Devizes to Westminster Canoe Race (125 Miles, 77 Portages)

With my favourite DW-Parter Cedric and my dream-support-team Andi and Andy I've completed the Devizes to Westminster Canoe race for the second time, beating my time from 2012 by more than 90 minutes (That's 125 miles and 77 portages in 20 hours and 15 minutes) and placing second in the Senior Ladies, but being the first woman through the finish on Easter Monday.

All the cheers made me alternate between sobbing and grinning in quick succession : D

I only found out on Monday night that I have also won a team trophy I didn't even know I had been entered for together with Matt, Tom, Ryan and Dan.

I couldn't have done this without the support of my Dad who came over all the way from Germany to be my main support crew. He is currently still in the car driving back, and did amazingly well (you wouldn't have known it was his first ever time to support a marathon race, and at DW, supporting is probably harder than paddling!), and the rest of the gang excelling at remote support ; ) I am very lucky to have such an amazing family.

I was also very lucky that Andy couldn't get a lift with anybody to support the straight through crews and was therefore by my side on a bike whenever there was a tow path to cycle on, doing more miles than I have done, with the emergency-gels at the ready, introducing Andi to some of the secrets of marathon paddling, sorting out the media coverage and helping with my boat, especially after day 3! Thank you very much, you are a very good chief potioneer.

I wouldn't have stood a chance without training with the amazing Fowey River Canoe Club with Brian as our coach. Thank you for being patient with the Slalom-paddler, convincing me to use a Garmin and charging it for me every night, giving me a lift to the race and taking care of Cedric afterwards.

Thanks to Dave and Sue for distracting me from any pre-race nerves with the classic Doyle Easter egg meditation and vegetable curry!

I have apparently won two further titles, having collected sufficient justification to call myself a marathon-paddler according to Andy (although he still might have to check with Brian first), and "sportiest person in the family", awarded by my dad.

This race is as fun and special as it is only because of the people who make it, the organizers, all the volunteers, the paddlers and support crews. Being cheered on, fed and sometimes even clothed by people you have never even seen before is something that wouldn't happen at many events. Congratulations to all paddlers, coaches and support crews!

THANK YOU, it's been amazing.

Much needed sugary tea and flatbread while the pasta is cooking.

World’s Best Support Crew

Start of Day 3

If you’re a DW paddler, you know the precise feeling of this.

Day 2

DONE!

I have no idea who took the photos - do get in touch if you know, I’d love to give credit.

Photo: Jenny Collinge

Proud to have my name engraved on that thing! Congrats again, everybody!

Waterside D, 34 Miles, 35 portages.

Which also means: End of the Waterside Series, 87 Miles, 110 portages.

Photos: Fred Taylor

The reason why I'm grinning like mad in the pictures is that I was ridiculously relieved to be able to race. I had hurt myself in training just after C and wasn't at all sure how it would go. But, thanks to everybody at the club being incredibly supportive, Megan helping me mix recovery potions and Eva aking me buy some "magical strapping tape" (Greenaway, 2017), it all went fine, so instead of thinking about how hard the race was, I was just delighted to be on the water (for almost the whole way : P)

Thanks for the photos, Fred.

This time I actually had to fight off support crews at Crofton to prevent passing out from too much sugar, thanks so much for feeding me and cheering me on, Catie, Dave, Lucie, Jo, Jo, Jo, Mike, Frankie, Charlotte, Harry, Susan, Ryan and Kevin and to Chloe for being a great roomie who actually joins me drinking lemon and ginger tea! I'll miss you at DW.

Thanks to Brian for keeping me calm, driving to all four races, supporting, and being generally awesome.

Congratulations #TeamFowey!

River Dart - The Loop (Devon, UK)

Into my paddling kit at dawn, out of it at dusk... must have been a good day!

Photo: Graham Smith

Thanks Graham, Victor and Andy for a fun day on the river, first paddle on the loop!!!

And cream tea. In Devon. Cream on top! Because the Dart still can't beat the Fowey, especially not in the evening light : P

This is one of the things I love about paddling: I just met those guys in the ‘Kayaking on the River Dart’ facebook group, but everybody is friends on the river.

