First Gym Workout

Only five people showed up for this practice.

The workout was as follows:
- Max pullups in 10 minutes
- Back-extensions
- Inclined situps
- Woodchopper
- Roman chair

To warm up, we spun for 5 minutes. The workout was exhausting, but was also quite refreshing since it was different from the usual track workouts we would do.

Final Water Practice Before College Cup

With one more week until the long-awaited College Cup Dragonboat competition at Lake Merced in San Francisco, practice maintained its usual intensity. We paddled almost nonstop for the 1.5 hours worth of practice, only resting about a total of fifteen minutes for stretches, technique instructions, and feedback. 

We did four race pieces, each lasting about 3 minutes or so. In comparison to the past few practices, our speed and mesh have improved. However, there were still many technicalities and little habits that needed to be tweaked a bit. The biggest thing that Coach noticed was not enough rotation, bury, and off-times happening once in a while throughout the race. For three out of the four race pieces, we raced with Lightwave to our side. Although they had a stronger start, body, and finish, we were not super far behind them. Hopefully, this will be enough to get a good placement for next week. 

Today, we also worked a bit more on power (and inherently, timing). For power, Coach emphasized hitting the water at the same time. The entire team must first be able to apply the power to moving the boat forward simultaneously. By using the hit drill, we practiced entering and pulling the water at the same time, but at a more controlled rate. After, we did the push-pull drill to practice utilizing the rest of our muscles to push the boat forward. Lastly, we did a power-ten drill where everyone continues paddling, but we went through row by row to do a power ten. The goal of this exercise was to enable individual portions of the boat to apply power without inadvertently rating up. 

To end practice, we had some blending pieces and section pieces. Blending pieces were times when we mixed the groups of people paddling. Typically we would do either back/front half, left/right of back/front, sometimes odd/even of different rows too. You can really get creative with this. 

Just Ten Minutes of Hard Work

The track was doused by rain shortly before practice started. Today, we had the lowest attendance of all practices (12 paddlers). Hopefully, it was not the weather that discouraged the team, but because most of them had other obligations to tend to. The cold really hit Stanford, as we all practiced in 50º temperature. 

We jogged two laps to warm-up. 

The main workout today was around strength and some cardio. 

Everyone paired up to do the following workout twice. 

1 min - max pushups

1 min - max situps

1 min - max burpies

2 mins - max shuttle runs

Stairs, Sprints, and Some Strength

Today's land practice consisted of a lot of running and some strength training.
After two laps of warm-up and stretching, we were divided into three groups to run stairs.
Up and down, up and down.
About three minutes in, we had to sprint a 400m and returned to stairs again.
After 20 minutes worth of stairs, the entire team had to run Indian runs around the track twice.

To end the workout, we had to do wheelbarrow, piggy back carry, and baby carry for strength training. We also had a short core workout before ending at 9 on the dot.

5 Races

Twenty in one boat. The remaining 8 people mixed with Lightwave in the HK boat.
Coach stayed with the BuK boat and worked the team pretty hard.
They raced a total of five race pieces with a few drills in between.
There is only one more on-water practice before the College Cup race.

TSF Letter Writing

Instead of a physical practice today, we spent the hour working on TSF letters and postcards. TSF is one source of our funding and it is important that we get them done. This quarter, we are responsible for writing 60 letters and 200 postcards.

Captain Shannon bought boba for us all, so it was a neat surprise. The undergrads took on the letter writing while the graduate students took on writing the postcards.

Third Timed Mile

We jogged 2 laps and stretched out for warm-ups.

Coach then got us to do wall-sits. Coach stated that everyone needed to at least hold the position for 30 seconds, and then that at least one person must hold it for 3 minutes. As the clocked started ticking, 30s, 1min, 1:30, 2mins passed by and not a single one of the 17 paddlers dropped. Everyone held strong position. At the 3 minute count, the majority of the team let out a huge sigh and stood up. Brian H. held on for about 10 more seconds before opting out. Mindy stayed for another 2 minutes, holding the wall-sit for a total of 5 minutes. SDB is getting undeniably stronger. We must keep working harder and harder.

Next, it was the usual core workout. Coach believes that a strong core is the basis for all other workouts and physical activities. Therefore, it is always a large part of the workout. Today, we held two sets of side bridges (L&R) and planks for 1 full minute and did 40 crunches.

The majority of the workout was the timed mile. Everyone started off together and Abaho was the one who took off from the start. He led the pack while Patrick and a few other of the speedy ones on the team tried to follow the trailblazer. The majority of the paddlers looped around at around 1:56, 3:56, 6:08, and finished at around 8:30.

The timed mile times were between 5:41 and 9:53. It is important to note that everyone is running on the third lane due to the blockers in the smaller lanes. Therefore, it's a significant distance more than 1600m.

To end practice, we did a sort of hand to elbow activity that required good timing.