The other awesome thing I did today (besides finishing my hat--see below) was participate in the annual Run of the Charles canoe and kayak race to benefit conservation efforts of the Charles River Watershed Association. IEc always participates in the 24-mile corporate relay. The race is divided into five legs, ranging from 2.5 to 6.1 miles, and follows the river from Dedham, Massachusetts (where the Brown Ballroom Competition always was), into Boston. People gather at the park at the finish line for picnicking.
One thing you should know about this race is that IEc always does remarkably poorly. Last year, one of our two boats came in dead last, long after the finish line had been taken down and the picnics packed up. Another year, we were disqualified after non-racers took pity on our helpless-looking paddlers and helped carry the canoe out of the water.
Anyway, what this means is that, as one of the few people at IEc who knows how to paddle and even steer, I was given a spot on the Leg 5 team. Leg 5 is the longest leg at 6.1 miles, and has three portages (that's where you pick the boat up out of the water and carry it down the road). The first portage occurs at the exchange with Leg 4 -- thank goodness all four paddlers can help carry because that portage spans 1/3 of a mile! The other two portages have to be completed with only the two Leg 5 paddlers, and they're about 200 yards each. Those 200 yards felt interminable, though. My partner and I are both small girls, and it's not easy to lift a canoe that weighs 2/3 as much as you do when your arms are already so close to the ground.
Compared to the portages, the paddling was a piece of cake! The river was pretty low this year, so although we had to avoid logs and rocks sticking out of the water, we didn't have many rapids to deal with. In fact, there was only one "whitewater" spot. I was a bit nervous because the rapids swept straight into a concrete wall, but Sarah and I paddled our way through just fine. (At an earlier bridge, maybe 100 yards after we first put into the river, we had a tougher time. The bridge was low - maybe four feet above the water - and arched so that there was barely any room to paddle underneath. Sarah and I hadn't quite worked out our paddling strategy yet, and we ended up drifting through the bridge backwards with no room to paddle to steer ourselves around.) Other than that, though, we just meandered through wooded, winding sections and across the lake-like water just outside of Boston. It was a moderately chilly day (55ish degrees) with a horrible wind that made steering a canoe with only two tiny girls to weigh it down difficult. But it was sunny, and at some points the river turned and gave us a tailwind, and that was fun!
So, no crashes, no capsizing, no lost paddles, no sunburn--I call the day a success. And I will have you know, IEc did not come in last this year. Sure, we took about 2.5 hours longer to finish than the leaders of the corporate division, but we finished THIRD and FOURTH to last (total times: 6:24:56 and 6:26:13). And in the overall relay, we finished fourth and fifth to last (the very last boat finished in just under 7 hours). Not last. Our two boats were less than 150 yards apart at the finish line, and you couldn't even see the last boats behind us. The picnic wasn't totally packed up yet, and I still got my free t-shirt. All around, a beautiful day on a beautiful river; I hope IEc does this race forever!
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