Done It : O

I've done it!
...off to training now.
www.dwrace.org.uk

Waterside C, 23 Miles, 35 portages

... too knackered to post anything yesterday, no photos either, but as always, big thank you to Brian for supporting and driving, definitely couldn't have faced driving myself home yesterday! Thanks to Andyfor threatening me with not feeding me if I didn't stop paddling "like a slalom-paddler", just after one of the school crews had complimented me on "what a neat technique" I have : D

I think everybody who finishes this race deserves congratulations, but all the Fowey crews did amazingly well, awesome results, everybody!

Well done, Ally, for achieving your goal!!

Special shoutout to Chloe. I do think she deserved a Waterside mug, finishing 2nd Junior Lady, was a bit disappointed not to see that mentioned at all at pricegiving! Congratulations, Chloe!

Quite happy to have beaten my target time again myself : )

It's great to be racing with you folks!

I found one after all! Just exiting Bruce Tunnel.

Dulverton Slalom, Barle, My First UK Slalom

I had always wanted to enter a slalom in the UK, and this one fit in time-wise. I had to figure out the division system (in Germany, all competitions are classed in age/gender categories, in the UK, there are divisions according to your level). Leonie and Clive Merrifield who organised the event were super friendly and welcoming and helped me to figure it all out. They also did a great job organising, this was one of my favourite races ever. Leon was over from Germany, and I remember listening to some awesome music on the drive.

Photos: Leon Rüttinger

I loved that I got an opportunity to compete in the team competition, too, because if you can get a team together, you can race (in German competitions, you can only form teams from clubs within the same administrative region). I arrived just in time as well, having done a training session at Fowey in the morning because I didn’t want to compromise my DW training. As ‘Rag, tag and Bobtail, we even ended up winning the team race.

Rag, Tag and Bobtail

Home for the night

My favourite move on the course!

Doing some officiating, which was very much the same as in German races.

I ended up being moved to the open category and winning it, which was a lovely surprise. However, what I’ll remember from this race is how much fun I had and how friendly and accommodating everybody was. And the bookshop. Here is a great detailed write-up about the race from Bideford CC.

Waterside B K1

17 1/2 Miles, 19 portages. It's not as relaxing as it looks in the photo : D

Photo: Poppy Taylor

Although the only thing I found as horrible as everybody said was the start.

Thanks to Brian, Kevin, Emma, Ben and Andy for your support!

Congratulations to the Fowey crew for some amazing results.

And thanks to those people jumping around with cameras so that we can all write our thank you / show off posts.

Waterside A

13 Miles, 19 portages (and one nicely refreshing swim) done, congratulations to all the finishers : )

Photo: Lucy Palmer

Photo: Fred Taylor

... most of the time, Cedric (yup, that’s the boat) carries me, but when he gets too tired, I carry him ; )

Photo: Lucy Palmer

Thanks to everybody who supported me today, especially Brian for driving and the Cabreras for saving me with a pair of leggins and a banana when I needed it!

Saarschleife, Saar, Germany

If we’re friends, you've either been on the water with me or I’m planning to take you paddling.
I think this is the third time Lisa-Marie joined me on the river, together with a friend from France and my sister Lou. Of course there were too many people in the boat, that’s half the fun of it! Saarschleife is a local tourist spot lots of people go to look at. Sometimes they confuse it with the Amazon. Anyway, I realised that even though I’d looked at it many times from the surrounding hills, I had never paddled it, and it was time to change that.

Here is the first time we were on the water together, this must have been 2006 or 2007:

Slalom in Baden, Switzerland

For a bit of a change, I went to this race in Baden, Switzerland with some younger athletes from my club at the time, Kanu-Club Elzwelle Waldkirch. Going to another country to race is always a little different, even if you live right across the border, so we did our best to understand how things worked and check in properly, and everybody was super friendly and welcoming. We’d reserved a campsite, but Wiencke invited us to come and stay at her house instead! This was my view lying in bed that night:

and the race the next day was super fun!

More guiding with Art of Outdoor

Another trip to Schluchsee, messing about in boats, sleeping in snowy yurts and … misbehaving on the via ferrata.

For data protection reasons, I have no pictures of me being a very serious and responsible guide with the clients. They were children aged 11-12, and I remember a couple of key learning moments around how to pee in the woods and how to look after each other in a group.

