Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1105 Luke Zolnierowski - Texas Water Safari Canoe Race

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Ep. 1105 Luke Zolnierowski - Texas Water Safari Canoe Race · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's our five of a fifty hour race and you're already, you know, I don't think I can do this for another hour.
0:13
[SPEAKER_02]: The next time that you feel that is going to be much more.
0:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So it is kind of managing yourself, making sure you get ahead of issues and never too far down in the hole.
0:23
[SPEAKER_03]: This episode is Luke Zalnerowski, the Texas Water Safari Race, two hundred and sixty miles by canoe.
0:33
[SPEAKER_01]: You're listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk with adventurers from around the globe to bring you the inspiration and motivation you need to get started in the outdoors or to keep you moving if you're already there.
0:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Now here's your host, Kurt Lindville.
0:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello friends, and welcome to the Adventure Sports podcast again.
0:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Today is about canoe racing and what some claim to be the world's most difficult canoe race.
0:56
[SPEAKER_03]: You have Luke's on their outskie with us today, and I probably clobbered that last name, but that was my best attempt.
1:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And Luke won the solo version of this race, which is called the Texas Water Safari.
1:09
[SPEAKER_03]: He won that last year, but it wasn't his first rodeo.
1:11
[SPEAKER_03]: He'd been down there.
1:13
[SPEAKER_03]: several times and so today is all about canoeing canoe racing and trying to train for canoeing in a quasi-dry state loop welcome to the program.
1:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So how are you today sir?
1:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Good doing well.
1:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I'm having a little bit of this comes every year a little bit of post-suffering blues meaning the race is over.
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: one of the racing for the season's done and you kind of don't always know what to do with yourself.
1:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Well I saw that last year you took first place in the solo category and I was looking for the results for this year maybe I overlooked them so fill us in how to go.
1:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they're not post that yet.
1:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So unless you were following the day of the race and around there, or it's not officially post that on the website yet, and that may have to do, I think it's a little later than other years with the race being called a bit earlier.
2:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So we didn't actually get to do the full extent of the race.
2:11
[SPEAKER_02]: The race is about two hundred and sixty, sixty-five miles.
2:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And this year, due to
2:17
[SPEAKER_02]: just a lot of hazardous flooding at the end of the course we only rated to mile two thirty where they kind of stopped the race.
2:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's I think it's happened maybe once before in history and that was maybe in the sixties so it's definitely not a common occurrence and I think they're still kind of sorting through exactly how to properly
2:42
[SPEAKER_02]: give people the right accomplishments and make sure everything's really put on the website correctly.
2:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's tough when the race doesn't get to go to the finish line.
2:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
2:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So they have to sort all that out.
2:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So how did you do this year?
2:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So officially, we ended up having a three way tie for first solo.
3:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, between three competitors, which that's roughly where we we we we we pretty much traveling together at that point.
3:13
[SPEAKER_02]: of mile to thirty.
3:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's, it's all day.
3:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, you know, because the race stopped early, no matter how the awards were given out, I think it was always going to be like, it was going to be tricky to make everyone feel like it was truly fair.
3:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually thought they might forego placements and just, you know, say you finished the race or you didn't.
3:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And then this was kind of a surprise to us during the award ceremony.
3:38
[SPEAKER_02]: They called all three of us up at the same time and gave us all
3:41
[SPEAKER_02]: like the solo win.
3:43
[SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, at the time when the rate stopped, none of us knew that that was the finishing point.
3:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So it wasn't like there was no finish line at that point.
3:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like picking any point on the course, like who was there at the certain time, like if we had known, maybe that would have been different, but because we didn't know the finish line was there at the time that we were there,
4:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I, you know, nobody was pushing really hard to try to be there first.
4:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
4:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, let's rewind a little bit.
4:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was a nice preview of what's coming in this in this conversation here Luke, but first where you, where you talking to me from.
4:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm in Boulder County, Colorado.
4:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We live just between Boulder and Louisville.
4:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that is part of the reason I of the story.
4:31
[SPEAKER_03]: We were talking just before I hit record here that Colorado, which I'm also in Colorado, Luke, and I lived about twenty five thirty miles from you for twenty years.
4:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So I know the area well.
4:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Nice.
4:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Not there anymore, but Colorado has lots of great white water.
4:47
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really good for kayaking, and you know, it's a fun state for lots of different types of water sports, but it's not known for canoeing.
4:57
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have gentle, wide rivers that flow for miles on end, right?
5:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, shallow rivers that are not white water, but a lot of the air, it's probably not even
5:08
[SPEAKER_03]: convenient to try to paddle those in a canoe because they have such shallow places.
5:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So you had to come up with a kind of unique way to train for canoe races and we're going to get to that in a minute.
5:20
[SPEAKER_03]: But before all of that, how did you get started in canoeing in the first place?
5:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So coming out of college, I would college northeast.
5:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I was really into backpacking and the outdoors in general.
5:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But I was a chemical engineering major and I ended up moving to Southern Texas right after college to work at a middle's refinery.
5:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and Texas is a lot of different things.
5:44
[SPEAKER_02]: What they don't have a lot of is a ton of public land.
5:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And like, you know, it's there, but it's out, it's how it's pretty far in West Texas.
5:51
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of private land.
5:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's not a ton of hiking trails and mountains, especially on the Gulf Coast, right?
5:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So that was kind of a gap
5:58
[SPEAKER_02]: that I was trying to fill and what I found was they actually have a lot of rivers and the rivers are public and you can you know travel and go camping on the rivers so I ended up kind of getting into that not from a racing perspective but just from being outdoors and enjoying nature
6:14
[SPEAKER_02]: with, you know, somewhat of a lack of trails around me.
6:17
[SPEAKER_02]: The outdoor access was really provided to me by rivers and bays.
6:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So I, I mean, I started out with a little sun dolphin eight foot kayak from Walmart that I would take down the river.
6:31
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, how do that for maybe a year, a year and a half more recreationally.
6:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And then my friend and I kind of heard about this racing community and like that they're really into
6:44
[SPEAKER_02]: adventure and they have a lot of interesting races.
6:47
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a night race that was being put on.
6:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So a canoe race at night and I never heard of anything like that before.
6:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And we thought, you know, we were twenty four or somewhere around there.
6:59
[SPEAKER_02]: We thought we're two young fit guys.
7:02
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll probably win it.
7:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, heck, we've been paddling our sundolph and kayaks for, you know, a few months.
7:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're probably pretty good.
7:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we showed up to that race.
7:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, we're looking at everyone else's boats and they're easily twice as long as our boats and they're half as wide.
7:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're thinking to ourselves, how are these people going to get down this river?
7:24
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not going to even be able to fit in these boats.
7:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to flip.
7:28
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no way they can navigate this.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: This is like a torpedo.
7:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, pretty, pretty soon we realized they weren't going to fall out and they were going to be able to navigate just fine and they left our line of sight almost immediately and we we finish dead last.
7:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think an hour after the last boat came in and everyone was just thrilled to see us at the finish line because that meant they wouldn't have to go and search for us.
7:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And that nothing bad happened to us and no rescues us.
7:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The rescues not necessary now we can all go home.
8:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
8:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, what a wakeup call to what can you racing is really all about.
8:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it really was I think we just had no visibility into the fact that this is like how
8:17
[SPEAKER_02]: much of a sport this is or let people do this.
8:19
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't even know that people did this until we kind of got into it ourselves.
8:23
[SPEAKER_03]: That's really fun.
8:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So describe the types of canoes you already said long, narrow, right?
8:30
[SPEAKER_03]: But describe the types of canoes that people are racing.
8:32
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of them are custom built.
8:36
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a few people down in Southern Texas who make them Jack Spencer
8:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Jane Daniel, a lot of them are carbon and Kevlar weaves.
8:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So you kind of have a sheet of carbon, maybe a sheet of Kevlar, a sheet of carbon, and that's kind of sandwiched together to give you a lightweight but durable boat that you can still hit on things and you won't make it dent in the boat.
9:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, eventually you will, but it can take some damage.
9:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's what a lot of people race.
9:08
[SPEAKER_02]: There's solo boats, tandem boats for two.
9:12
[SPEAKER_02]: and then anything up to six people.
9:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is kind of specific to this Texas community.
9:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a lot of other races in Michigan in Alaska and the Yukon in Alabama that really kind of singles or doubles.
9:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Singles or tandem are really the boats that people use.
9:31
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of those are more often stock, canoes, winona's, surf skis have become pretty popular.
9:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So those you can kind of more readily buy or source.
9:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Savage River is another outfinger that makes a lot of carbon racing tandem boats.
9:47
[SPEAKER_02]: But the three to six number for racing is really I think kind of unique to the San Marcos River and the Texas Water Safari.
9:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've seen pictures or descriptions of some of the giant canoes that held massive amounts of payload cargo and, you know, big teams of men that would try to petal these and some of the bigger rivers around, you know, the north and Canada and the northern U.S.
10:16
[SPEAKER_03]: and what have you in many, many years gone by.
10:19
[SPEAKER_03]: But I have never seen a canoe like that, and I'm looking at a picture right now of a six person canoe, and it's the top of the website, which is texaswatersafari.org, if anyone wants to look.
10:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I have never personally seen a canoe that long.
10:35
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a bear to transport.
10:39
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of people have specialized racks.
10:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they hang over front of your car in the back of your car.
10:45
[SPEAKER_02]: There, I mean, they're over forty feet long.
10:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the thing that it reminds me of is crew, of course.
10:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
10:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And, but everyone has a single paddle and they're in a canoe.
10:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's different.
10:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
10:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, some of those teams, in that photo, they're using single blades, but another unique feature, a lot of these boats and a lot of people who do these races alternate between the two.
11:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So they'll use a single blade canoe paddle and then they'll take out a double blade kayak paddle, it'd be kayak for a few hours and then switch back to the canoe paddle.
11:16
[SPEAKER_02]: and the proportions of that differ for different people but a lot of people use both.
11:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Now are they doing that for efficiency or to change the motion up because it is a very long distance at their covering.
11:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a bit of both most people can go a little bit faster on the double blade.
11:35
[SPEAKER_02]: The caveat there is it requires a little bit more technique and once you're tired it's a little more difficult to maintain proper form
11:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you start to be fatigued, it can be a little hard to maintain that.
11:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And then a lot of people switch to the maybe slightly slower, but more easily executable single blade battle.
11:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it's kind of trying to go as fast as you can and survive.
12:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of people are alternate between the two.
12:04
[SPEAKER_02]: to try to give them the best overalls.
12:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
12:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So I grew up in a canoeing town, Talaqua, Oklahoma.
12:11
[SPEAKER_03]: The Illinois River is there, and it's a scenic river in hundreds of thousands of tourists, maybe more, show up there every year to paddle the river.
12:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's, it's, it's class two water.
12:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Nothing crazy, but it is very, very lovely.
12:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But the canoes, I mean, they're heavy aluminum boats.
12:27
[SPEAKER_03]: They hold two people.
12:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And most of the time, well, maybe not most of the time.
12:32
[SPEAKER_03]: But a good part of the time, the canoes upside down in the ice chest is spilling.
12:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And everybody is trying to recover all the lost pieces.
12:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, that's a totally different scene than what you're describing.
12:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So you contrast what a lot of people think about when they think of recreational canoeing with what this race is like.
12:50
[SPEAKER_02]: First, I think I'll say, you know, the race can be, you can approach it in very different ways.
12:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So often, like, let's say someone's training for a marathon.
12:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Some people are training and racing to win it.
13:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Some people have a goal in mind of, they want to beat their personal best.
13:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And some people just want to survive the damn thing.
13:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, anyway, I can, I want to, I want to make it before the cut off.
13:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So this race is very similar.
13:13
[SPEAKER_02]: There's different tiers of people that some are very competitive.
13:17
[SPEAKER_02]: They're trying to go for maybe the overall win or a class win or top-fifteen is usually a significant achievement because the top-fifteen gets plaques.
13:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So some people try to make it in the top-fifteen.
13:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Then there's more of a middle range where people are maybe they did it once and they're trying to beat their time again, but they're not quite fast enough to be in those in that top-third or so.
13:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's people who are just trying to make it in, and maybe it's even more of a camping trip, right?
13:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So the race, you have a hundred hours to do it.
13:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It's two hundred sixty miles.
13:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you try to go the slowest pace on average, you have to move about two and a half, two point six miles an hour, but
14:00
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're stopping, you've got to factor that in.
14:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're actually moving quite a bit faster.
14:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But the winning teams will often come in depending on water level between thirty five or forty five hours.
14:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's nearly half that time.
14:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's the difference between one and a half nights out there or three nights and four days.
14:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
14:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a wide range of what the race can be and what people make the race to be.
14:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Some people bring
14:30
[SPEAKER_02]: camping gear, they plan where they'll stop, they take rest and they're just trying to make it under the hundred hours.
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Some people are stopping as little as possible.
14:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, every ten to twenty miles you have an opportunity to receive food and water.
14:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So the top teams are, they're not even stopping to receive the food and water.
14:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It's dropping in my boat and I'm going, right?
14:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And then maybe towards the end of the day, maybe you stop for a little bit, but it seconds not minute.
15:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I've actually heard that the people who look at the roughest is that middle third.
15:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the top third is, you know, they're racing hard, they're pushing, but they're only out there for, let's say, two days.
15:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
15:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The people on the back end who are out there for four days, they're stopping to sleep each night and they're resting and they're taking care of themselves.
15:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But the people in
15:22
[SPEAKER_02]: in the middle are still pushing really hard, they're not resting very much, maybe they didn't plan to be out there for that long, pushing that entire time and they're not taking care of themselves, so they often look the roughest.
15:33
[SPEAKER_02]: People in that seven D to eighty five hour range.
15:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it sounds it sounds so punishing.
15:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I've talked to a lot of distance runners who have done ultra marathons and things like that.
15:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And one thing that I've gathered over the years is the body people say this and I think it's slight exaggeration, but they say the body doesn't really know distance at no time.
15:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the faster runners
15:55
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, they may finish a marathon, and the next day is another marathon, and the next day is another marathon, one of those sorts of races, but they may finish it very quickly, and then they have so much more recovery time.
16:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And they can take care of themselves.
16:08
[SPEAKER_03]: They weren't running as long, even though they did the same distance.
16:12
[SPEAKER_03]: One could say, well, they put in more effort because they did the distance faster, but they do get more recovery time.
16:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And I can see how that would work out in canoeing as well.
16:21
[SPEAKER_03]: You might work a little bit harder, but if you have a great team and a great boat and you finish sooner, well then you weren't punished for nearly as long.
16:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, some people say, I don't know how you can, I need to go faster.
16:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how you can do it in a hundred hours.
16:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I wouldn't be able to sit for that long.
16:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
16:40
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
16:41
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I just, it sounds grilling to me.
16:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've been doing a lot of canoeing this spring with my son.
16:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's nothing fancy.
16:47
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not doing rivers.
16:48
[SPEAKER_03]: We're just doing flat water.
16:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But we've been out in the canoe a lot this year.
16:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And, man, after just two or three hours, I am ready to get out of that boat.
16:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
16:58
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, what does it feel like to be in a boat for days instead of hours?
17:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So the most surprising thing?
17:05
[SPEAKER_02]: that I didn't realize going into my first year doing it.
17:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I kind of thought, you know, once you feel bad, you feel worse and then you feel worse.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And once you're tired, then you're more tired, then you're really tired, then you're extremely tired, and then you're then you're passed out.
17:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's not really how it goes.
17:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You kind of go through cycles and there's a lot of ups and downs.
17:26
[SPEAKER_02]: There's moments where you feel really good.
17:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's moments where you just cannot sit
17:33
[SPEAKER_02]: in this seat for any longer because your rear hurts so much.
17:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But then maybe half an hour later, you've completely forgotten about that because you've got, you're just so hot from, it's the middle of the day, it's three o'clock and you can't, you can't think about anything besides how hot it is.
17:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And then maybe the evening rolls around and it's cool.
17:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I feel great and you're ready to paddle and you're ready to go and you don't feel anything that hurts you.
18:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And then maybe you go pretty hard for an hour or two.
18:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And then all your back is just killing you from going on for the hour.
18:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there's a lot of ups and downs, which I didn't anticipate.
18:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought it was a slow, steady march down, but it's more like a roller coaster with maybe
18:21
[SPEAKER_02]: higher highs and lower lows as you go.
18:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I used to tell people who didn't had never experienced endurance sports that yeah, you get tired.
18:30
[SPEAKER_03]: You get to a point where you can just keep going and you don't really get a whole lot more tired for a long time.
18:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you do again.
18:37
[SPEAKER_03]: But what you're describing is that you get really tired, but then you recover some.
18:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I think the trick and there's a lot of race strategy on, you know, continuously eating and drinking and making sure you don't go too far down in the hole, because once you do, it's fairly difficult to recover.
18:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So trying to, you have loads, but you try to kind of get ahead of them and make sure you're eating, drinking, taking in calories, taking in electrolytes, you know, maybe if you're having any
19:07
[SPEAKER_02]: muscle spasms or issues with your wrist like maybe taking the time to stretch that or or switch your positioning because if it's if it's our five
19:16
[SPEAKER_02]: of a fifty-hour race and you're already, you know, I don't think I can do this for another hour.
19:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the next time that you feel that is going to be much worse.
19:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So it is kind of managing yourself, making sure you get ahead of issues and never too far down in the hole so that you can, you're able to recover.
19:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
19:35
[SPEAKER_03]: But Luke, let's talk a little bit about the race itself.
19:38
[SPEAKER_03]: You already mentioned the distance and its in Texas.
19:41
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the river?
19:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a combination of two rivers.
19:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It's sourced to sea.
19:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So you start out on the San Marcus River.
19:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It comes out of the Edwards Aquifer in San Marcus on spring lake.
19:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And then for about eighty five miles, you follow that river.
19:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's fairly shallow, narrow, twisty.
20:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's also, especially at the very beginning, it's cool water.
20:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about seventy two degrees, I think, all year because it comes out from an under
20:12
[SPEAKER_02]: ground spring.
20:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's just beautiful scenery and very enjoyable.
20:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's a little bit more technically demanding on the navigation.
20:20
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of portages, dams, some rapids to either go through or navigate around.
20:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not of it is, you know, white water, class three, class four.
20:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I don't even know if we get up to class two, depending on the water level, you might get up to class two in some years in a few areas.
20:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'm not even sure about that.
20:42
[SPEAKER_02]: but you follow this beautiful river for eighty-five miles across all these fortages and then you join the Guadalupe River at mile eighty-five and you follow that all the way down to the Gulf Coast.
20:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I believe the San Antonio River comes in just before the mouth but then it's still you're still on the Guadalupe River until mile two fifty-five and then
21:08
[SPEAKER_02]: after two hundred fifty five miles of traveling in a channelized river you exit the river out out of the mouth and enter San Antonio Bay and for a lot of people that's at night and the world just kind of opens up to you.
21:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean you're in a river with tall banks around the by trees and then all of a sudden you're in an expanse of what feels like the ocean.
21:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
21:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it's about a water brackish at that point or is it still fresh?
21:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so there's there's a point called the salt water barrier Which has a series of baffles that they inflate if the water level ever gets really low It's possible that the salt water comes up So to prevent salt water intrusion into any water intake systems or people's wells.
21:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, they have these baffles that get raised to prevent that so
22:00
[SPEAKER_02]: You shouldn't see any brackish water until below salt water barrier.
22:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's near the end about mile, but then the bay is okay.
22:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are a lot of portages or portages.
22:13
[SPEAKER_03]: However, you want to say it at the first part of the race.
22:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So on the second part of the race, are there many?
22:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Not so many.
22:19
[SPEAKER_02]: The last damn is kind of right after you get on the Guadalupe River.
22:24
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in Gonzalez, Texas.
22:25
[SPEAKER_02]: After that,
22:27
[SPEAKER_02]: There aren't really any dams.
22:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So no, no dams to go around.
22:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It's pretty open river at that point.
22:35
[SPEAKER_02]: It tends to slow down as you go because the elevation gradient is not as extreme anymore.
22:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So you may get a bit more water, but there's not a lot of current.
22:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So it does a lot of it is fairly flat water paddling from mile about eighty five down to the end.
22:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And back in the day, there used to actually be teams that would row.
22:56
[SPEAKER_02]: parts of the race or the whole race, which is very difficult to do on the upper part of the river on the St.
23:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Marcus.
23:02
[SPEAKER_02]: But once you're on the Guadalupe River, the river's fairly wide open and there's not as many sharp turns so people would get into schooling and kind of have boats that maybe you could paddle on the upper river.
23:15
[SPEAKER_02]: then swivel around in your seat and get out of your ears and now you're rowing to it.
23:20
[SPEAKER_03]: There you go.
23:20
[SPEAKER_03]: That's wild.
23:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I wouldn't have thought about that.
23:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm going to admit my ignorance here by telling you what I do know and then you can fill in what I don't.
23:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
23:30
[SPEAKER_03]: A sell boat that's a deep draft boat.
23:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It has a maximum speed based on the length of the bow wave, so the length of the water line of the boat determines how fast it can go.
23:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's because the bow wave won't go any faster than that and you can't pop out and get above it.
23:46
[SPEAKER_03]: A speed boat pops over that when you first accelerate, you know, the boat laborers to punch out and then start skipping along the surface.
23:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So we can go as fast as the motor can take it because it doesn't have to contend with the bow wave.
23:58
[SPEAKER_03]: canoe is somewhere in the middle of all of that.
24:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess the question is, do the longer boats have a marked advantage and how fast that they can go?
24:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Are they contending with the limitations of the length of the boat?
24:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll say everyone, everyone does contend with that limitation and I think we're kind of getting to what maybe your whole speed is.
24:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
24:20
[SPEAKER_02]: The way I understand it, the whole speed of your boat is the speed at which it's traveling
24:26
[SPEAKER_02]: when your own bow wake and wave is at the length of your boat.
24:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you exceed that, once your wake is wave is longer than your boat, it becomes exponentially more difficult to go any faster.
24:42
[SPEAKER_02]: That's because you're having to essentially go over trying to climb up over your paddling uphill.
24:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So the longer the boat, typically the higher the whole speed and the higher cruising speed,
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: that it has.
24:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So until you're at your whole speed, I think your energy input to speed is fairly linear, but once you're above the whole speed, it becomes exponential.
25:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So you might be having to put in multiple units more of work.
25:10
[SPEAKER_02]: get the same increase in speed that you would have had below your whole speed.
25:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting.
25:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So these these very long like six person can use.
