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Sometimes a time trial is a well-coordinated event of many people racing down a controlled course with well-marked lanes. And sometimes a time trial is a race of two boats, pitted against one another and the wind, racing against a Walmart stopwatch held by a frozen rowing coach piloting a john-boat with a bad gas line and a dog.

Time trials for selection for the 2022 IVF World Sprints is going to be another lonely affair for paddlers on the East Coast. Without a regular sprint series, with few V1 crafts overall and fewer still outside of Florida, the East Coast time trials are going to look like the lonely affairs of years passed.

This past Sunday morning, two women from the Washington DC area, met up with a rowing coach who had been duly bribed with promises of bundt cake.
Our gracious host agreed to our use of the Sandy Run rowing facility, to run a few time trials to submit in advance of the December 1 deadline and the regularly scheduled closure of the course. Although there have been nice days up here in DC, many of those days have occurred during the work week. This left us to run a trial during the frigid weekend weather.

We met up at the Sandy Run training facility and put together our boats under the curious and watchful eyes of rowers and Boy Scouts. We kicked a few goose droppings off the docks and launched ourselves out into the balmy 50 something degree water. Fortunately, the wind was a reasonable 6-8 miles an hour which only made the temperature feel like 26 or 27F as the temperature was in the low 30s.

Our gracious host and his dog, both suffering mightily, led us to the calmest part of the course and we were able to get two runs of 500 M done before cold set and no one felt like a 3rd run was as good an idea as it seemed in the car. The Sandy Run course is on a reservoir of the Occoquan River. With steep-ish sides and plenty of curves we were pleased to have found a straight-ish course that was out of the wind for at least 2/3 of the way. The hull side crosswind at the end felt like being slapped by an ice cube.

While our trials were solitary, we're hopeful that there might be a greater uptake of world sprints and V1 racing here on the East Coast for the 2022 cycle. We'd love to race more paddlers in warmer water and to get an ECORA women's and men's V6 crew or two. Certainly there are more frozen East Coasters who want to paddle together? Where are you? Would you like to paddle together? And do you have warmer water? We'd love to hear from you - send us an email at info@usaorca.org.

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