For the Love of Paddling!

Two weeks ago, I just had my most exhilirating and tiring days of my life. I was so blessed to be part of a team who represented UAE (though most of us were Filipinos) in an international dragon boat competition. Imagine that! I am competing and worst, I have a sport! Haha.. Anyway, our team, who we call ourselves as ADMar did train for this event for 3 months. Yeah yeah it was a short time of training because we never really thought that we would still be going to compete.

So, first stop is the Penang International DragonBoat Festival in Malaysia. We stayed there for three days. Below are our race results.

200m

1st race 4th place at 50 sec

2nd race 1st place at 49 sec

Finals 4th place at 50 sec

500m

1st race 1st place at 2:11 - straight to finals

Finals 3rd place at 2:08 - due to technicalities we were disqualified :(

I know it sucks but there will always be douchebag losers in the competition that will never ever accept the fact that they can either win or lose. But in our hearts, WE DOMINATE!

My team with their coolest hairstyle :)

And no, this ain't over yet! Since I have the coolest and awesomest team, we became famous and got featured in an article from a Malaysian newspaper. :)

'nuff said!

Next, the Lee Kum Kee 8th International DragonBoat Federation Club Crew World Championships and 37th Hong Kong International DragonBoat Races in Hong Kong. Yes! This is pretty amazing and prestigious race. It was actually the second largest dragon boat competition in the world and being part of it is awesome! We actually didn't set our hopes so high for this as we know that the best of the best paddlers from around the globe will be there. But we can't help but laugh whenever those tall, buff guys and gals sees us pass by. Their jaws were literally dropping and we can read from their minds like "What the heck are these tiny people doing here? And oh, they have two girls." We were like, watch us boys and girls. Hahaha

Anyway, as expected, level of competition is high but as the newbies, we pretty much did great! Great in the sense that we have consistently beaten our time here in Abu Dhabi races. Our HK race results are as follows:

2000m finished at 9:24.233

We ranked 17th out of the 23 teams who participated.

200m

1st race 6th place at 53.57 sec

2nd race 3rd place at 52.19 sec

Semis 6th place at 47.13 sec

We ranked 19th out of the 22 teams who participated.

500m

1st race 6th place at 2:12.5

2nd race 4th place at 2:06.5

Semis 6th place at 2:10.1

We ranked 19th out of the 23 teams who participated.

Yeah, we did 2000m and it was so intense! I actually enjoyed it! Especially when we passed by 2 or 3 boats ahead of us :P 9minutes and 24seconds non-stop paddling is hardcore. Hehe

During our 2Km race

Remi and I showing off how sexy our back is!

The best part of this almost two weeks trip? We learned, we enjoyed, we travelled and we made a lot of friends. T'was an adventure and a great experience. One of the precious moments I would forever keep in my heart.

Adventures of this whole trip in the next blog post. Ta-ta!