The hard fight

I've had quite a shock recently, despite paddling at least 3 times a week and doing alternative exercise I have not even cracked the D-grade this season. At least my performance increased by about 8% in the last race, so hopefully I'll be at 60% tomorrow, lets see! Operation B-grade is gone, that will have to wait for the new year, I'd be happy with a C.

How rapidly does one lose fitness?

Having recently started paddling again, with the last time I paddled regularly (3+ times a week) being in February, I have started to wonder how much fitness one loses after such a long break.

My last paddles have been in the region of 6km each, about half an hour, and I was pretty tired at the end of it. Given that my goal is the Cape Point Challenge, a whopping 56km, I have a long way to go. I have to be fitter than 56km come December, since I believe one must always have a little extra in case things go wrong (e.g. a head wind, very choppy seas, swimming to shore). I'm looking forward to all the training, the time I spend on the ocean is always worth it, and it always makes whatever I may be worrying about look insignificant afterwards.

To get back to the topic, I think fitness dissipates pretty quickly, is dissipate the right word? My guess, if I had to put a figure to it, is 50% per month. So if you could paddle 20km, then do nothing for a month, you'll be able to do 10km, then after another month of no paddling, you'll be down to 5km which is pretty much rock bottom. Will consult scientific authorities when I have the time.

Operation B-grade and Some Surf Then Cape Point

After a month or more of no paddling I've lost just about all my fitness, could probably do 10km but would be nackered after that. Having just read all the articles about the recent ARB World Cup, and knowing that I can't go on like this, I have made up my mind, its time to launch Operation B-grade and Some Surf Then Cape Point. B-grade comes first since I am convinced that without that level of fitness the Cape Point Challenge, which I did not do last time despite just barely qualifying, will only be painfull. Some Surf, and by that I mean riding proper waves like at Muizenberg or Big Bay, comes next since I need to be able to handle getting out in big surf. The last time I saw big surf was at the Knysna Sedgefield 2006. That was horrific, I wasn't fit enough, didn't have enough juice, and just made it to the massive backline. Once I let the first wave slide ahead I made my move and I will never forget seeing the monster that took me out, I was later told that my ski shot up into the air on impact while I got taken in by wave after wave.

Anyways, from next week I'm paddling at least twice a week during the week and once on weekend. That will be untill the end of July. Then things will build up every month with intensified effort in August. Life is too short to not paddle!

Surfing the net after surfing the swells

I've been paddling for about 4 years now and in that time have lined up my favourite paddling spots.
I have also started my own business specializing in wireless Internet hotspots - RedButton (www.redbutton.co.za) - and being connected to the Internet has become important to me. Ideally I would want to go to the club house outside of rush hour (to save time), do some work online, go for a paddle, do some work online & drink a coke, have a beer, then head home after rush hour. Problem is none of my favourite paddling spots have hotspots. I could get iBurst, Sentech or 3G but don't want to fork out R2000+ when I could be using one of our hotspots at next to nothing. So, the plan is to get my favourite places connected with hotspots, then share the love by giving all paddlers in the Discovery Men's Health Series free vouchers in October. Time to give something back to the paddling community (and of course shamelessly promote my company).

Haven't been paddling much lately, doing about one a week, without that one paddle I would probably have had a bout of road rage by now as stress levels are high. Time to hit the ocean, no matter what happens there is no excuse, life is too short. As a related side watched Million Dollar Baby the other night, what a tear jerker (even for a hard paddling man like myself)!

Back in the saddle

Had my surfski repaired after a disastrous attempt at taking on the Peninsula Marathon. Withdrew from day 1 of the Peninsula after discovering that my home-made effort of bending my rudder back into shape did not work out so well. I struggled to make 10km/hr in flat conditions and was dead last, then got milked in the surf and my boat started taking water. My ski was in bad shape. I had rammed my rudder on two occasions, both times I had forgotten that I had a near 7m rocket on the roof of my car. The ski also had cracks from the horrifying experience of the mother of all waves taking me out at the last Knysna Sedgefield race.

