A little strawberry topping
Posted On Monday, November 16, 2009 at at Monday, November 16, 2009 by Sharon
I wasn’t planning on writing this but I was chatting with a friend about the weekend and I was telling her how cool it was to be doing what I did on Saturday and then I thought, hey, since it was an effing cool experience (in my eyes anyway), why not blog about it?
If I haven’t bore you yet with my paddling stories, do read on.
Saturday, 430pm we had the usual physical training in Macallum St. before the paddling session. It was more like a warmup session where we had to jog 3 rounds, some pushups, jumping jacks and a bit of stretching before getting ready for the paddling session.
The weather got darker as we were finishing up the physical part and I thought ‘yay, great! it’s gonna rain, maybe they’ll cancel the paddle session!’ Yes I was secretly hoping that they’ll cancel the training, I was just feeling lazy that day. But I was dead wrong.
Everyone started walking back to the so called ‘headquarter’ (basically just a container storing all the paddle equipments). It had started to drizzle by then. I thought to myself ‘It’s raining, are we still doing this?’ but kept quiet since everyone seemed to be oblivious to the fact that it was raining.
Moments later, I found myself equipped with the usual glove I always use for paddling and a little bit more, a life jacket -_-“ I contemplated in the beginning whether to put it on or not but some guy told me ‘well if you want to stay save and you can’t swim well, I’ll advise you to do so’
I looked out from the container into the pouring rain, more dark clouds approaching, and the dangerous looking sea. Ok, point noted. Strapped on the jacket it is!
By the time we were all seated in the boat, we were half drenched from the rain. I was a little worried if the rain will make the vision poorer, as if getting sunblock into my eyes is not painful enough, I have to squint my eyes, worrying bout the sea water and the rain. Yes, at that moment, it felt like another FML day.
But whether I like it or not, the training will go on. And we paddled into the sea. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, in fact the rain felt like a blessing because it washed away the salt water we got onto our faces. I was beginning to enjoy paddling in the rain.
Being in the sea, drenched inside out under the pouring rain, thunders and lightnings so visible from where we were, the waves in the sea getting rougher by each passing minute and jellyfish sightings every now and then was actually kinda FUN FUN FUN!
picture for illustration purpose only
The most fun part was the part where the boat felt as if it was 'flying' when we paddled really hard and fast riding through the strong waves, I had to contain myself from shouting out loud in excitement
yes I'm crazy like that
oh think medium to hardcore water rafting perhaps?
The team too was very energetic, we had better more structured trainings lately with the competition nearing. The killer part was the 500m paddle nonstop, that's like ~300 strokes nonstop @_@ I was really really bad at that, I exhaust myself far too quickly, my stamina was bad, my arms gave up too soon :( as much as I really tried very hard not to stop too often and kept up with the speed. Sigh.. I think I need to drink the stamina powder the guys are drinking at the moment :p
The only part I regretted was putting on the life jacket, I didn't need it because it was hardly that dangerous and it restricted my movement. Nevertheless, it was one of the best paddling session I had, and I definitely want more of those!!!
Maybe my life is getting too mundane that I'm craving for some hardcore adrenaline rush excitement @_@ hence, the post was named as such.