These are from another Art of Outdoor trip in January 2016 to Melchsee-Frutt, Switzerland. Skiing and snowboarding.

New skills learned: how to peel bananas.

Took this because of the moon, but it’s barely visible.

One of the more special places I’ve slept.

Alte Elz - Guiding for Intersport, Freiburg

I did quite a few trips with them, but guiding for a big company is nowhere near as fun as for a small one.
This one stuck with me the most: Some buisinessmen from Saudi Arabia who were very disconcerted by having a female guide and didn’t want to listen to me at first, then needed me to hold their hands and pull their boats out of the water repeatedly when they capsized on the mirror-flat river.

Guadalquivir, Sevilla, Spain

I had a couple of days in Sevilla on my way to visiting my friend Eva in Cádiz. It was super hot, I was wandering around quite aimlessly and spotted people paddling on the river. Managed to find a local club and talk them into letting me into the secure compound to paddle a few strokes on the river I’d first read about in my spanish textbook in 8th grade.

Ardèche and Baume, France

This is such an amazing school trip the secondary school I went to, Peter-Wust-Gymnasium Merzig, runs every year. It’s a whole week paddling and climbing in the south of France, and it’s one of my favourite things to guide. The teachers who lead it treat the students like mature people, so they behave like that most of the time, and the whole trip ends up being super relaxed and fun and everybody ends up learning loads. I love having the time to not only guide people down a river, but actually do a couple of technique/ skills sessions on the river Baume right next to the campsite and teach some paddling basics. The amount of development I see with a lot of the students is truly impressive, and overall, this is a very rewarding trip.

I’ve paddled with Steffen since I was fourteen.

We focus on chosing and/or creating a learning environment where it’s safe to fail rather than trying to prevent failure, and it works wonders!

How awesome is ths water?!

Students after their first proper river trip. Smiles all around.

The playground!

Our accommodation

The students’ accommodation

Getting work done in Steffen’s and Petra’s mobile home on the way home

unloading stuff

dirty socks compulsory

boat inspection

Swiftwater Rescue Course, Augsburg, Germany

Took a night train from Slowenia from the Gene17 Next Generation Training Course to this weekend Swiftwater Rescue Course Jan was offering. I only had to throw a pillow at a snoring passenger once (in fact, I actually only lightly dropped it on him, he kept sleeping but stopped snoring - win). Steffen picked me up from the train station in Augsburtg and we had breakfast in his mobile home, then learned and practised various rescue skills over the weekend. There was a race going on on the Eiskanal, so we practiced near Jan and Cordula’s flat on the Lech river. I stayed with Julia and Arnold, who kindly put up with lots of paddling kit in their living room.

Learn your rescue stuff, folks, you’ll feel so much better.

Stayed a day longer to brave my ex home-course in an OC1. It was awesome.

This is what I wrote on facebook: ‘Jan Krause ran an amazing Swiftwater Rescue course over the weekend, now he's saving the lost : P

(sorry, there wasn't enough light for better pictures...)’

Gene17 Next Generation Training Course, Soča, Slovenia

This was an awesome week’s worht of paddling and one day in the snow. I was severely out of my depth experience-wise and I struggled, but I met some lovely people and I learned loads.

Some new kit I got from Chickenline for the trip

I was at a EUDEC Council meeting in Amersfoort, Netherlands until the day before this course started and flew to Venice from there without a plan for how I’d cover the last stretch across the border to Slovenia. I was incredibly lucky to sit next to a very friendly and kind guy from Slovenia who was driving that way and gave me a lift. He created split skis, I remember that, this is probably the website, but I’m not entirely sure. Anyway, we listened to 'Girl from Ipanema’ on the drive and I still connect it with trusting my gut feeling despite knowing how everybody would have told me not to take the lift, and feeling really free, and super grateful not to be stranded in a train station.

There is a snow day in the middle of the week, to get a rest day from paddling, but also to prtactice teaching a completely new sport to somebody, and better empathise with the learner.

We did Otona twice on the last day. I was super scared at the beginning, and still quite scared throughout. I don’t think I needed to be skills-wise, it’s probably another case of my experience needing to catch up. There is a cool video of landslide rapid .

I wrote on facebook at the time: ‘Next Generation Training Week was amazing... not leading this one yet, but getting there : D

Thanks everybody involved for making this such a great time!’