Well I'm back now, new rudder, new cables and perhaps even an improved engine. I'm taking Creatine now to see if it will help give me more power when sprinting to catch runs. Today won't be a paddling day as I had my bachelors last night, what I day and night! We played paintball during the day and I took a beating of note in the last game when the-bachelor-never-dies rule was introduced, meaning that I could get machine gunned after being hit (normally you only get shot once then a team mate tags you back into the game). It didn't help my cause when I ran away in a straight line after being caught in a bad spot, my back now has a couple a welts on it thanks to that bad move. The night got wild, an experience I'll never forget, it's incredible what you can get away with in public as the bachelor. The lads tasked me with all kinds of potentially embarrassing requests to the public and all gladly participated.

Well hopefully I'll have a double ski in a couple of months, I spend a lot of time on the water and want to take my fiancée out with me on weekends. It wont be a fast ski, probably a Bayrunner (made by Brian's Kayaks) which looks more like a sea kayak. Can't wait to get it, plan to get into the kelp and then do some snorkeling using the Bayrunner, then go into secluded spots and braai whatever I've taken out.

No paddle = fattening & irritible Nico

Due to work pressure I have failed to paddle for over a week now. Its terrible. I feel like I'm growing a boep (beer belly) and am growing irritable, sending snappy emails and barking when I shouldn't. I'm almost thinking that not doing exercise is irresponsible when under pressure. Time to hit the water!

Pencil Flares - Playing Hard To Get

Schlepped to three different stores and called another to get myself a new set of pencil flares today (having fired my last set at the Total Sports Challenge). Without them I'm probably not going to be allowed to race in tomorrow's Discovery Men's Health race, given the near death of a paddler in the last race.

Here are the Saturday morning results:

- Brian's Kayaks, Paarden Eiland: closed (astonishing that they were closed on a Saturday morning).
- Waterworld, Paarden Eiland: no pencil flares in appropriate paddler-friendly casing, only one-time smoke flares (no good).
- Kazkazi Kayaks, Three Anchor Bay: no flares, sold out due to rush from surfski paddlers.
- Paddlers.co.za (phoned them), Simon's Town: one set in stock, but got a hold of them too late. Simon's Town is also a 80km round trip to my place.

After driving around Cape Town for flares I settled on doing some carbo-loading at home with my first ever Japanese beer and roll-your-own sushi.

Garmin Forerunner 201 - Initial Impressions

I finally got a Garmin GPS unit to take my training to higher levels and have so far done 2 paddles with it. Ended up going for the cheapest model, the 201, but it does all that I want it to do and the next best model was an extra thousand or so. Also decided against a grey import to get the local maps and support, so far that support has not been great, more on that down below. I tried hard to get an average speed of 15km/hr on my first run with it but that was out of my league, somehow that figure got stuck in my head as being the one to go for. The unit doesn't show my average speed, thought it would, or maybe it does and I just don't know it. My hand calculations show that I got an 10.43km/hr average. Dawid Mocke did the Oceana - Barkers 14km paddle in just about an hour, so with 14km/hr an average speed, I've got a long way to go!

The greatest feature of the Garmin is getting the data on to a PC and then analyzing it. I've been dying to get my runs onto MotionBased in particular but so far no luck. I simply can't figure out how to get my Garmin 201 talking to my PC. I've Googled for hours. The 201 comes with a serial interface, that is fine, I plug it in and the Garmin software is meant to detect my Garmin, it doesn't. Articles online speak of putting the Garmin in Garmin Mode but I have no idea what that is. Well I'm stuck for now, will try see if there are other 201 owners at the next race.

Tried calling Avnic Trading CC to get help during the week, they referred me to the dealer and their phone must have been off the hook at the time. Could buy a USB-to-Serial converter and see if a USB interface will magically give me joy.

Overall I'm moderately satisfied so far, not being able the interface with my PC is the biggest disappointment. To be continued....

Total Sports Challenge 2007 - That Sinking Feeling

I was to be the K1 paddler in team Pam Golding. Met the team the night before and we planned the days proceedings with Scott, our team leader who had secured the sponsorship. Although everybody claimed to not take things too seriously I got the feeling that every member was or had been a competitive athlete. On the actual morning the quality of the team started to show since by the time our road biker came in we were sitting in the top thirty. Things were looking good, very good. Our road runner put in an excellent time so by the time he handed over to me I was ready to deliver my personal best. Nikki Mocke set off about 5 min ahead of me and she was sure to have been on a good team.

