World Championships - Endurance

Racers on the Tara Gorge, racing!

After all the fun and games of the day before, the World Sprint Champions awoke early, around 3:30am, to get the bus to the bus to take them to the Tara ... The story continues ...

After 4 hours sleep the bus to Banja Luka was quiet, on arrival we felt like everyone was looking at us, it's a very different feeling when your leading! We mounted our bus and tried to make it look as busy as possible so that it stayed as 'our' bus. This made the 7 hours journey to Foca much more bearable, especially as we passed crammed buses! On our arrival in Foca, we paraded the streets in super hot temperatures as once again the crowds came to see the teams and entertainment put on by the town. We were then herded (as we tended to be on this trip) to the camp, shown to our accommodation, lovely little wooden huts, then herded once again on to the river for another trip down the stunning canyon. This time however, we started in a thunder storm and torrential rain, we revised our lines and made it to the bottom as quickly as possible to keep warm but conserving as much strenght as possible.

Which little house do you want to stay in!?!

This is the view from the restaurant, the Norwegian girls and the river!!

We awoke early for breakfast and a team meeting to arrange the plan for the day, the mini van heaven met us promptly at 8, we then warmed up and stretched to save time at the get in before departing at 9am?! Even though the start of the race was put back half an hour, it is surprising how much there is to do to prepare you boat, this made it seem like the race was upon us before we knew it. After a quick warm up we were summonsed to the start and asked to choose our lane, all looked very similar but we felt that trap 5 was closer to the finish, thus better for us! This shocked all the other nations as they tried to get in the faster water higher up the river. We then once again destroyed everyone off the line and easily took the lead as the others battled for water, we survived a broken paddle and held the lead as the others battled between themselves.

Mini van heaven, ready to take the teams to the water

The BIG BOYS stapes and jimbo try to fly?!

Rosie pretending to be a cat, Bry pretending to skip in the early morning warm up!

The boys much to the shock of the starters chose lane 5, they then stormed out of the blocks showing they were the fastest starters in the world and that that was the lane to go from!

We managed to hold the lead for the first fifteen minutes of the race until in one rapid all four teams came past in a short period of time, very strange how it happen and very demoralising. We managed to hold our race together and paddle the way we wanted to, we held onto the group and took Austria in one of the later rapids to finish fourth in the group. We were happy with the way we had paddled but for me a little disappointed to have finished in 11th, saying that, it was close having 15 teams all within a minute after 48 minutes of racing.

The girls starting at the front of their heat also chose trap 5 after seeing the start we had, they too managed to take the lead going into rapid 1, but faced a lot of pressure as there was little fighting behind them. After fighting to hold the lead, they dropped down the group trying to stay in contact, but didn't feel strong in the boat. After staying in the middle of the pack for much of the race Canada surged past in sight of the line. They finished in 6th place as the Japanese came from one of the slower heats and destroyed them all, winning by over a minute.

The girls showing the rest of the world their clean heels at the start of the endurance

The end of the girls endurance, this is the most favouritist part of the race, it's over!!

Both Teams were a little disappointed with the results from the race but with the racing so close, it was good to see we had caught the teams in terms of times. We find the endurance one of the hardest events to train for, not that we don't try, the lady bay run (from the water sports centre in Nottingham to the city and back) is perfect distance, but we lack good quality constant rapids to get a good rhythm to conserve out strenght. We did learn a lot out there and hope to put this into good use for future competitions.

One last word on the Tara, go there and love it like we did, a true visual gem!

Adam

The Tara Canyon baby!

This is the road ... to hell and the start!