Slalom Irish Open and Team Trials

I've been saying to myself for years that I want to try slalom sometime so when the Irish open and team trials came around I said I'd give it a shot. Over christmas I acquired the ULKC plastic slalom boat, set up 'gates' on Castleconnel using rubber ducks and pieces of string and got to work trying to figure out how the new type of boat worked. Somewhere along the way most of my ducks got lost/stolen so I went even more ghetto with pieces of sticks hung at the side of the river. I got some footage of myself when I was practising to help me figure out where I was going wrong. I think this helped my paddling in general, even though improving ingrained bad habits is easier said than done! Manuvering a slalom boat through gates is a lot more difficult than it looks to a whitewater boater too but eventually felt like I was getting the hang of it.



Fast forward to competition day and when I got there I found out that I would be the first competitor on the water and that practise runs arent allowed, completly ruining my plan to get lots of time on the water in before the timed runs! When you're standing on the bank of the Sluice looking at all these gates in the water it all looks very do-able but once you get on the water you realise a few things very quickly; that the water's moving a lot faster than it does on Castleconnel, and that a few isolated gates on Castleconnel are no training for offset downstream gates on a slalom course! With that kind of a lack of preparation my first run was always heading towards disaster and I ended up missing the majority of the gates on the first half of the course, leaving me with a time of something like 5 minutes once all the penalties were added up! Still, it was something to build on and I knew that I was able to make all the gates on the second half of the course meaning that I could concentrate on that first section in the lead-in to the Sluice.

My next few runs all improved as I figured out the best way to negotiate that section and by the end of the day I was down to just missing one gate on the entire course. This meant that my goal for the Irish Open on Sunday was to have a run where I made it down the whole course with no 50 second penalties. The 2 second touches could be worried about some other day! I also got a loan of a composite boat off Niall Cockbill for the day which made everything a whole lot easier! On my first run I managed to get through every gate on the course, which made the whole weekend a success as far as I was concerned! On my second run I was deemed to have missed the same gate as I was having trouble with the day before which I disagree with since I'm full sure I did get my head around the pole but what can you do! On that run I only touched 2 gates so there's still something positive that I can take from it. Even with my 'clean' run I was still way off the pace of the other lads in the mens expert class so I still have lots of work to do but that run got me 1st in the under 23 category, and I would have won the novice category by miles if I was in it so I think I entered the right one. I really enjoyed the weekend and hopefully I can get some practise in before the next slalom event comes along. It really will take a huge amount of work if I ever want to become properly competitive in it tho, the lads and girls who are training full time for it were something else to watch, crazy boat control!

Colm Healy put a good video from Sunday up earlier, check it out;