We are into the last week before our first event the MPA - 2010 River City Dragon Boat Festival and we were working on our sprint intervals. It was noted by our coach Jan, that our team has very strong starts, a pretty decent middle but we just die at the end. From my observations we've rarely had a full boat, we sometimes miss key pieces to the team which seems to hinder our overall speed, but not to take the cop-out route - we just need to get better. Which is a very fine line with our boat and the boat that we compete with. They put in a lot of off season training and practicing together, so they have that middle stroke and end stroke combination down. We just started practicing in April and we are still learning to gel together as a team.

Speaking for myself, I like to work on the tasks at hand when it comes to Dragon Boating. It's a team sport and since I sit at the back of the boat, my task is to keep my head up and stroke rate in sync with the pacers. My contribution is my strength and conditioning and ensuring that I have the correct stroke technique to help propel the boat forward with all of my strength. A fellow paddler (Chris S.) told me his mind set that he just concentrates on the next stroke, if the stroke he finished was not perfect or strong he quickly let it go and prepared himself for the next one. I've framed my mindset to that mantra, of just focus on the next stroke ensuring I put in the proper technique of 'catch, pull, finish, recovery.'

Learning to push oneself to their limits is another thing. I read this great quote by a computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra:

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

This is the part in Dragon Boating, that you most have to be responsible for. How much can you push yourself?

Last year I sat in a boat with Carolyn who is our pacer helping out another team race. As this was a very in-experienced crew, she was tasked with pacing and counting out loud the stroke rate. Technique was probably very foreign to the paddlers on the boat. When the race started and we were half way to the finish, she suddenly started screaming out loud to the whole boat. She was screaming at the top of her lungs "Leave it all in the boat!" over and over again like a battle cry. This was great in the sense that I can sense the paddlers picking up on this and I'm sure everyone there dug in deep and through all the excruciating pain that paddling can bring, brought forth their last bit of strength and pushed the boat to the finish line in first place.

And last night as we were doing our first 500m sprint against the other boat, we were in the middle stroke when we suddenly started dying. You could feel it, but my job is not to be the voice of the boat, we have the steersperson for that. But for myself, I was feeling the weight of the paddle getting heavy, and my muscles were straining, my breathing was not there but I started screaming out loud to force breathe into me and from my past experience was to bring myself past my limits. In my mind, I was constantly shouting to myself to not give up, do not drop your strength, do not give up...goooo! It's finding that edge, and staring out and down the precipice of giving up is where you truly figure out if you've got the guts to keep going forward. That is the part of Dragon Boating that I like and enjoy. The team aspect of being in sync is one thing, but the individual mindset of being responsible for your actions in order to help the team is what I believe makes or breaks you.

~Going forward with strength and determination.