Here’s another video about the course by Alexander Sukodholov. It’s super well-made and contains lots of drone-footage, really worth watching!

Voldafjord, Norway

I have always been able to deal with cold a lot better than with heat. My friend Eva is the other way round. She is adventurous enough to still have wanted to paddle when she came to visit me in Norway (I studied in Volda in 2015).

She was worried about the cold, though, because the only time she could come visit was in winter. ‘No cotton, wool or fleece, something that will still keep you warm when wet’ is one of my standard instructions to make it work. That day, I also put a hot water bottle in the boat by her feet. It worked, and we had a great time on Voldafjord in front of snowy Rotsethornet.

A year later, she was studying in the very south of Spain. I went to visit her in summer and called her worrying about how I’d deal with the heat : D

Jølster and Storelva, Norwegian hospitality and Zimbabwean food

"Lena, you go paddling, I make food, when you get off the river it'll be ready." Shingi and Panda had invited me back to the Jølster river. Shingi was going to make some Zimbabwean food for us, and he had even arranged a place for me to stay with Aud. Aud is one of the nicest people I’ve met, she lives right by the river and likes to watch the paddlers. I got my faible for candles in glass vases from staying at her cosy home. She took this photo of Panda and me paddling past her garden.

photo: Aud Næss

We made sure we got on the river as soon as possible. The level was slightly lower than the last time I’d run it, but I was a lot more nervous. I think paddling the whole thing without any preparation or opportunities to scout and the pressure of having to look professional for the clients in the raft in combination with the trip being my first one on bigger white water had made me scared, even though everything had gone really well. This time I had time to scout, though, so I did, and ended up having a lovely time on the river anyway. I’m still beating myself up about chickening out of surfing a really big wave. Confidence is such an important factor on the river, and I now know how important it is for me to expand my comfort zone step by step. Even knowing I have the skills from slalom paddling, my river-experience needs to be able to catch up.
I don’t remember much about the food other than that it was super tasty, that Shinghi had made a veggie dish with beans especially for me, and that there was sadza, which I’d only known from books and was super happy to try. After the meal, we sat together by the fire in Aud’s living room.

The next day, I went to paddle Storelva with Panda. I was still a lot more nervous than I would have liked. It was a lovely river, though, and great fun overall.

One almost roll…

photos: Peter Panuscik

Something I hadn’t ecperienced before was finishing on a lake.

What a great end-of season-farewell-weekend!

Jølster (Rafting this time)

I’m pretty sure this was my first time in a raft. My sister was visiting with her friend while I lived in Norway and between my seminars and lectures, we drove to Jølster to go rafting with Shingi and Panda.

All packed for the trip

What would a paddling trip be without shenanigans…

Dinner and cups of tea by the lake with a little helper

Got to sleep in the lavvo - it was chilly, so we kept the fire going all night.

Two Paddles a day (Rossåa and Voldafjord)

I lived in Volda, Norway, for half a year in 2015 to finish my undergrad.. I had brought my whitewater kayak and was sure someone at my university would paddle, but nobody did, so I tried to find people in different ways. I’ve already written about how I contacted the raft base I’d driven past. This time, I saw a car with boats on the roof parked in town and left a note with my e-mail address and an explanation under the windscreen wiper. The guy who owned the car actually got in touch (and I feel a bit bad about forgetting his name - I think it was something with an M.

We met by the river and he greeted me with ‘there’s a four meter waterfall at the beginning.’ I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t, so this became my first waterfall.

Photos: Anna-Sophia Leuk

I had never paddled a river like this. It was really narrow and small, like a waterslide. Pretty straight-forward unless you manage to get stuck.

The obligatory scout before the first run

And setting safety.

We ended up doing a second run. mostly because it was so much fun, but also because I somehow feel like I’ve done a rapid or feature ‘properly’ if I do it twice. I guess it makes it less likely it was a fluke.

I love how paddling makes it so easy to connect. Wherever I am, if I managed to find some paddlers, I usually ended up having a great time.

I’d promised my sister and her friend a paddle on the fjord that day, so that’s where we headed next.

The whitewater guy, M(?) was staying on a boat in the harbour and had us over for drinks that night. We ate at the local pizza place first as a rare treat. It was an awesome day.