Having completed the DW two days ago, my body is only just
showing signs of recovery. It was brutal. As I lay in bed for the first time there
was not a part of me that wasn’t aching and I have only just stopped having the
urge to be sick. Was it the hardest thing I have ever done? It was certainly up
there.
There are 3 distinct phases of the non stop 125 mile Devizes to Westminster
Canoe race. The first is a 54 mile stretch of the Avon and Kennet Canal
which contains the majority of the 77 portages. The second is a 54 mile stretch of
the Thames between Reading and Teddington. The final 17miles to Westminster is on the tidal part of the Thames. Crucial to the race is getting to Teddington within a certain time before the tide turns.
Once it does you have to wait 6 hours before you are allowed back onto the
river – if you paddle against the tide you will go nowhere.
Knowing that we wouldn’t be able to get a huge amount of
training in before the event, and being novice paddlers, George and I took the
decision to use a sea kayak purchased on Ebay. She would be considerably slower and heavier but crucially more stable than any other boat taking part.
The race starts between 7am and 1pm on Saturday and it is tactical
when competitors choose to leave. Having checked in the boat on the Friday
night and gorged ourselves on pizza, we woke on Saturday morning with the aim
of starting as close to the 7am start as we could, so we were happy to
be leaving at 7.15am. The conditions were predictably cold but sunny. Despite other
boats effortlessly cruising past us, having no feeling in our hands and regularly paddling through ice, our spirits were high.
You can’t complete the DW without a support crew. You depend
on them entirely to provide you with the necessary food, drink and moral. With
George’s Dad Steve and fiancee Emma, we couldn't have asked for more as we saw
them regularly and their energy was incredible. Thank you!
Our tactic was to be slow and steady on the water (as we had no other
option with HMS Ebay!) but fast through the portages. If we took an extra minute or two at each of the 77 locks and weirs then it would add a further couple of hours to the race, so we aimed to be as slick as possible through them. If our crew were there, they
would hand us a fresh bottle and bag of food, and we would get paddling
straight away. Whilst in the boat, one of us would eat and the other would
paddle. Yes it wasn't the fastest way to do it, but it kept us moving forward. We could also see that it was working as we were keeping up with a lot of boats that
were clearly faster than us, but they were faffing so much when they were out of the boat.
A constant headwind was proving a hindrance but was
certainly not dampening spirits. We were enjoying ourselves, having a laugh and
generally keeping our minds off the bigger picture - the fact that we had many
more uncomfortable hours left to be sat in the boat. At one stage we were
looking good to complete the first 54 miles in 12 hours – a great achievement
for us as we managed just 40 miles in 12 hours in training which again shows our
efficiency at the locks was paying off.
When we pulled into Reading 13 hours later, we were bit
confused why we had lost an hour on our predicted time, and suddenly panicked that we were running behind schedule. We had a very quick change of clothes, and said goodbye to Steve and Emma and welcomed my brother who had agreed to see us through the night. In theory, getting onto
the Thames should have meant that we increased our average speed considerably
above the 4mph we had been used to. However we were gutted to find that we only manged 4.5miles in the first hour on the Thames. As mental as it sounds, at 9pm on
Saturday we knew that we were massively under pressure and would need to paddle as hard as we could in order to make
it to Teddington for the 8.30am cut off - our race was well and truly on.
It is hard to describe, but the focus that
we both had to make the 8.30am cut off was incredible. We had plenty of knock
backs that could have broken us. I lost my phone which meant that my brother really struggled to find us without the GPS app that we had downloaded.
Without our support crew we had to eat our emergency rations and were running on empty for a while. The
confusion between BST and GMT (which is difficult at the best of times, and even more so during the race as the clocks changed at midnight), meant
that we were getting mixed messages from everyone we asked, and for a while we genuinely didn't know if we could make the deadline. All we knew was that
we had to push hard all night as it was going to be close. I can’t really speak for George, but the
cold didn't really affect me as much as I had feared. At -2 degrees it was extremely cold,
but because we were pushing so hard, my core temperature stayed just high
enough. The boat was covered in ice so reading our mileage chart was difficult at times, and our paddle covers (pokies) were frozen solid and sounded like cardboard. Chris said that at one stage we were covered in ice too. Proper Shackleton-esq, but our focus was so fixed on the 8.30am cut off that everything else didn’t seem to matter. (I
know, it is even odd typing that!).
I completely buried myself to get to Teddington and when the
sun was up, and we were approaching that all important lock with 30 minutes to
spare, I was so exhausted and got a bit emotional. That felt like our finish line. It was a massive achievement to have been able to haul that boat of ours to
that point within the time restraint. Mentally we relaxed as from then on, all our hard work should have
been worth it as our sea kayak would
cope so well on the choppy tidal water and we could just sit in the fast current and
let it take us all the way to the steps at Westminster without needing to paddle. Of course it wasn’t as
easy as that!
We discovered that we had picked up a hole in the boat and
that we were taking on a lot of water, but we had come this far that we were
not going to let that cause us to DNF, we just had to stop regularly to empty
her. Also the dream of the wild rapids of the Thames couldn’t have been further
from the truth. It was flat, and the small paddling that we could muster was
getting us nowhere. We asked another crew if there was a time limit on this
stretch, they said there wasn’t as such, but we had between 90 – 120 minutes
before the tide turned completely and it would be nigh on impossible to paddle
to the end. With my stomach, shoulders, and back in tatters, once again we had
to push hard to complete the remaining 12 miles in under 2 hours without the drag from the
tide that we were relying on.
Those final 2 hours were agony. Whilst it was
great to have more support from the banks including my girls, we just wanted
it over. We were done at Teddington so this effort was killing us. I just
couldn’t get comfortable in the boat, so when we finally saw Parliament and our finish line, the feeling was more relief that exhilaration.
Relief that we were finally getting out of the boat, and that after 28½ hours,
we were finally done.
48 hours later, my hands and wrists are sore, my back is
aching, lips chapped, legs bruised and I generally feel drained. A few more
sleeps should sort all that out, and the feeling of a deep sense of
satisfaction will remain, knowing that we had to push ourselves so hard to
complete it.
We were also lucky. Our friends JB and Graham, the 2nd
boat in Team Capital City were going so well until they hit a log and broke
their rudder after 15 hours. We are gutted for them, but we
know that they will come back even stronger next year.
http://www.justgiving.com/Devizes-to-Westminster-Research-Autism