25:18
[SPEAKER_03]: They have an advantage not only is it more more power as far as a number of people paddling, but they also are going to have a much faster whole speed.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Now they don't always have an advantage, especially in the beginning of the race.
25:31
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of narrow turns and it's difficult getting that long boat around each turn.
25:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And you have to, it essentially has to lose all of its momentum, turn, and then they have to regain that momentum.
25:43
[SPEAKER_03]: They have to pivot.
25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to pivot it from the front and the back.
25:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So usually both the bow and the stern person are steering the boat right opposite ways.
25:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And then everyone has to work together and get the boat back up to speed.
25:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So in the beginning, a lot of solos and tandem's actually have quite a quite an advantage.
26:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So usually I think
26:05
[SPEAKER_02]: solo boats and tandem boats tend to lose placement as the race goes on because they have a bit of advantage in the front but then they lose it more in the open water.
26:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So it sounds like a lot of fun.
26:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell us, so we've heard about kind of the logistics of what this is and I know that we could dive into the details forever but what about the camaraderie, the people that you meet, is there a community that's around racing these boats?
26:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, there's I've never, I've not found another community like that.
26:35
[SPEAKER_02]: to the one that's around kind of associated with the like the Texas racing, the Texas canoe racing community and the Texas waters of Ari.
26:44
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of people that come back every year to me, I've actually never lived in Texas while I did the race.
26:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I lived in Texas for three years on between twenty fourteen and twenty seventeen the first time I did the water safari was twenty eighteen so I've always come in from out of state and every time I go down there it feels a little bit like coming home or to my second home it feels a little bit like a family reunion because I yeah I've over the years I've gotten to know more and more people and a lot of people come back each year some people
27:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, skip a year, take a few years off and come back, but everyone is very friendly, very welcoming and like, everyone loves seeing new people and like bringing in new people.
27:23
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it almost sounds like a cult sometimes when we talk about it.
27:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's one more members.
27:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
27:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, come on.
27:29
[SPEAKER_02]: We only do, yeah.
27:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, the the community's great.
27:33
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, I think it's a significant reason why I do this race every year because there's other long distance races out there.
27:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I've thought about doing them and they seem interesting in different ways but what well maybe they don't like maybe they have that same community but I just don't know it yet but this is just so familiar to me every year and it's it almost marks the passage of time for me each year like I love coming back to it in the familiarity of it and seeing what all these people are up to a year after year and I mean some of them might've seen their kids grow up like when I met them
28:10
[SPEAKER_03]: their kids were you know four or five years old and now they're like almost teenager and that's yeah so I think everyone it's a pretty close in the community and I think it's what keeps me coming back every well you know in twenty twenty four you took the first solo and your time was fifty one fifty five according to what I'm looking at yeah so so people understand that's not fifty one minutes and fifty five seconds
28:37
[SPEAKER_03]: We're talking about fifty-one hours, fifty-two hours essentially.
28:42
[SPEAKER_03]: What does it take to go solo for that long?
28:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, describe what that feels like.
28:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Most people have never attempted anything like that.
28:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
28:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll compare it to what it feels like doing it on a team.
28:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of my fears about doing it solo before I actually did it.
29:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've done it first as a team of two.
29:03
[SPEAKER_02]: then on various setups of teams of five and six people.
29:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've always, so always either attend them or a team.
29:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And on a team, you kind of share the responsibility of whatever's happening.
29:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're able to pick each other up and help each other through tough moments.
29:19
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if somebody's feeling really out of it, maybe we can put them in a middle seat and they're still paddling, but maybe they don't have to pay attention to where we're going.
29:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
29:27
[SPEAKER_02]: But like the person who's steering is very much on mentally and trying to decide where to go.
29:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So you kind of share the load and you're able to help each other through some of these ups and downs.
29:37
[SPEAKER_02]: On a solo boat, you're not really sharing your responsibility.
29:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You're doing every, you're navigating, you're planning where to go, you're paddling, you're kind of doing all of it.
29:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And you don't have anyone to talk to or break the silence with or make jokes with.
29:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So I really thought, do it, try and do do a solo year.
29:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought,
29:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It was going to be really lonely and really boring.
29:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Those were my main two concerns.
30:01
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, it happened.
30:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I ended up doing a lot of training runs with different people.
30:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So even on training runs, I wasn't lonely or bored.
30:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And during the race itself, I just found myself paddling with other boats for nearly the whole race.
30:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I was almost never really alone.
30:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And now that could have turned out to be different if there weren't other boats that had a similar speed to me.
30:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I might have very well been alone because even if someone's three minutes ahead of you and three minutes behind you, well, you don't really see them.
30:32
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to still be around the other events.
30:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So it may just be the way things turned out that I, it wasn't boring at all.
30:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And I didn't feel lonely.
30:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually enjoyed.
30:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You're able to focus a lot more on, you know, improving and what you're doing yourself in your own decisions.
30:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you know, kind of interesting to work on year after year.
30:51
[SPEAKER_02]: See, what can I get better at?
30:53
[SPEAKER_02]: What can I do better?
30:55
[SPEAKER_02]: and you're not, you know it's all coming from you.
30:57
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not, oh well maybe my partner did this or that or didn't, right?
31:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I really enjoyed the solo year because I could kind of work on all these variables on my own and get better at them.
31:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But I also paddle with a lot of other people during the race and before the race and kind of enjoyed that.
31:13
[SPEAKER_02]: What I did find to be different was usually at the end of the race, you would think everyone just kind of collapses in a heap of exhaustion, which is sometimes true.
31:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But you have all this emotional excitement.
31:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
31:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And adrenaline of finishing and how did everybody else do?
31:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And you just kind of want to talk to everyone.
31:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
31:32
[SPEAKER_02]: For maybe a few hours before you then crash and go to sleep wherever you are standing at the time.
31:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the end of my solo year, I found I was really just drained mentally much more than any other year because I had to be on the whole fifty two hours.
31:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And I didn't sleep at all during that time.
31:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And I
31:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was really just mentally exhausted and drained from having to.
31:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I never could have zoomed out and just, okay, let me just paddle and somebody else will steer.
32:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I was always having to pay attention to where I'm going and steer for that entire time.
32:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was just, everyone's physically drained at the end of it, but that I didn't have so much of that emotional
32:14
[SPEAKER_02]: If you will, I was, I was kind of just done.
32:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Just done.
32:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds like an incredible feed, obviously.
32:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that's an understatement, right?
32:23
[SPEAKER_03]: But tell us what your boat is like, because it's not just your regular canoe that you pick up at Walmart or something, you know, what are we talking about here?
32:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So my boat is a Spencer extreme pro.
32:37
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what Jack Spencer calls this model.
32:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's a Kevlar and carbon boat.
32:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about twenty one feet long and it's fairly narrow in the front and the back with these kind of wide hips that come out in the middle to give you some stability.
32:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So it doesn't have a very strong primary stability, meaning it doesn't
32:58
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of stay on center.
33:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It always oscillates a little bit around that center.
33:02
[SPEAKER_02]: But when the secondary stability catches, when that hip kind of touches the water, it's got a really good secondary stability so that you don't end up tipping past that hip.
33:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's a compromise between still being a fast boat, but being stable so that you can
33:22
[SPEAKER_02]: sit in it for days at a time and then make it across open.
33:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you seated in the middle of the boat like at the center of gravity or are you a little behind or in front of that?
33:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Pretty much in the middle, the seats in the middle and it's on rails so that you can slide it a little bit forward, a little bit backwards.
33:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I have the center of gravity tilted just a little forward so just a little bow down so that when I'm moving it's trim.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, you're seated at
33:49
[SPEAKER_02]: in the middle.
33:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So you don't have a lot of ability to steer from the middle because you're not at the pivot points.
33:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So there is a rudder on this boat.
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what does most of the steer fascinating.
34:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, back to Colorado being landlocked and not a lot of big, quiet rivers to go down.
34:09
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you train for this living in Colorado?
34:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
34:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do paddle my boat whenever I can.
34:17
[SPEAKER_02]: on reservoirs or lakes or mostly flat water.
34:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a pretty significant season when water is just frozen.
34:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can't really get out onto the water.
34:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I made the mistake once of driving to the lake thinking, it hasn't been that cold yet.
34:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think it's frozen.
34:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I remember parking and seeing all of the geese on the water.
34:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And they looked really tall.
34:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, why are these geese?
34:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So tall.
34:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I realized it's because they're not in the water.
34:45
[SPEAKER_02]: They're on the water and they're walking and you're a few inches off the water.
34:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So I drove back home and I don't know what I ended up doing that day, but I think I had a decision a few years ago where I was thinking of getting another boat, but I wouldn't really be able to use it all year round.
35:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got interested in getting a trainer, a paddle trainer.
35:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a kayak bird similar to what a rowing machine would be.
35:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of looks like that except the seat doesn't slide.
35:15
[SPEAKER_02]: It's fixed and then it has a pole with two attachment points to cables so that you can kayak or you can take off one attachment point and canoe, but it's
35:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Not a roaming machine, although a little similar to that.
35:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a kayak and canoe herb.
35:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know there's at least two companies that make it mine as a kayak first.
35:39
[SPEAKER_02]: There's also a kayak pro.
35:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But the one I got, it's made in Hungary.
35:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got it shipped to me in a series of IKEA boxes.
35:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I was wondering how many were going to send it to me.
35:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I ended up getting about thirty different boxes of parts.
35:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you've got to put it all together.
35:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Does it feel like a fairly natural motion?
35:59
[SPEAKER_02]: It transfers very well to the water to the motion of paddling transfers very well.
36:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Now you don't get the, you don't get to work on your stability, right?
36:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to tip the thing over in your garage.
36:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't have any of that.
36:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're able to really work on the fitness of it, the fitness and the motion of paddling.
36:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And I, I mean, I, I paddle on that pretty much year round.
36:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Not only because sometimes it's cold and frozen, but sometimes it's just a lot easier to go into my garage.
36:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And if I'm doing a thirty minute workout, it might take me thirty five minutes.
36:34
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I can write.
36:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Get changed, go to the garage, do my workout, and then come back home.
36:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And in a thirty minute workout took me thirty minutes.
36:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas if I need to go to the lake, the closest good option for me is about thirty minutes away.
36:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So to load the boat up, drive there, and unload the boat and set up.
36:53
[SPEAKER_02]: That's probably about an hour.
36:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So an hour to prep and get there and start paddling.
36:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Thirty minutes on the water and then another hour to get back.
37:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's, I mean, that's two and a half hours.
37:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So some days it just isn't really realistic.
37:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a lot easier to, you know, a thirty minute workout takes me half an hour.
37:10
[SPEAKER_02]: as opposed to a half hours of all that's set up, getting out there.
37:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So are you going to Boulder Res or Stanley or where do you tend to paddle?
37:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been going to McKin-Tosh Lake, Macintosh Lake.
37:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, long, long, long.
37:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's, you can go at any time a day.
37:23
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no opening or closing hours.
37:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's kind of why.
37:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's, it's not a huge lake, but it's, it's worth for me there.
37:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Just, yeah, it's, it's free and it's open.
37:34
[SPEAKER_02]: whenever you need it so I can go there after hours before hours.
37:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been to a few other places as well, but that's kind of my main goal too.
37:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's your go-to.
37:42
[SPEAKER_03]: That's awesome.
37:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want to talk a little about the stability you keep mentioning and what some people call twitch muscles or stabilizer muscles, their smaller muscles are not your main core muscles that you would, well, they are your core muscles, but your main muscles that you paddle with, but they're quite keep you from tipping over, keep you balanced,
38:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And as the canoe rocks from side to side or forward and back, then I'm just thinking about my canoeing this year.
38:11
[SPEAKER_03]: That's part of the reason why I won out of the boat.
38:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Because after rocking back and forth and side to side and trying to stabilize everything for two or three hours, those muscles get tired.
38:21
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, I just want to quit moving.
38:23
[SPEAKER_03]: How long does it take for that to kind of become, I guess, sustainable?
38:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Might be the word where you can actually be in the boat for three days.
38:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But I feel like it's a little hard for me to say because I switched into the solo boat once I've already been paddling for about six years.
38:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And we started out in an aluminum canoe, which is very stable.
38:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, super wide.
38:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of, now it feels like a bathtub or two bathtub.
38:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So we kind of went, I feel like I kind of advanced my way to this boat slowly.
38:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And I went from the aluminum canoe to these multi-man boats, which felt to be at the time of going into them.
39:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But I also, I lived in California between living in Texas and Colorado, and I had a surf ski, and I actually did a lot of paddling with the Berkeley paddling and rowing club, and we did some downwind and surf ski surfing, downwinding, and I think that helped a lot with
39:26
[SPEAKER_02]: stability and being an open water in San Francisco Bay and being open to the rolling waves and getting used to that.
39:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But how long does it take?
39:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I think like most things, when you first start out, you can make a lot of improvement and then that starts to slow down.
39:44
[SPEAKER_02]: That can be very encouraging because, well, if you
39:48
[SPEAKER_02]: spend a month doing it every other day.
39:50
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to get a lot out of it and then less and less so.
39:53
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think what helps is like putting yourself in some of those more challenging situations like going out on a windy day or putting yourself in some chop or some open water.
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Because if you've got to figure out how to handle it on flat water first of then pushing those stability limits and maybe having just some days where I don't have a
40:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going out there.
40:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even have a goal of distance in mind.
40:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just working on stability for thirty minutes.
40:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to see how much I can rock back and forth without tipping and see how that goes.
40:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I think maybe it's probably a bit of a personal answer, but definitely I think helps to kind of work up through less advanced boats and then slowly get yourself into more advanced and tippy boats.
40:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Although not everyone has the luxury of being able to
40:43
[SPEAKER_02]: have an unlimited number of votes to go through, so.
40:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
40:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it sounds like something that could be really healthy for stabilizing one's back and core and spine and, you know, just your whole proprioception has to be improved by that type of motion.
40:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I kind of think of it like slack lining, which is a ton of fun, and I think a little bit more difficult than the canoeing, but the idea that you're on something that's constantly moving and you're constantly stabilizing it with your body, right?
41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's very different than being a land and being stable, right?
41:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You're always moving a little bit and you don't react every motion too much because then you that you overreact and you're in the water.
41:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've got to be comfortable like just kind of almost dancing there a little bit all the time.
41:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, one more physical body question.
41:29
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're paddling, not rowing, then you're not using your body symmetrically.
41:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Now you can paddle on one side versus the other, but even that's not symmetric.
41:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I guess it can be if you change your hand position.
41:40
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the question.
41:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you find any challenges trying to use your body symmetrically so that you get the same type of workout on both sides or anything like that?
41:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I think because I primarily kayak double blade and kayak, I don't, it feels fairly symmetrical.
41:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I also use the single blade, but I've mostly been training on the kayak blade.
42:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the trick for the single blade is a lot of people just count however many strokes they want to do per side and then switch to the other.
42:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So for racing it's often eight to twelve strokes per side and then you switch to the other side and then you see alternate which side you're on, but the
42:20
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a boat class, a solo canoe, a USCAC one.
42:25
[SPEAKER_02]: It's its own division in the Texas Water Safari.
42:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, one person in a USCAC canoe with one single blade, no rudder.
42:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're doing all your steering from the center with a single blade.
42:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So where you're paddling in on which side is often driven by which way is the river going, which way is the wind coming great?
42:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So you may be on one side for much longer than you want.
42:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it's six these strokes on the left, two on the right, and then six these strokes on the left.
42:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
42:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is, I mean, it's, I think it's known as one of the toughest classes, partially because of that because it's so difficult.
43:02
[SPEAKER_02]: to steer and you don't really have a decision of where you paddle.
43:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's driven by the conditions on the water.
43:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Very, very cool.
43:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it sounds like a ton of fun.
43:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I love canoeing because I love the way that nature is around bodies of water.
43:18
[SPEAKER_03]: you see animals that aren't afraid of you because you didn't walk up on them you're drifting by you know there's that sort of an experience and also just the whole ecosystem that's around water different types of birds and and of course they're the fish and birds catching fish and you know all the things it's really really fun in Texas in some places they do have alligators
43:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep, and there are alligators on the course, you could say.
43:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, once you get down into the lower Guadalupe River past the salt water barrier, some of those before then, there's a lot of alligators.
43:55
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of them work very big.
43:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there, I don't know, three to five foot gators, and often all you see is their eyes on the water in the distance somewhere.
44:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, but they're there.
44:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So you're paddling at night and you see the the rise reflecting with a headlamp or something and can you make the alligator noise look?
44:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if I've ever heard an alligator make a noise.
44:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Just the big splash.
44:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the big splash.
44:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I know of people.
44:24
[SPEAKER_03]: They do something with their mouths and it's kind of like a sound or something that they claim calls alligators.
44:29
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know anything about that.
44:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So forgive me people from misleading you on that one.
44:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I don't think I'll try it.
44:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't need to call them to me.
44:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you ever been tempted to jump in the water and swim with a boat for a little bit?
44:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Just have a change of motion and refresh yourself?
44:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Usually that's unintentional.
44:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Usually you don't want to do that because you're not paddling and you're not going so fast.
44:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's enough times in the race where you hit a stick that you didn't know was there that was just under the surface and it flips you over and well, never swimming.
45:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So it does happen, but it's usually not the intended outcome.
45:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, let's hope the stick wasn't an alligator.
45:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, this has been a ton of fun.
45:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I've really enjoyed hearing about this and I'm not in the community, right?
45:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So for me, this is one of those lesser known types of races that are out there.
45:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very, very interesting and it sounds like a ton of fun.
45:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell everyone where they can learn more.
45:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so there's the Texas water safari has a website.
45:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It's Texas water safari or they also have a Facebook page.
45:32
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of information online.
45:34
[SPEAKER_02]: about that and they have a YouTube channel that has recordings of previous years seminars.
45:41
[SPEAKER_02]: So every year in February they do a seminar that they live stream and kind of answered questions for any beginners or anyone who might be wanting to get into the race, like save the required equipment, what is the race like, how should I be training, just kind of the whole
45:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think it's gone four or five hours long at times.
46:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So you know, you can kind of definitely select when you want to watch.
46:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, there's a lot of good online content on their website, their Facebook page and their YouTube channel.
46:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, that's cool.
46:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And what about people if they want to get in touch with you?
46:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Would it be good.
46:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I can give you my email address.
46:16
[SPEAKER_03]: That's up to you on how much because, you know, thousands of people will be hearing this.
46:22
[SPEAKER_02]: You have an Instagram page that you know what made my Facebook, I mean, you could look me up on Facebook, Luke's on your outskis.
46:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And then that's, that's a good way.
46:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's ZOL in IEROWSKI.
46:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
46:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Zalnerowski.
46:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I had a note here, which we didn't even touch on, something about Sandy's paddling podcast.
46:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
46:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So there, this is a fellow podcaster who you may or may not have heard of.
46:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's, she's, she started doing
46:52
[SPEAKER_02]: paddling specific podcast interviews fairly recently this year and has interviewed a lot of people who have been involved not only with the water safari but paddling racing and paddling in general so she's there's not I think there's maybe six or seven episodes out at this time but Sandy only she's I mean she's very into the community her father Tom Goins was
47:15
[SPEAKER_02]: done the safari many times.
47:17
[SPEAKER_02]: She introduced him on that podcast about his first water safari.
47:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And if anyone wants to hear more stories about the water safari, I think that's another good resource to go to.
47:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's fantastic.
47:29
[SPEAKER_03]: All right.
47:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, Luke, will you close us out with one fun story?
47:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Either something that worked out really well or really badly, but something that you remember that stands out for you.
47:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe I'll do.
47:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It was okay.
47:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Our first, this was
47:43
[SPEAKER_02]: My safari partner from twenty eighteen and I, this was our first training run in the bay that we did.
47:51
[SPEAKER_02]: We decided we were going to run the last sixty miles of the river in two days.
47:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So mile two hundred to two fifty in the first day and then just an easy twelve mile paddle the next day.
48:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Fifteen first Saturday and twelve on Sunday.
48:06
[SPEAKER_02]: The twelve miles was going to be in the bay, but you know, that's fine.
48:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Where we were expert kayakers at that point.
48:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So after we spent, you know, I think Panam to ten PM, twelve hours on the river doing the first fifty miles, went back, got a few hours of sleep, came back to do the last twelve miles of bay.
48:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we put on about ten AM and we thought, oh, we'll be back for lunch.
48:31
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll have a late lunch, two minutes.
48:33
[SPEAKER_02]: your clock at the max.
48:35
[SPEAKER_02]: We didn't anticipate how strong the wind was going to be that day.
48:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And we were moving once we got out into Santa Antonio Bay.
48:42
[SPEAKER_02]: This is in our plastic kayaks, maybe a half mile at a time.
48:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And at a certain point, there was a fishing boat that came up to us and asked us, do you boys need some help?
48:53
[SPEAKER_02]: No, we're training.
48:55
[SPEAKER_02]: No way.
48:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is like four o'clock in the afternoon.
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're still like, we got plenty of time.
49:02
[SPEAKER_02]: You know?
49:03
[SPEAKER_02]: hours until dust.
49:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, two hours later after we maybe moved a mile, we're like, where's that guy again and where's that boat?
49:12
[SPEAKER_02]: That would be great.
49:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Go back.
49:15
[SPEAKER_02]: We ended up finishing that paddle at three a.m.
49:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh oh, so what is that like a fifteen sixteen hour day from whatever which world miles for twelve miles?
49:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Man, that could really change the outcome of the race.
49:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't imagine hitting that at the end of already like two and a half three days of battling and then you have to fight that.
49:37
[SPEAKER_03]: That's crazy.
49:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so it's a huge unknown.
49:40
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people say the race doesn't start until Victoria, which is mile two hundred and then anything can change in the bay because
49:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, your competitor might be two hours ahead, but he might have flipping his boat, and he might be swimming for six hours.
49:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, well, that's a very, very cool story.
49:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Luke, thank you so much for sharing on the Adventure Sports podcast today.
50:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I enjoyed that a lot.
50:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And everyone, that's the Texas WaterSafari.org if you want to learn more in Luke Zonerowski.
50:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you very much, Luke.
50:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you, Kurt.
50:13
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a pleasure.
50:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you bet.
50:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And for all of the listeners out there, don't forget, make sure you get out there and have some fun.
50:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it doesn't have to be canoeing, it doesn't have to be canoe racing, it can be anything that you love, but it will enhance your life.
50:27
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll meet new people, you'll have community, you'll have fitness, and you'll have that stress release that adventure sports provides so well.
50:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So until the next show, get out there and have some fun.