Written Tuesday,September 8
Today is our third full day on the Queen Mary 2. We have been having a wonderful time doing nothing and barely talking to each other or anyone else. This morning I discovered that the live feeds from the dragonboat festival are posted on YouTube and I spent a couple of hours watching parts of it.
I haven’t written much about it because we’ve been moving from place to place or I’ve been tired, but watching the videos brought it all back. I think I last left you on our unexpected Friday off. The next day was 200 meter sprints. The first races were the preliminary heats. Our team (Portland 56) is particularly good at fast starts and we did really well in the sprint races at a dragonboat festival in Victoria earlier in the summer. I was definitely looking forward to the 200 races. It’s long enough away now that unfortunately I don’t remember all the details, but there was a lot of hurry up and waiting – at one point one of my teammates said, “We should practice race marshalling where we stand around in the hot sun for an hour and then move a few feet and stand there for an hour and then go back to where we originally were.”
Eventually, though, we were in our boat paddling out to the start. Every time I was on that lake and had a chance to look around me, I breathed in the moment. I was in France, in a boat with my teammates whom I love very much, in a gorgeous lake, surrounded by alps.
The start of the race was fast, and I think we were all much more relaxed than during our practice, but right at the start I slid towards the middle of the boat, which was disconcerting. It took me a few strokes to get my bearings and the next thing I knew, we were done. Our time was 1:00.56 (a little less than one minute, 1 second)
Afterwards, our coach said we could have been stronger in the finish, but that we finished respectably, not one of the fastest times of the morning, but definitely not in the back of the pack. We came in 4th in our heat (out of 6).
Normally in a race, near the end the caller yells, “Finish it now!” I hadn’t heard that and was actually surprised when we abruptly stopped paddling. I mentioned afterwards that I didn’t hear “finish it now” and our amazing caller, Shana, said, ‘Really! I called it.” It was surprising because I wasn’t that far back in the boat.
I asked one of my teammates, “Did Shana bang the drum?” And she said yes. I said, “I don’t think I hear anything when I’m racing.” My teammate remarked that that was good – that meant I was working hard and concentrating, but I thought maybe it wasn’t good if I am not hearing the commands during the race.
We learned that they were going to skip the semifinals and go straight to the finals. There were 26 final heats and the heats were based on time. The 6 slowest teams were in heat 1 and the 6 fastest (including our other crew, Pink Phoenix Oregon) were in heat 25. We were in heat 14, which meant our first race time had been faster than 78 other teams.
Again, we had a lot of hurry up and waiting and during that time I started saying to my teammates, “56 or better!” Our official team number was 56 and I wanted to finish in 56 seconds or less. Actually I wanted to finish in 55 seconds or less (match the time of Pink Phoenix Oregon) but my teammates seemed to prefer 56 or better.
As we lined up in the tent waiting to go to the boats, teams took turns chanting and singing. We have a team member who is really great at leading chants, but she was on the other crew, so me and another teammate did our best. Really, though, we couldn’t hold a candle to the teams from outside the U.S., who had really long songs that they sang very loudly. It was so fun listening to everyone and chanting our own once in a while.
Once we got into the boat, the people around me kept saying, “56 or better.” I also had a goal to not get so lost in my concentration that I don’t hear commands. We paddled out to the start line and had to wait there a long time because in the previous race one of the boats had capsized and it was taking awhile to get everyone on that boat onto a big raft and then bail out the boat.
Here is a link to the YouTube video of the Final 200 races.
You can start at the 1:48:00 mark to watch the aftermath of the capsize and us waiting for our heat to start, or you can start at 2:02:00 to see our race. What’s really notable is how absolutely gorgeous the surroundings are.
This time I didn’t slide at the start and I focused on the beat of the drum. The race felt amazing. It felt like we were all in sync, and this time I heard Shana call, “Finish it Now,” and put everything I had into the finish. We were in lane 6, the farthest left lane. When we finished, I looked to my right and didn’t see any boats. “Did we win?” I asked, and someone said, “Yes!” I couldn’t believe it. I’m not used to winning races. It turned out we did win the race with a time of 57.91. That time was faster than most of the teams in many of the heats that followed ours – i.e. teams that had ranked higher than us based on the preliminary races. In the end, we finished 16th out of 156 teams and our other team, Pink Phoenix Oregon, finished 6th overall. We were so happy and proud of ourselves.
When we got back to the dock and were heading back to the tents, we were each handed a flower and an official placed a medal around our necks. Then we walked through a corridor made up of our Oregon crew who had lined up on both sides and high-fived us.
