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Have kayak; will travel

Quite a bit to blog about for a change, but not much time, so here's the abridged version.

Equipment
We will be using the Discovery at the Waterside D this weekend and during the DW because all the Mystyres and the condors have been taken. It's no real problem as we are very comfortable paddling the disco as it is what we have used all winter and it turns out it's lighter than the mysteres as well, although much more uncomfortable to shoulder during portaging. The big revelation has been my new boat shoes which have made it sooooooooo much easier for me to control the disco; I can actually feel the rudder bar! I have a history of ankle and foot problems so I am not looking forward to the Crofton flight and running in them, but I 'll worry about that when I need to.

Training
We've finally got some decent sessions in. A few paddles on the Basingstoke Canal (Thank you Carole!) which were really good fun. Very, very dark, with bats flying straight at us before their radar kicked in, making us flinch and the thunderous 'thwonk thwonk' noise as we crept under the M25 with rush hour going on overhead and the cars and lorries hitting the expansion gaps. We have also had two good paddles, one from Old Windsor to Sunbury. Lots of mucking about to get cars in the right place but well worth the effort. Going through Runnymead we literally could not see our hands in front of our faces and it was guess work as to where the river went; great fun! Last night we did Sunbury to Teddington, all at DW pace which felt comfortable. While we are not any faster than we were 6 months ago, (I guess that we simply have not done the quality of training to bring that about) we are more efficient and the paddles that we are doing of 2 hours plus feel very comfortable now. A good sign.

Tomorrow we will be doing Marlow to Romney, a paddle that we were due to do weeks ago, but most importantly this will be with Adam and Phil so we will be using it as a dry run for the D, which in turn, is obviously a dry run for the DW. The last few paddles have all been in 'race trim' , carrying our compulsory safety kit etc, so tomorrow is going to be about pracitising feeding and a chance for Adam and Phil to practice their map reading. If we get the chance after the D we may try to get further up river to paddle some of the course from Dreadnaught reach but that seems fairly unlikely. we'll see.

Other stuff
Jamie' shoulder has settled down, in no small part we think to the fact that our paddles of late have not involved having to work against the flow, so that bodes well for Sunday, however, we are just so tired! The last couple of weeks we have done nothing it seems except try to sort out the logistics to enter this race! Slowy but surely we are ticking everything off but it is a marathon in more than one sense.

Posted by Alex Kew