So having gotten the arm band I hopped into my K1, put the juice hose in my mouth and tried to secure the splashy. Almost decided to leave the splashy as other guys were leaving it but I had also done my holiday training on the very same lagoon in a surfski and the wind regularly picked up to the level where wind-driven white horses would make things uncomfortable, and thats on a surfski. I didn't put the splashy on properly, there was a gap at the back, but felt that would be fine.

So off I went. Things were looking good and I caught up to two surfskiers who had to hop off to de-weed their rudders. The wind started to pick up though and with the increasing size of the mini-swells the surfski paddlers managed to pass me. The swells seemed to be at exactly the right frequency for the nose of the K1 to constantly slap up and down, breaking the speed of the boat. I felt a bit of water at my feet and this was a bit worrying but I told myself that all I had to to was turn around the buoy (a police ski boat) and all would be good. I got to within 500m of the police boat when I realized that things were getting exponentially worse. All the water accumulated in the nose of my K1, so I would submarine deeper and deeper with each mini-swell. Things were looking bad, the water had to get out or I would sink.

With sinking being almost certain I looked to see how far I was from shore, sadly I was at least 1.5km from shore. I knew the distance from my training paddles across the lagoon. There was no way I could reach shore. So my only hope was to push on to the police boat. They already had another K1 on the boat and were trying to tip the water out of that boat. All I had to do was reach the police boat. As I got to within 20m of it though my K1 did its final submarine dive and sank. It was completely filled with water but the bouyancy inside the boat stopped the boat from going down to the bottom. Thank God for the bouyancy! I tried to sit in it and paddle it submarine style but this wasn't working so well. A random paddler gave me advice on how to paddle the submarine but I didn't understand what he was on about, so I kept trying to ride the submarine to the police boat. There was no way I wasn't going to finish this race, two team members were waiting for me.

I had only been busy perfecting my submarine riding style for a few seconds when my only hope of getting going again went down in front of my eyes. All the police men on the buoy decided to stand on one side of the boat while tipping water out of the K1 they had aboard. With yelps from the crew the back corner of the boat started filling with water and with everybody falling further to the submerged side the boat went over. Great. We now had about 7 people in the water. I felt that was it, race over. It was raining now and one couldn't see all the way back to the start which was about 6km away. We had to get rescued, the police guys didn't have life saving jackets on and were clinging to the ski boat. As it turns out the only other flare in the group wasn't working, so I opened my pencil flare case (which I had never expected to have to use) and fired off a salvo of three and then a last one aimed at Fisherhaven for good measure. I had no hesitation if firing my flares, especially after reading this article on www.surfski.info

As I straddled the submarine I tried phoning Scott to give him the bad news but I couldn't operate the joy-stick on my phone through the plastic cover. I would have to wait. Surprisingly few paddlers came to find the turning buoy, most hadn't even started the race, this made me feel even worse, we had really been doing well. After what might have been 10 minutes a ski boat approached from Fisherhaven and soon after another two rubber ducks. Things were looking up. The guys in the one rubber duck knew what they were doing, they must have been the official rescue crew. They delegated work to the boats and said they would help me just now. In order to lighten the load I drank some of my juice and squeezed the remaining liquid out.

Well they had me going in no time when it was my turn, the K1 was emptied on one side while I was instructed to swim to the other side and mount the craft. Once aboard I sheepishly asked if they would let me continue and that is precisely what they had been thinking. Great. They helped me in and this time my splashy was properly secured. Off I went, finally! I paddled hard and fast but still submarined quite a bit. The odd thing was that I still saw a few guys without splash covers on the water. My K1 must have been the problem. I had picked it up for R 480 on an auction and it was quite beat up, but it never sank before.

Upon getting to the finish I charged through the mud and handed the arm band to Scott who was very happy to see me. Everybody was freezing at the finish, the rain and wind taking its toll. We emptied about 2 litres of water from my boat before carrying it, mmmm, I had another leak then.

All in all we lost 20 - 30 minutes and still finished with a respectable 7:30min. What a race! Despite rain at the finish two commentators kept things lively. The hot food and beer on offer helped as well. I couldn't believe how many top sports people took part, even Bruce Fordyce made an appearance. Overall the organization was first class. Near sinking aside, being part of a team made this one of my best paddles ever. Cheering each other on at the change-overs, the team briefing, a team picture, it was fantastic.