Mexican? No, Mediterranean.

On Kingsway and Fraser, there is a restaurant that has on its awning...

Super Burrito
Meditteranean Cuisine

Funny...

Jericho Iron race

Last Saturday, I raced my first ever 15km OC6 race. My shoulders were tired, my butt was sore, my legs felt like jello, and my mind went numb. I kinda wondered why people do this! In a weird, sadistic, painful way, it was fun. How far can you paddle before your body gives you the boot?

It was a little cool and cloudy but the water was fairly calm and the wind just slight. Good paddling conditions. I always feel nervous before a race and that morning was no different. I did my yoga stretches before I left the house and I did a quick jog to get the blood flowing once I got to Burrard marina. Met up with the other paddlers and we made our way to Jericho. Just before 12:30, we boarded our OC6 and made our way to the start line. Except that nobody seemed to know where the start line was. We were moving up the boat to where we thought it was when we heard the start gun go off. Oh shoot! We’re going? I was on my off-side but what the heck, let’s do a start, shall we? So off we went and we actually did a pretty decent start. Ready and reach, I heard, and I settled in to our race pace. It’s a long race and I wanted the rate to be low and steady so we don’t burn out and fizzle midway. I was sitting in the first seat and my job was to set the pace for the rest of the team.

All the mens teams sprinted off ahead of us and behind us was a pack of the mixed teams. We were in the middle of the two packs, basically by ourselves all the way through. It was hard to gauge how fast we were going or if we were holding up our pace. I just kept the rhythm pretty steady and hoped that we were doing okay.

We finished third out of eight mixed teams, clocking in at 1 hour 28 mins. This was a very good result for us and we were all pretty happy with how we did. We could hard walk after all that paddling but we were happy.

Results:
Mixed
1 Lotus Mixed Open 1:19:33 1
2 Pacific Reach Mixed Masters 1:24:35 1
3 FCRCC Ke Kumu O Ka La Mixed Open 1:28:49 2 <- that’s us!
4 Ocean River Mixed Masters 1:34:00 2
5 Powell River Mixed Snr Masters 1:37:45 3
6 FCRCC Mixed Masters 1:39:54 4
7 FCRCC Mixed Open 1:40:19 3

Huli drill

Last Saturday morning, the OC6 race development crew went for a long paddle - 17km long. We are preparing for the Jericho Iron race this coming Saturday. We paddled hard, doing about four race pieces. We were paddling back to the dock when Norm, the coach, instructed all the boats to turn back towards Kits beach to do a huli drill. A huli is when the outrigger canoe capsizes and a huli drill is when we deliberately huli the canoe and practice getting back into the boat. Everybody in the boat has a job to do to get the boat back upright and going again as fast as possible. But after paddling 17km and with the water being cold, we didn’t really do the drill very fast. But we did it and we’re just happy that it’s over and done with. Hopefully, there will be no huli this Saturday during the race....

Start of the week

Halfway to work this morning, I realized that I left my work laptop at home. Ugh! Turned the car around to go back to the house. Not a good way to start the week.

iGoogle

I’m getting on the Google bandwagon. My Google experience has mainly involved the search engine and Google maps. But now, I’m trying out iGoogle and it rocks. It is the page you get when you sign in to Google and iGoogle lets you customize it by adding tabs and widgets into it. I have my top news stories, the google reader, google talk, the calendar, gmail, and as of today, I added the Flickr Nugget. Pretty cool stuff...

Getting faster

I took the OC1 for another 5k loop last night. Actually, according to my GPS, the route from FCRCC dock to Science World and back is 4.73km. Anyway, last February, I clocked in at 39:42 mins. Last night, my time was 37:37 mins. Gotta get to 35 mins by end of summer...