Off to the races...again!

So it was that time of the year again when the Dragon Boat Festival took place as part of the Adrenaline Sports Festival in the capital city of Abu Dhabi. This year too I volunteered to be part of the Radio 2 team which was supposed to be a mixed team with a minimum of 13 men and 5 women in it. We had asked our listeners to text us, if interested in being part of the team, and the response was overwhelming. This time we were hoping to do better than our previous races in which we had come last in all the races!

Training sessions took place on two Saturdays before the event from 2 pm to 4 pm in the waters behind the Shangri-La Qaryat-Al-Beri hotel. We were trained by professional dragon boat racers and it was nice to once again respond to commands like Paddles up, Stop the boat and to row to shouts of 1 to 10. In our second training session we had an excellent coach Yanni, a Canadian citizen of Romanian origin who has been a coach for more than thirty years. This particular training session was intense and Yanni helped us focus and gave us the strategy of starting with 10 powerful strokes, followed by 10 quick strokes and then covering the rest of the 200 metres on a steady count of 1-2 with long and relaxed strokes done in unison. The result of the training was an aching back and arms but confidence levels were up since we won the mock race held that day against two other teams.

The day of the finals dawned and our first race was scheduled for 11:40 am. There were six teams and we came third covering 200 metres in 1 minute 5 seconds. Our timing was good enough to get us into the semi-finals with the next race scheduled at 3:20 pm. It was a warm day and we had to make sure that we were not dehydrated. We came first in the semi-finals timing 1 minute 6 seconds which was very good since the wind was against us. For the first time ever Radio 2 entered the finals of the Dragon Boat Racing Festival.
Our final race was at 4 pm the next afternoon. This was the finals of the Corporate Plate category and although the excitement and commitment was great our performance was not and we came sixth in a very closely contested race. It woud have probably taken a miracle to make us win since the other teams were professional dragon boat racers. On the bright side of things we were the sixth fastest team out of the 43 teams in this category and were also the best Radio team since the other radio stations lost in the first round itself.

Three things that I realized over the last three weeks – I love dragon boat racing. It gives me a high and I love being in the waters and being part of a team sport. Secondly being short really helps since the shortest person in the team needs to be on the last row of the boat. Last but not the least we have some wonderful people listening to our radio station. Out of the 18 member team only 3 of us were staff and the rest were our listeners who put in a lot of passion and time into this. Two of them could not make it to the finals because they were aching too much but they arranged for a substitute and were there to cheer for us.