I’m almost recovered from last weekend’s 24
hours of the Monster and Sea 24 paddle to raise money for families battling
cancer. It was an incredible experience,
but was it ever hard.I was in Florida when I saw the Facebook post Jessica Rando made, looking for paddlers interested in getting together to do the “24” in Toronto. I won’t say that I jumped at the chance but the idea of paddling regular shifts around the clock appealed to me at a time when I was obsessed with chasing distance for the 100/100 Paddle Challenge. So I thought, why not? It’s for a great cause, will fill a training need and, with the right group of people, will be a lot of fun. I contacted Jess and was part of the team!
Our Toronto team for the “24”was awesome. First let me say a few words about Jessica
Rando, our captain. Jess is an amazing
paddler that too few people know about.
This is largely because she’s also a really good coach and is generally
busy running training camps or coaching when she could be at races like the
Carolina Cup or Key West. As a result,
not a lot of people have gotten the opportunity to meet her.
I’m pretty convinced that at a race like Key West she’d do really,
really well and am hoping she arranges date of the training camp she runs so
that she can race it next year. Carolina
Cup is more of a challenge for her, as the date seems to conflict every year
with her Florida camp for northern-based paddlers, but she’d do well in that
race too I think.
Jess put everything together for us for
this event. All we had to do was promote
the fundraising page and show up to paddle.
She pulled together a fantastic team, with diverse backgrounds,
experience and personalities, and everyone got along fantastically well. I shouldn’t be surprised really, because
everyone I’ve ever met in SUP is fantastic and would have made good teammates. But our group for this was especially great
and really supportive of each other through the wee hours of the morning on
what turned out to be a pretty cold night.
Jess’s first recruit was her husband Del
DaSilva, and Jess and Del, living only a block from the river offered up their
house as the staging area for the event.
They totally opened up their home to five other paddlers and all their
wet, stinky paddling clothes and made sure their kitchen was stocked with food
(with a fantastic level of support in the form of soups, pasta, corn bread,
cookies etc. from the local SUP community).
Joining Jess and Del were myself, Anthony
Bruzzese, Tracey Finley, Steve McKenzie and Julie Postill-Connolly. 
I’ve paddled with Anthony for a couple of
seasons and regularly over this past fall and winter, and he’s became one of my
more frequent training partners. And
Tracey made her way out to my end of the city a lot over the winter to join us
on the water for chilly winter workouts.
I hadn’t paddled with Steve and Julie as much, but they’re awesome and
incredibly into it. Having this kind of
positive energy in the group was essential, because although this wasn’t a
race, it was still a huge challenge.
I knew that Anthony was going to be my
partner on the water. Jess had decided
to break us into three groups, each doing one hour shifts. Anthony and I would be a pair, Jess and Del a
pair, and Julie, Tracey and Steve would paddle together. So about a week before I spoke to Anthony
about the strategy I thought we should employ on our shifts. I suggested a conservative approach, as I
didn’t want to kill myself with some pretty big races coming up towards the end
of April. I wanted to make sure I didn’t
get too tired doing this event and end up compromising some quality in the
preparation running into the Carolina Cup. 
As it turns out, we ended up doing a fairly
aggressive pace as we both took a few days easy leading into the 24. After the first one-hour shift from 8:00 to
9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, I knew I could average 8.5 km per shift at least
into the night, if not for the whole thing.
For Anthony and me it became a challenge in consistency, trying to paddle
well at a fairly aggressive pace each shift for exactly 60 minutes, and
targeting 8.5 km each time. We actually
got through 8 of 9 shifts hitting that pace exactly, before I hit the wall with
about 10 minutes left in shift eight. I
was on track to hit 75 km in 9 shifts but backed off a little in the last shift
from 7:00 to 8:00 on Sunday a.m. and finished at 74 km.While this pace was a little off race pace, it became progressively difficult from shift to shift and the whole thing became more and more of a challenge. To the point where, now that it is over, I can say it was one of the harder things I’ve done in paddling. So how does paddling just below race pace on flat water for an hour every three hours compare to Chattajack? Or Molokai? Or Blackburn?
