It has been many weeks of dragon boat training for the team. Every year almost feels like a rebuilding process with around half of the team leaving and then having to train a new batch of newcomers. This season saw a very enthusiastic team of new paddlers and with 35 of us, it was our largest group of dragon boaters ever so far.
We were excited with being able to travel outstation for the Penang International Dragon Boat Festival held on 11 and 12 June 2011. The team started our journey up to Penang on Friday 10 June itself in order to put in a practice session in the afternoon at the Teluk Bahang dam. This then allowed us to make a pitstop in Ipoh to savour some delicious Ipoh food.
We took away some of our favourite egg tarts (which were sold out within a minutes of the egg tarts being brought out, luckily we called ahead to book) and then went to the 'Hall of Mirrors' shop to eat Ipoh sar hor fun as well.
We then continued on to Penang where we would be staying at the Naza Talyya hotel. It is just at the edge of Tanjung Bungah beach and quite a decent hotel for the price. It has beach access and the rooms are decent enough.
The first day of races would be on Saturday and there was a change in format this year. While previous installments of the Penang competition were races over 500m, this year had 250m races as well. So Saturday's schedule would be for the 250m races while Sunday was over the 500m distance. We took part in just two races on Saturday to serve as warm-up races for our main 500m events on Sunday.
We had to wake up at 6am on Saturday, in order to eat some breakfast and then get ready for our first race at about 8.30am. We were at the Teluk Bahang dam nice and early and we also had to then set up all our paraphernalia at our tent.
We very quickly found out that the level of the competition was very high this year round. We were just about the only corporate team competing and were going up against the likes of the national teams of Indonesia and Singapore which were warming up for the SEA Games. The drawback of the Penang competition is that it does not have any separate corporate category so everyone is thrown into the mix.
We were last in our races on Saturday, and this trend would continue for our races on Sunday. But I knew the experience at the competition would be invaluable and we were in the end treating this as a mid-season race. We would continue with our training after that.
Saturday still allowed us to squeeze in Penang food. For lunch, a whole bunch of us headed to Swatow lane. The food there isn't as good anymore but I still like their ais kachang dessert.
For dinner, we would be having a team dinner together where we walked across from our Naza hotel to the nearby food court. The place surprisingly had a good selection of food and we stuffed ourselves that night,
On Sunday, it was again a very early start to the day with all of us being up at 6am, grabbing some breakfast and then getting ready for an 8am race. It was going to be a particularly gruelling day of racing for some of the women due to the number of events we signed ourselves up for. Some of them would have to race about 7 races all in all for the Sunday alone.
We did end up last in all our heats and we weren't even close to beating any of the other teams. But the paddlers did not let that temper their spirit. Many of them wanted to now train even harder to emulate some of the other good teams. It was a definite fun experience for everyone and hopefully it will serve to fuel everyone to greater heights at our next competition.
Our next target will be to race at the Malaysia International Dragon Boat Festival here in Putrajaya, on 20-23 October 2011. The paddlers are already itching to get back on to the waters to start training again.
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