Day 141

Blurb: Seal Team Six Dragon Boat!

Backstory: Summer has descended on Columbus and my co-workers and I took to the water for the Asian Festival Dragon Boat races. These things are really big canoes with a lot of rules. You can see the boat in the picture above, there are about 20 people on the boat and everyone sits two to a row. It's an extremely tight fit, thank goodness my row partner Walter has small hips. I also want to say that for the first 10 minutes in the boat I thought we were going to tip over, so I held onto the guy in front of me for dear life. If there's one thing you don't want to do it's fall in the Scioto River, it's disgusting.
We all got to the river around eight to practice with the pros and we quickly found out we weren't very good. Apparently rowing in-sync is a very important part of racing a dragon boat. You row to the beat of a drum and follow the person at the front of the boat, if you don't do that your paddle hits the person in front of you. Also, you're also not supposed to talk while your rowing, and all we do is talk. But the best part of the whole hour was when the instructor told us we were a very heavy boat and that they must feed us well.
After practice we thought we were pretty good, then reality set it. The first race looked to be going pretty well then every one's strength petered out and we lost. That sent us to the loser's bracket where we didn't far so well. We lost our second race by a lot, it wasn't even close. But I had a lot of fun splashing around in the water, getting some exercise and sun. I logged my first sunburn of the season but it was worth it.