Nevermind, better luck next time

I return from the weekend still unranked in the world of indoor snowkayaking but victorious in my quest of having fun trying to be ranked. The whole event was comedy and I think the picture above sums up the weirdness nicely - can you spot the odd one out?! Or have you ever seen a kayak on a chair lift before like below?!


My failure to become world indoor snowkayaking began the night before in the bar as all kayaking weekends seem to here in the Netherlands:

A night in chez mathiewagon below also didn't help but by the time I had made it to getting my sleeping bag, there was no chance I was going to be able to find the room inside where everyone was sleeping.

So off I stumbled to register at 7am the next day and get some practice in beforehand. The building in the background housed the track and is the largest indoor ski centre in Europe - or was - I can't remember now? The morning was a little blurry but I do remember the 2 thoughts I had when I saw the end of the track was actually the freezing cold pool below. "Bugger, I didn't bring a spraydeck!" and "Well at least that'll sort out my hangover!"


So the track looked a little bit like a bobsleigh run as you can see from the following pictures. Below is looking up from the bottom:


Then hiking a little way up the slope you get a better view down into the finish line pool:


Then at halfway there is the DJ hut with what must've been the Dutch equivalent of Dave Pearce rolling plenty of phat ones and "Loving Detroit city" a little too much:


The view up from halfway still looked a long way to go like this:


So what was it like to ride? Well I'm going to be a bit of a bad workman here and blame my tools. A freestyle kayak, like mine, was slow. All the creeking style kayaks were faster and even if someone wiped out in a creeker, they were soon on your tail again:


The course was basically a zig zag path down the indoor piste. All the corners were banked to aid the kayaks in the right direction as expertly demonstrated below:


However, it was not always easy to point the kayak in the one direction. There was plenty of people (no doubt unintentionally!) preferring to take a more backward facing stance:


Then there were the jumps, nothing too big to induce spinal compression but certainly enough to jar you upon landing:


Again there were a few indiviauals opting to become airborn without looking at the jumps:


My favourite part the water jump finish line which did a good job of slowing you down. Without the pool, I'm sure there would've been a few through the windows and into the bar moments. Even with no spraydeck I manged to nail some decent boofs (spoofs?!) and stay relatively dry under my snowboard pants:


Not everyone went fast enough to reach the pool though, but there were plenty of volunteers more than happy to assist with an extra push!:


Most of the carnage happened at the first corner at the top. Surprisingly, only one guy was injured - it looked like a busted collarbone.


They did try to slow down the corner by putting rubber matts around and above as shown below:


But as you can see that didn't help at all!!!


So back to my ability - well I'd rather not but if you must know I didn't even make it through my heat :-( Races were in sets of 4 people and the two fastest went through to the next stage. I was third in my first heat - doh! I'll be getting my hands on a Rotobat for next time. But for proof there is a photo of me below from the website:


The Dutch guy won below and the TV was there to interview him in all his glory whilst his buddies pelted him with snowballs! All the results can now be seen on the website and I'll definitely be back next time to seek revenge.


So taking pictures of brightly coloured moving objects in bad indoor light, with a white foreground and a spotlit background definitely posed a few challenges! As you can see from my full Flickr slideshow below it took me a while to get the right settings including flash to get it kinda OK. But here's my full set:

Flash Slideshow

I also took some very very short video footage which is not that good as I was holding my SLR camera in the other hand. The TV crew did a much better job and I grabbed their content online as well so here is footage of the previous days practice:



And here is the actual event itself:



There's also going to be a bunch of other photos and videos on the official website here

The Adam weekend of stiff necks

Adam visited last weekend for what seemed like an eternity! Hope you didn't get too bored whilst I was at work Adam? He stayed from Weds night through to Tues morning and I'm knackered for it. We managed to cram quite a bit in to his time here as you can see from yet another mighty blog entry...

