I’m not quite sure what is wrong with me lately. I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts and can’t quite pin point it. The weather hasn’t exactly been helping either. When it gets quite hot or humid or smoggy(!), I find it quite difficult to be active in any way. I didn’t eat much before I went to practice. Just some apple caramel pie during the day and then right before practice one of my usual apples. My TCRs today felt very laboured. By the time I finished them and went to go tell Coach SM what my time was I was having trouble breathing. I had to take a minute, use my ventalin and sit for a second. I think I even sat down and cried a bit. I wasn’t sure if it was a panic attack or if it was my asthma acting up. I just felt very constricted in my chest. I was fine after a while. Coach SM went up to me before I went into the boat and asked me if I was OK. He wanted to make sure I was because he didn’t want me to do anything where I would hurt myself. I told him I’ll be fine. He was going to put me in the front but then asked me if I wanted to sit in the back instead. I asked to be sat in the back. I figured if I had to stop at some point I wouldn’t be getting in anyone’s way if I was at the back. It’s been like this for a while and I am hoping it will go away when I get to Montreal. I really don’t want to be not performing at my most optimum level.
Today we were doing the “only the good practice”. It’s not so bad now that it’s become a “regular” thing to expect every week. Basically, during this practice Coach SM wants “only” 8 minutes of good paddling. What’s good paddling you ask? Well, that would be paddling at least 14 km/hr. It’s not that we have to hit it at that speed, but we also need to maintain it for as long as we can. The clock starts when we hit 14 km/hr and ends when we drop below that speed. The amount of rest we get is the same amount of time we maintained 14 km/hr. We did a start to wake the muscles up. Every time we do a start, particularly when it’s the first piece during a practice, my arm always feels a bit tingly. Not in a bad way. Just … well tingly. Like I could feel all the blood and adrenaline rushing to my arm. It’s an amazing feeling really. Anyways, I’m starting to ramble. Where was I? Ah yes, explaining the “only but the good” practice. Our first piece was amazing. I definitely could tell that we were paddling longer and I was wondering when the heck Coach SM was going to tell us to stop. When we did, Coach SM was smiling. It must be good since he rarely smiles 
. He told us that our first piece was 1:32. Which means we paddled at least 14 km/hr for 1 minute and 32 seconds. There were even a few times where we hit 15 km/hr! He was very, very happy. When we first started doing these kinds of practices, our pieces were only about 30 seconds. As well, I noticed that we had most of our men at practice today. Not always so true in the beginning. The women on my team are known to be strong as well as very committed to coming to practices. This is not necessarily true for the men on the team. It’s usually one of the guys that are missing when we don’t have a full boat. It’s funny, I think that for the most part, we’ve had a full boat at almost every single practice if not some spares too. Now that they are maintaining 14 km/hr longer, we can all tell we are definitely getting stronger as a team. If we can paddle at least 14 km/hr for 2 minutes Coach SM would be ecstatic. Well maybe not, but he would be smiling at least. It would be amazing if we could do that and I really think we are getting close to it. 2 minutes is practically a 500m race! I can’t wait to see how fast we are by the end of the season. By then, that is when we should be our strongest.
As we continued on to practice, our pieces started to get shorter. All less than 1 minute. It’s to be expected as by now our bodies are starting to fatigue. So, it made perfect sense. One of the things Coach SM did was stop saying anything at all in our last few pieces. Since he is not actually in the boat with us when we race, we have to be prepared to race without his prompting us. Currently, he prompts us after we do our start, during the power phase when we need an extra push and then near the end to “stay on it.” It was a bit strange at first but I think it was a good exercise as it really forced everyone to deal with the race mentally and not just physically on the water. I liked how at the start, he gave us some visualization (imagine team so and so on one side and another on the other side and how bad they want to win this race), and mentioned all the different ways we could be distracted during an actual race. I’m sure it will be really bad at our next regatta in Montreal. It’s a big regatta so there will be lots of competitive teams there. A couple of times he almost caught me off guard. Usually I’m good as I tend to do my own visualization to get myself “race ready”. That’s when I zone everything out. It’s just me, my paddle, the boat and the water. There’s a book I read when I first started paddling that really helped me with my visualization. The book is called, Thinking Body, Dancing Mind by Chung Liang and Al Huang. It’s a fantastic book and I recommend it to all, athletes or not. Even now, I still refer to it. By the time we got to around 7 minutes, Coach SM said to us, “you can finish it with 2 pieces or 1. The choice is yours.” When we finished our piece, he was smiling again. He said we finished it in 1 piece which meant that we pushed ourselves enough to finish the last piece in just over a minute. In other words, we still had something left in us when we didn’t think we did. It was a great feeling finishing practice like that. Not only did we finish practice early, we finished practice off with Coach SM smiling. Now, THAT is what I hope to be seeing more of as we progress through the season.
