On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 07:25:10AM -0800, Barry Lee Brisco wrote:
> Ok, Rich, you brought it up <G>. What is this hobby/obsession of yours?
Oops. Thought I'd already mentioned it here. I'm a whitewater slalom
racer (read: late-blooming jock). This means that I frequently drive for
hundreds of miles to paddle for, oh, six minutes, and a good day is one on
which I am not upside-down in freezing water while being smashed into
rocks. ;-) Actually, I have had some pretty good days racing, though
only an ESPN producer's misreading of a schedule kept me from becoming
a crash-and-burn video clip during the wildwater race at the
World Master Games last summer.
But it's all worth it. I've made some of my best friends through
racing, and because it's a small sport, there's a spirit of community
and sportsmanship that's often missing in other places. I think one
of the things that binds us together is that we all know how hard everyone
is training -- it takes six years of six-day-a-week training to make
a decent slalom paddler. So even a weekend warrior like me can show
up at a major race, get waxed by Olympic team members, and yet still
be treated as a peer. Kinda neat.
So one of the reasons that I telecommute is so that I can train on the
river -- during the day, for obvious reasons -- year-round.
Anyway, I've temporarily put up a picture so that you can see what
this looks like:
http://www.applied.net/usckt/nwsc/rsk-96nationals.jpg
The current is flowing from left to right in this picture; I've just
come through an upstream gate (foreshortened in the photo; the distance
between the poles is about 4 feet) and am heading for another one just
to the photographer's left. I'm immersed in what we call a "hole"
or "hydraulic", where nice things can happen if you do everything right,
and bad things (described by colorful terms like "Maytagged" and
"gone to visit Mr. Bubbly") can happen if you screw up.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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