Training as everyone knows has it’s up’s and downs. A couple of weeks ago was a particular low point for me, with the trees shedding leaves like they are in a hurry for winter to come and constantly getting caught on the stern of my boat and an obvious drop in temperature, falling out of our K1’s has become even more unpleasant than it was before.
We were doing a sprint session and for the first four efforts my boat had been picking up leaves like it was designed for it, producing a sluggish pace rather than a flat out one minute sprint, and to top it off Antonia’s boat didn’t appear to be collecting half as much debris. By the fifth effort this was more than testing my patience and a few too many aggressive strokes in my unforgiving Nelo, landed me in the cold water, gasping.
We were on a more flat scenic part of the river rather than the busy docs and there wasn’t anywhere obvious to get out. Luckily I spotted a swans nest and swam over to it. The angry swan to whom we had the delight of meeting earlier was no where to be seen but even so Antonia was on vicious Swan watch while I hauled myself onto the bed of grass. As you might be able to imagine it’s quite hard to boat from a nest and it took 2 attempts to finely leave the unusual landing stage. That was the end of that session even though we had quite a while to paddle home I couldn’t get warm which infuriated me even more as I hate cutting any training session short but made up for it in a weights session later. At the time I was not amused, Antonia was trying to have her concerned voice on but actually thought it was hilarious.
Swans will always be a pain to paddlers because of their territorial nature but for just that session I was extremely grateful.
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