Spring Paddling

Well its been a long time since my last update and a quite a bit has happened since then.  This semester's classes went well. I had an independent study in the civil engineering department which was a really positive experience and caused me to change my major to Biological Engineering with the Natural Resources Engineering Option.  In the end I attained a 3.83 GPA in addition to training about 10x per week.
Now on to the fun stuff.

The Cheat Race this year was the friday of finals week for me instead of the week before so for once I would be able to race it. The only problem is that I have never paddled the Cheat Canyon before. Its very hard to find people who want to paddle wildwater boats on the canyon for fun, and the shuttle alone is quite a challenge.  So I just decided to wing it and borrow a wavehopper (plastic more stable version of a wildwater kayak) and do the race anyway just following people down.
The week leading up to the race was pretty dry and I was worried that is would be very low and miserable, but two days before the race there were several thunderstorms in the area which brought it up to 4ft for the race!  I  was pretty nervous, I knew the Cheat would get really big with alot of water, and these race boats aren't the  most maneuverable or stable for that matter, but I had driven all the way there and already paid the entrance fee so I was racing.
After some confusion at the start the race was on.  The cheat race is a 10mile mass start race that usually attracts about 150 people. With my poor start I was at the back of the back trying to work my way to the front.  For a while I was doing well but then Jason Beakes was ahead of me and he was in a green boat.  For probably 20mins I would sprint to catch up to him as he took some weird channel where I would spin out and get passed, then I would turn around and sprint on the flats to catch up to him again. This happened over and over again until there was a large flat and I was able to pull past him and slide into 4th position.
3rd place was paddling a speeder which is a similar boat to mine so I was able to follow him much easier.  2nd place was almost out of sight so I just comfortable followed 3rd place until things flattened out at the end.
At the finish I ended up 3rd overall and first in my category.
The LAKS wavehopper crew who I met two weeks earlier was there and they had a strong showing http://laksyoungracers.blogspot.fr/2012/05/saturday-april-21-wavehopping-on-north.html

Now that the race was over, it was time to do some training. Since I was still intimidated by the canyon I headed upstream to the Cheat narrows.  Saturday and Sunday I did 3 runs complete with bike shuttle. I put the video camera on for a few of the runs and made a little movie
http://youtu.be/njLjOmzccQ4