Oval’s Paddling Centre

It’s hard to say which province or city in Canada (or the world) has the best kept secret of where is the best place to train if you’re heavily into water sports. Living where I am on the south coast of BC (British Columbia) you are able to train year long (if you want to) on the water. However the rest of the province and Canada is buried under snow, so they can not head out to their favourite watering hole for a practice but instead are able to train either at a pool sitting on the deck with paddle in hand or in a true paddling tank.

Over the years I have wished we had one out here for the longest time to help spice up our training, as well who wouldn’t want to be indoors paddle instead of being outdoors being hailed on? (Been there done that, no more thanks). A paddler friend of mine from Montreal told me that I should attend one of their indoor paddling practices anytime I want to head out east.

Now I can say we finally got a paddling tank out west! That’s in one of the 2010 Olympic venues buildings that worked along side with a Rowing and Paddling Centre and they designed a paddling tank inside the building, for their rowers and us paddlers (dragon boaters, outriggers and other canoeists). It’s got a boat structure of an 8 person skull or a 10 man canoe/dragon boat (dragon boat team normally has between 20-26 people).

Thier website did not have much information about this paddling tank and even in the email I got back from them saying no more then 10 people in the room. So there goes my idea of having 10 people in the structure and rest of the team on the edge of the deck.

On Saturday I was offered a chance to be in the first dragon boating paddling clinic being that was put on by my coach, in the clinic there was only five people in it so we got more one and one time in the hour that we had then we would have if we had a full boat of 20 paddlers out on the water doing the expect same thing. More pictures on flickr.

It would be interesting to see how much will be changed in the paddling tank once the Olympics is over. I know they will be putting up the mirrors then and adding a video system but not sure what else. A few of us noticed when we first stepped into the boat structure that there wasn’t anything for our feet to go against and if you weren’t careful there were lag bolts sticking up from the corner of the bottom. Hopefully that gets fixed or looked at.

Now we got to wait until April before they re-open up their doors again to the public.

If I had to rate this venue out of three out of five paddles. As not 100% finished and its more of a rowing tank not a paddling tank but it is something.

Lissy | Frithjof | Caity | medina | Chris | Shauna |

Land Paddling

After @guapomole posted this youtube video (below) on twitter, I started thinking that I should kept with skateboarding instead of giving it up as a preteen. Also got me thinking about this year’s dry-land training routine since my 15th dragon boating season almost coming to an end in a few days.

I’m thinking about take up land paddling (a long board with a kahuna big stick) as my cross trainer this off season instead 6man outrigger, I’m looking forward not having to travel an hour to/from get to practice especially on those crappy nights.

It may not be the correct stroke that I do but from the videos I’ve been looking at, you can get a lot of good top arm drive, the whole body gets a workout and just think about the balance one can get from that too. Using this and my other core exercises would for sure help strengthen my core muscles that I lost due to the surgery I had back in April.

I want to be on the A boat next year, which means there is a lot of work a head of me to do.

What do you do the spice up your exercise routine?
Would you use a sport to strengthen another sport?

Frithjof | Dez | Kimm | Jean-Luc Picard | Katy | Caity | VancityAllie |