find that not only had the course configuration been changed but it was actually very good for slalom. The race was run as a championship which meant two days of racing. This would have been no problem on a normal weekend but this weekend was also the inaugural JurgFest, a 4 day festival to celebrate GB Head Coach Jurg Gotz turning fifty, which made things pretty tiring. The weather was glorious all weekend and the courses set for both Heats and Finals were technical and fun. We paddled pretty solidly for the most part with a small touch and some time loss on our final run we had still done enough to bag the win. Thanks to Stafford and Stone for running another quality race and to Jurg for organising such a fun festival.

The next weekend was the Scottish Championships in Grandtully. Etienne had the weekend off since he was ineligible to race but I did my best to represent both of us by racing all 3 categories. I'd been up in Scotland all week on a mountain biking holiday with Campbell Walsh and I think chasing Campbell up hills for 4 days had tired me more than I realised. My first runs in all 3 categories (I paired up with Campbell for C2) were pretty horrendous. Happily things improved on second runs, by ten seconds in each class which made my efforts much more respectable. The champs was a lot of fun again and continues to be a great tribute to the spirit of the slalom community in Scotland. Thanks very much to all the organisers, chefs and everyone I borrowed equipment from.

Finally last weekend saw us travelling North again to a venue I hadn't visited for nearly 15 years. The Big 'Grrr' Abbey Rapids Prem race was held on the Abbey Rapids section of the River Tees. Leaving Nottingham early in the morning we had an apprehensive drive up, the poor weather forecast (very high winds and rain) and unreliable river levels made us pretty dubious about what sort of race experience to expect. We arrived to find glorious sunshine but very high winds which made racing seem unlikely but to our amazement the river being in a deep gorge meant that only the first 11 gates were intermittently affected by the wind. The river level was good and the course set made good use of the features and avoided the rocks. We were fortunate with the wind conditions on our first run, the gates were moving but not too badly and we had a pretty good run. Having never paddled the course before in C2 made it feel like a mini adventure which was cool. In between runs we went to the cafe for some coffee and cake. When we came back to the river we discovered that the river had risen by about half a metre. Since most of the upstream gates were now in the flow it was quickly obvious that 2nd runs would have to be cancelled so we helped lift the gates and then went for a surf on the flooded river. This was at least as much fun as 2nd runs would have been so we were pretty happy with our trip overall. Thanks to Nicky and Darren Cresser and the rest of their crew for putting on a solid old school style race.

We've got the weekend off racing this week but the weekend after we're off to Llangollen for the last premier race of the year and a chance to win the ranking championship again. Fingers crossed :)

Cheers Tim

(Posted on the 7th Oct 2009)