Race Trip - Day 7 - Last Day

Here I am, sitting in Melbourne Airport, getting ready to board my plane back home. Today has been a long day of travel, but I only have a couple of steps left, a plane ride and a taxi trip. Looking forward to it.

The Standup Paddle Board National Championship finished up yesterday with our Technical Race taking place on the last day of competition. In Standup Paddle Boarding a Technical Race is one where you race in and out of a surf break, negotiating a series of buoys. They are typically about half an hour long or so, so they are fairly fast and furious. When it comes to racing, it is the form of racing I am least comfortable with.

My comfort levels in Tech Racing are such that I strongly considered not doing the event. I can surf, but I am not awesome, and SUP surfing isn't something I have spent a lot of time doing. As such, Tech Racing puts me a fair way out of my comfort zone. The bigger the surf, the more outside my comfort zone I am. Heading into the event yesterday, I really wasn't sure.

Once I was at the beach yesterday though the surf looked within my ability so I decided to give it a go. Sure I wasn't going to do well, but what did it really matter, I was there and the race was there and I wasn't in danger, so I didn't see any reason not to try. In my experience we so often talk ourselves out of things before we even try them and when you really sit down and think about it, our reasons for sitting out usually aren't that strong. I like to think that I don't skip out on something just because I am unsure of it, and I certainly didn't have any good reasons to not race yesterday, so accordingly I lined up and got ready to go.

In the end I was dead right, I didn't do well. But like the marathon on Saturday I didn't embarrass myself either. I had a bit of fun and was glad that I experienced the event. I know I didn't paddle that well, but every experience is a chance to learn and that is exactly what this was. I have now done a Tech Race at the Nationals and so when the next opportunity to do that comes along I will be a bit better. While there is lots of different aspects in the various paddling events at Nationals, they are all interconnected in terms of skills, so I know that if I can get better at this discipline it will make me better at the others and vice versa. These kinds of learnings mean that no experience is ever truly a waste.  As with the marathon, I am keen to see what I can learn in the next 12 months and how many improvements I can make before I am back at Nationals this time next year.

For now though, I am really keen to get back home.