Race-Day Wednesday

Hey its Maddie with my second blog ;)

 Depending on how familiar you are with the keener program, you may or may not have heard of Beatdown Thursdays, the day everybody at keeners voluntarily subjects themselves to scary lines usually involving even scarier holes. Evidence of Thursday's carnage is likely posted frequently on this blog, complete with floating paddles and (hopefully) floating paddlers. What you may not have heard of, however, is what happens on Wednesdays. The slightly less famous, yet no less entertaining day we all forget to be scared of that hole we got stuck in on Thursday; paddling right through it on the way to the finish line at the end of whatever rapid we happen to be racing. Believe it or not, Race-Day Wednesday is often responsible for more swimming kayakers than any other day of the week. If you imagine trying to hold you're breath while running a marathon then you might have an idea of what its like to flip during a race. Today we got especially lucky because we got to do a boater-cross down coliseum rapid, with many people getting lost in the foam pile that is Big Kahuna. I can only imagine how entertaining it was for our coaches.
The first race I participated in must have been particularly entertaining because almost everybody missed their line by varying degrees, resulting in multiple upside-down kayaks being surfed in the middle of Big Kahuna, all trying in vain to continue downstream. Because racing isn't my strongest point I was last coming down the rapid, and all I remember right before I got eaten by the wall of foam was the hull of another kayak coming down on my head. Needless to say I didn't finish that race very quickly.
Luckily my last race was more successful and I came in a very close second (like ridiculously close) and although I didn't win I had a much better line that didn't involve running through every hazard you could find. All in all race day was really fun and I think we all learned a lot of river running skills as well as the best way to knock someone out of your way on a frantic race to the finish.