There was no holding back right from the word go. As soon as I picked Adam up from the airport, we headed straight to the local indoor ski slope. It was a good start to his trip as after the half time beer we were hitting the bigger jump that I have yet to have the courage to play with. And also getting some 360's off the roller hip shaped lump next to the jump. OK so they were a little more like 270's for me, cheating a bit by carving hard into the hip ;-) But hey I was stoked, don't usually have the bottle to try those. Cheers Adam :-)

Friday night we went to the Melkweg again where I was the previous week with Emma. This time to see a hip hop act called Peeping Tom with Rahzel the legendary human beatboxer. Rahzel was really the main reason we went and it was a little disappointing that he only did one set on his own. But during that set he managed to reproduce Justin Timberlakes Sexyback sounding just like the real thing! It was quality - checkout this video that I found for an example.

We hung around in Melkweg to see if the resident DJ was going to get any better. He didn't - not even after the JD and cokes we started to knock back. So we hooked up with Sophie and yet another night in Winstons. I was steaming and made everyone aware by jumping in all the puddles on the way home in the pouring rain. I think I did a good job of soaking Sophie - Sorry!

In the morning there was a bit of deja vu from the previous weekend with Emma. I found myself waking up waaaaaaaaayyyy too late for the flow riding I had planned for the both of us. I await the speeding tickets, but we did still get there in time for the majority of our two hour session. Unlike with the girls on bodyboards, I opted for a standing up session for us guys. I'm glad we booked two hours cos it took a good 45 mins to get the hang of it. It's much harder than bodyboarding and our previous snowboarding skills did not help much. Yes we might have reasonable balance but on a snowboard all your weight is on the front leg, on a flow board you need to put all your weight on the back leg. A bit like riding powder? - NO - even more weight back than that so it took a while to get that. But once we mastered it we were ripping it up (kinda). Checkout the following video footage of us masters in action - note Adams 360 is entirely by fluke the jammy bastard! And I can confirm it's not as painful as it looks. Well not during anyway. Oh and by the way, you can click on the google logo to watch a larger version.



Once the wet fun was over the hangovers hit home and we generally lounged around the DWD white water course eating ham and cheese toasties before agreeing that was a waste of a day. I showed Adam another nearby indoor ski slope that had an "airbag" setup but more on that later. Then we went to checkout the local kayak store for a few shots at the ski ramp but the cold and dark got the better of us so we wimped out. With nothing else to do it was back home, pizzas and back on the sauce meeting the disco twins for another night on the town. Equally as messy, equally as late (6am) but at least we had a lie in the next day.

Now the flow waves don't hurt when you fall off, but both Adam and I had screwed ourselves somehow cos on Sunday morning our necks were well stiff. It even hurt to yawn - which we were doing a fair bit! What better way to treat a stiff neck than to go launching off a 2m high snowboard ramp. I say launching but a better word for it was hucking - spins & flips. No me and Adam have not become overnight snowboard pros but remember I mentioned the airbag? Well this was the setup ->


Coming second close to a fresh tracks day on Whistler back in Jan 2001, this is one of the best things I have ever done on my snowboard. After a few warm up runs we joined the back of the line for hitting this monster. Adam was up first followed by myself and for the first few runs we found it really difficult to even get just a grab in. The speed you have to hit the jump at felt quite unusual. Normally we are jumping off smaller jumps so a lot slower and know how much the ramp is going to kick you up in the air. This thing was a beast and with quite a rutted run in that I found myself nearly binning on a few times! But once used to the feeling (not that we ever really got a good grab in) it was time to step it up and I am proud to say for once I was the first to start the rotations flinging myself in all directions off the lip. Needless to say, Adam followed and skooled me but I'm chuffed I went for it first :-) I was the first to try a 180 (that actually ended up being a 360!) and the first to try a front flip (god knows what happened there but I didn't do it right I know that for sure!) Checkout the video footage below, the guys at the end of the video show us how it should be done. Quality!



That night we crashed early after attempting to watch "Ferris Buellers day off" - a movie I got from Gary. Gary mate if your reading then that was shite!

It got to Monday and both of us realised we had not done the standard issue red light district cruise so that kept us entertained for the night. Adam didn't quite have as bad an experience as Charlie tho! We had a few strolls around interspersed with games of pool until yet again it was waaaaaay beyond midnight.

I've finally caught up with my sleep so hope you enjoy the video clips and the collections of photos below. Cheers Adam for a class weekend :-) I've got a couple of weeks break until the Irish invade with Olaf...

Flash Slideshow