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.