Final Dragon Boat Practice

Tonight’s practice was our smoothest ever, which is a huge relief since it was our last practice before our time trials on Saturday and the actual races on Sunday.

I made sure to leave work at 4:55 pm, which gave me plenty of time to get stuck in traffic outside my office, on the Mass Pike ramp, off the Mass Pike ramp, on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, finally find a parking spot on Mass Ave., amidst the craziness of an MIT Reunion weekend.

Around two thirds of my team was present, and we ended up acquiring some a few people from the Verizon and SunLife corporate teams who needed to squeeze in a few extra practices. Perhaps it was corporate espionage to see how well we preformed but I think it reflected the nature of the Dragon Boat festival – everyone is cheerful and eager to help one another out.

I’d been lucky enough to have the same row in the front of the boat and the same partner for my first three practices, which is extremely rare since most of the boat gets shifted around to balance the weight. However, my usual partner had skipped this practice so I got paired with one of the “randoms” from another team. Which was fine, except for the fact that she was very vocal in expressing her opinion and in pointing out differences between our team’s paddling and her teams. This ended up being a blessing at the end of practice. Judging from how silent she was, I knew that we had gone from being a boat that she had regretted joining to a team that had delivered a good workout.

We nailed our start, had survived two, three-minute long race simulations and had successfully completed a bunch of “power 20” strokes.

Hopefully, this puts us in good shape for the time trials on Saturday. I honestly have no clue how much better or worse we are in comparison to most teams. We’ll have two time trials, which will have us racing against two other teams, to result in one combined time that determines our bracket for the actual races on Sunday. As the weather is supposed to be nice and in the 70’s this weekend, I’m actually looking forward to it!