There are a number of things that the 24
throws at you that makes it a challenge:
- Distance: Okay, so it’s not non-stop, but it’s still 74 km in a 24-hour period. I have never done that type of volume in racing or training before. To do that distance, I had to travel at a pretty aggressive pace. It certainly wasn’t a cruise. It was a solid training session, repeated 9 times, and starting every 3 hours.
- Rest: When I train twice/day I generally have 6 to 8 hours rest between sessions. Three hours is incomplete recovery, even if the pace isn’t all out.
- Repetition: Doing two, three or even four shifts was easy. It wasn’t until the fifth shift started from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. that it started to get hard. After that it was a challenge. I’d come off the water, walk my board up the street to Jess’ house, drop it in her front yard and then start changing into warm, dry clothes. After tossing the wet clothes in the dryer, there was about 30 to 40 minutes to relax, get something to eat and drink, and try to stay somewhat loose. Then it was time to start suiting up again. The walk back down the road with the board, in the dark and cold, was just long enough to allow me to mentally prepare to get on the board and immediately fall back into my pace. But each time I got back on the board in the overnight shift I first had to soak the deck pad of my board in the water and then try to rub all of the ice off of it.None of these things on their own should wear on you mentally, but when combined and repeated over and over there is an undeniable effect that starts to wear on you, each time more than the time before.
- Lack of sleep: It’s one thing to paddle hard. It’s another thing to do it round the clock. I found the deeper we got into it the more difficult it was just because of lack of sleep. I began to feel a lot like I do when I’m driving to or from Florida non-stop by myself. Mentally this felt a lot like being at the wheel of a car for 22 hours straight. I’d like to think that this was a much healthier and less mentally challenging endeavor, and there was some consolation in the fact that I wasn’t going to end up against the guard rail if I fell asleep paddling. But the fact that this was physically demanding and done without any sleep, made each successive shift more difficult.
- Weather: Over the course of this winter I’ve discovered that paddling in the cold often feels more fatiguing than in the summer. I’m not sure if it has something to do with dense, viscous, near freezing water or whether it’s just psychological and has more to do with the need to suit up in all kinds of gear and tread carefully on your icy board so you don’t slip off. Add to it the fact that in this case we were paddling at night, in a river running with a substantial current, and it makes it even tougher. It’s just that little bit harder to relax when you have to really pay attention to where you’re going and how you’re moving on your board. Put it this way, I’m sure this would have been easier to attempt in Toronto in June.
In the end, I’d have to say this was harder than I’ve ever found Chattajack, even though in Chattajack I’m paddling non-stop for 5 hours. I didn’t draft for one stroke of 24,which undoubtedly made it harder. And then, of course, all the things I’ve mentioned above made this a really difficult challenge.
I would have to say that as a way to
accumulate volume it was great training.
The fact that I was able to do that volume with a high level of quality
made it even more effective as a training activity. So it’s nice when you’re doing something worthwhile
for other people and having fun with the people you’re doing it with, and
getting such a great training benefit from it as well.
In the end our group raised over $8000 for
local families who have a family member battling cancer, and had a ton of fun
doing it. The 24 is a great idea, and
it’s pretty cool to be part of an event that is going on in so many other
cities at the same time. I do question
the wisdom of holding it so early in the year.
I understand that it is less likely to conflict with summer races if
it’s held early, however as it turns out we got lucky with the weather which
allowed us to complete it. Northern
climates don’t really lend themselves to this type of activity in March, at
least not with any degree of reliability.
If the river had still been frozen we wouldn’t have been able to
complete the event, as the lake was too wavy to safely paddle at night. Furthermore, as I write this one-week later
there is snow on the ground and an overnight temperature of – 10 C before wind
chill. Staging this event in May would
make a lot more sense.
This was a fun event and I’m glad I did
it. Sign me up for next year!
