Fair Weather Paddlers

This morning I got up extra early to go get my allergy shots before paddling. Nothing quite like getting jabbed with needles before going out for a good, hard paddle. It was cold and raining. You know it's raining hard when Gus is squinty from the drops pelting him in the face. I got down to the beach and the rain had abated, mostly. We had 13 people come down, 12 people seated in the double hull and one person steering from the aft bulkhead. We got on the water rather quickly, the clouds were looking ominious and Sabine said that it was snowing down at her place on the Seattle/Renton border.

We headed out for the Ballard Locks. As soon as we left Waterway 18 the wind hit us full force and the chop was pretty big. By this point my fingers were painful with the cold, the rain was driving down, why were we doing this??? We passed under the Aurora Bridge and then the Fremont Bridge at which point we took a brief break to adjust clothing and get some water. Then we were off into the meat of the workout. One minute active rest, six minutes hard, one minute sprint hard and back to the beginning. Thankfully by the end of the break the blood was again keeping my fingers warm.

Once we were well into the cut (aka the ship canal) the rain was still coming down but it felt like it was coming down harder. Not like more intensity, but physically harder, like freezing rain or small hail. Nothing like little bits of frozen stuff speckling your workout pants to make you wonder 'wtf am I doing this for?!?' And the stinging in the eyes, ye-ouch! But none of that stopped us, we kept on going hard. At our usual turn around/break point Doug just turned the boat and kept us going. Once we'd returned under the Ballard Bridge someone asked if he'd missed the break, I piped up with, there are no breaks during a race! I think we did 5 or 6 sets of the 1-6-1 series. I was definitely tired at the end. I'd entertained visions of heading to the YMCA after practice to do some dips and pull-ups. Between the too tired and too cold after practice, ya, that didn't happen.

We are definitely not fair weather paddlers down here. IMUA!

It wasn't this cold for us, thankfully!