Hey all you Paddlers!!!

Hope you’re all still feeling awesome about yourselves, cause the Annie Maniacs had a tremendous showing this weekend and each of you I feel really stepped it up to make it happen.  In fact, throughout the entire weekend, all the other captains kept asking me where we were from and how long we’ve been together.  I guess they were all surprised that a local team who just got started this year was doing so well!!!  Anyway, here’s a recap of this weekend...btw...I do this cause I enjoy writing up summaries.  =)

DAY 1 RECAP

• Heat 1:  I think before this heat we all were a bit worried that we wouldn’t do that well.  Our bitter rivals Shibumi (whether they know it or not) were in this heat, and I think we all really wanted to take them down after what happened at Rose Festival.  But once the race started, we totally kicked everyone’s butt in this heat...even Shibumi.  And this, I believe, was the first time that we ever won a heat outright!  Awesome...at this point, I could have gone home and been happy.  We were brought down a bit when we saw that our winning time of 2:40 was by far the slowest winning time of all the other heats.
• Heat 2:  Boring race...came in third with a time of 2:40.  I think some people were unhappy following this race about the rate.  So we tried to correct it in our next race.
• Heat 3:  This is the heat to remember.  Thanks to a crash that took out the top 2 teams, we finished first instead of 3^rd.  Imagine that...two 1^st place finishes in the first day out of 3 heats.
• So at the end of the first day, we were ranked 4^th out of all the teams in thrown into the Competitive bracket.  In fact, the only teams ranked higher than us at this point were Zamboanga, Wasabi, and VO2 Max.  Haha...I think we were all questioning our seeding, but it was our chance to step up to the challenge.  

DAY 2 RECAP

• Heat 1:  We definitely did not step up to the challenge this time.  I’m not sure if it was due to us being psyched out cause of our seeding, or the morning tiredness, or not having Phong with us, but we really sucked this heat and wound up with a time of 2:50.  I think this was like the worst time of the day for a mixed team.
• Heat 2:  Much better effort.  We were definitely trying to break the 2:40 barrier and we kept it a much closer race than the first one.  We ended up losing to those blasted Cleveland HS kids again by a few seconds. 
• Heat 3:  Last heat of the day...last heat of the race...last heat of the year...last chance to break 2:40.  And we did!!!  Not only did we smash the barrier by going down to 2:32, but we also finally smoked those HS kids who kept beating us before.  This race was awesome awesome awesome.
• So we ended up with a team plaque for 2^nd place in Competitive II Division, and each of us gets Silver Medals. (let me know if I have this right)
  • People who already have medals:
    • Sophia, Derek, Dianna, Mandy, Vina, Julie, Amy, Vivian, Brett, Joe, John, Chun L, Brad, Tom, Chun C
  • People still need medals from me:
    • Kim, Natasha, Nate, Nicole, Gerry, Annie

So again, great job everyone.  But let’s not totally get out of shape and let ourselves go to $h!t after this race....we would just have to start all over again next year.  So if anyone’s interested in continuing to paddle this year, just let us know and we can figure a way to make it happen.  I e-mailed Annie with our results and she’s seriously jumping for joy on her gimpy Achilles over in France.  Alright..that’s it.  Stalk me for medals if I don’t give them to you.