Montreal DragonFly

Dragonflyers,

Yes, it was another intense practice with Melissa…  and lets also welcome Linda & Leslie onto the boat!  Cheers!  Tonight, we definitely had a great turn-out!  Most excellent!  We must keep the number of attendance high for the summer… every practice counts NOW!!!   We need to be ready for our races this summer….  and for those that attended practice tonight…  though, we did manage to beat the same team twice at a 250m race…  we still NEED TONS of improvement!

 Things to work-out:

• Our start is still weak.  I don’t know if any of you on the boat even felt the boat “LIFT” but, I didn’t.  That’s not a good sign.  The boat initial state is still and heavy in the water.  The goal of the first 5 strong power strokes in the beginning is to LIFT the boat.  That’s why the deeper that you paddle…  the more water that you’re pulling with all of your strength.  Also, Melissa enphasized on the REACH.  Obviously, if you reach-out more, you’re pulling more water…  and get the boat the move a LOT more.
• We’re getting better with the 15 strokes & 5 transition strokes.  We must keep in mind that the 5 transition strokes is for us to get from really fast pace to actual race pace…  during the transition phase, we slowly start reaching-out, focus on pushing into the water…  pulling more water…  but, we can’t let the boat slow down too much…  This is still a race for obvious reasons!
• Now for the race pace…  after speaking to Melissa…  we’re still far from reaching our race pace.  Hard to believe but, we’ll have to paddle faster…  with control & power if we want to make the cut.  So, this is a warning…  next practices, we’ll be expecting to be paddling even at a much higher pace!
• The boat is technically separated in three parts: the pacers (the first three rolls), the engine room and the rockets (the last three rolls).  The job of the pacers is to set the pace for the rest of the boat.  The engine room is where the most of the POWER is coming from and they work even harder to lift the boat.  The rockets…  why that name???  Well, if you haven’t noticed, for the pacers, the water that they’re paddling is dead…  more resistence to paddle…  then, that same water goes through the engine room….  slightly easier to paddle since their water was already moving…  by the time that it gets to the back of the boat…  the water is even FASTER…  less resistence then it went through the engine room…  they have to paddle even more faster just to keep-up to pace with the rest of the boat because of it…  ROCKETS!  In other words, if you have less resistence, you should be able to pull even more water…  meaning “reaching out more” but, you’ll have to make quick exits to keep-up with the pace of the rest of the boat.  You know what I mean?
• The caterpillar effect…  As Steven and maybe some of you might have felt it on the boat during practice….  Obviously, this is not good since we want the boat to go on the water as smoothly as possible…  or like Melissa said…  she only wants to hear ONE UNIFORM sound of paddles hitting the water all at the same time.  This caterpillar effect has more of a negative effect…  slowing us down mostly and also wasting our efforts in getting the boat moving.  To lose this effect, we must focus…  meaning, we must LOOK-UP…  look at the person in front of us…  look at the pacers…  we must imitate the person in front of us!!!  At the end, we must be ONE.  This means that if their paddle is in the water, your paddle is in the water…  if their paddle is coming out of the water, yours too….  if they do a pause, you too…  See where I’m getting at with this?  You become the person in front’s shadow!

To finish-off, I know that the 10km run for the most of us is done….  but, this doesn’t mean that we should slack off now.  You guys know that one practice is just not enough to cut it…  Most competative teams have 2-3 practice a week plus gym trainning….  It might not be another dragonboat practice, but you must do some other exercises to stay in shape…  As for me, I go to the gym 3 times/week….  plus, I went for 2.5km jog before practice as well.  Stay in shape!!!

That’s it for now…  looking forward to the next practice!  Have a good weekend!

 Nancy

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.