The whole weekend was quite hot. My hair was a mess because I was constantly pouring water over my head or wetting it with lake water. On Thursday when we did the parade of nations, our boat passed people in the swimming area, and it looked to me like that was definitely the best place to watch the races. So on Saturday I brought my swimsuit and after our 200 race, a couple of my teammates and I went to the swimming area. Ultimately it ended up being just me and Christie because Kaci went to go get ice cream and we lost her.
When we first arrived in Aix les Bains, we all received festival swag bags, which included a shirt commemorating the festival. We had each specified what size we wanted, but it seems they used men’s sizing instead of women’s, so most folks were figuratively swimming in their shirts. The cut was weird and the material kind of heavy and I heard lots of complaints (including my own) about the shirts. We were told that we had to wear the shirts for the closing ceremonies, so Christie and I wore the shirts over our swimsuits. (Later, when I saw the video I saw how great it was to see so many people all wearing the same color.)
The water was amazing. I think we were out there for at least an hour and a half. I had left my glasses on shore, so I could see a bunch of blurry boats, but wasn’t able to actually see the Oregon crews race, but Christie did and we were kind of cheering, but they were so far away they wouldn’t have been able to hear us. They finished fourth in their heat, but it was the fastest heat of the day. They did really well.
Oregon was in the 2nd to last heat and after the last heat, the flower ceremony began. During our season, Pink Phoenix competes in about 10 festivals, some in Portland, some in the Pacific Northwest, and others farther afield. Some of these festivals have a special race just for breast cancer survivors or for all cancer survivors. These races are usually followed by a flower ceremony, where the boats line up next to each other, everyone is given a flower, and then we throw the flowers in the water in honor of people we have lost. These ceremonies are beautiful and very moving.
All the teams had been asked to line up on the beach for the flower ceremony, and I was so glad I was in the water, because it was a very crowded beach. Ultimately several teams waded out into the water and stood there right next to the beach. Everyone had their flower.
Before the festival, all teams were asked to pick one person to participate in the Sandy Smith Global Race. Sandy Smith is someone who was instrumental in creating the international breast cancer paddler community. I think there were six boats, made up of people from all different teams and countries. Since Pink Phoenix brought 2 teams to the festival, we got to have two paddlers in the Global race, and our Board chose our caller, Shana and our tiller, Merle, both wonderful human beings.
We watched the boats paddle out to the start line. Meri Gibson, the President of the IBCPC, explained that this festival was not about competition, but about community and fellowship, and that the Sandy Smith was not a race, but that all the boats would cross the finish line in unison. I think that would have been beautiful, but shortly before the boats took off Meri said that she had just heard that they would be racing, and race they did! Then, slowly, they all circled back to line up at the beach. Christie and I stood at the very edge of the swimming area and looked for our teammates.
Once all the boats were lined up, the ceremony began. There was beautiful music, most of it live, though I was too blind and too far out in the water to realize that. All the paddlers in the boats, and then everyone on the beach and in the water, waved their flowers in the air. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what it feels like to be a part of this – it fills me up with joy and with sadness and I love these ceremonies very much. Eventually we all threw our flowers into the water and watched them float away. While we threw our flowers, French musicians sang a song written especially for the festival. I was thinking about the people I have lost when the man next to me in the water grabbed my hand and said we should all hold hands while we were thinking of the people we love, so we did, about 8 or 10 of us and swayed together to the music. I just tried to fully experience the moment – it was amazing is all I can say.
After the flower ceremony there were speeches by French dignitaries and a lot of people began to flow away from the beach back to the tents area. Christie and I eventually got out of the water. There was a big concert on Thursday night at the race site that I didn’t go to, and the people who did go said it was so much fun. So I wanted to stay on Saturday for the concert, but I was tired and I had heard that the transportation from the race site back to the hotels was not great. Plus I hadn’t seen Mary all day, so I went back to the hotel.
This morning I watched the Flower Ceremony on YouTube and saw how much I missed, including the fact that in addition to the Sandy Smith boats, there were 4 or 6 boats of metastatic cancer survivors – that is, people living actively with cancer – lined up for the flower ceremony. I ended up watching the entire ceremony. I found it incredibly moving and beautiful – the music, the surroundings, the 4500 women waving flowers – and I think someone with no interest in dragon racing might actually enjoy it. So the YouTube video is here:
At the 34:30 mark you can see Christie and I and the other people holding hands and swaying further back in the water.
