Hi Guys,
So the last couple of weeks i have been rather busy training all over England.
The highlight has been training on the new Olympic slalom site in London.
The course its self was incredible, A steep gradient created a really exciting ride and with the powerful water all in all a extremely technical course is made.
The site is architecturally pretty, with wooden decking and cool shutter like things. The glass gives the course a modern feel as well as the rapid block bollard system in place makes the course easy to adjust and boat friendly. There is a spacious warm up pool, which curves round to a smaller area where the escalator is. The bottom of the course flows straight towards the escalator and the pumps so it’s nice to end a run and float to the escalator to do it all again.
The course its self starts with a wave like entree which then gets increasinly difficult with side currents causing you to have to keep your edges flat. the eddies all down the course are crisp with a nice backflow meaning super fast breakouts.
The course then takes a turn and goes down the largest section of the course, wich consists of a haystack type wave with large eddys either side, which I feel crosses will become a regular move on as the looping pool at HPP.
The course continues down the main straight with varying features which i found to be a key section as the lactic starts to build and you still have to be strong and technically good to get the gates.
I did four sessions in total over two days and certainly felt that was a hard 2 days training, the powerful nature of the course is physically draining but that is what makes it challenging.
I have now got back to Chester and it has gained a place in my favourite artificial courses and I can’t wait to get back down to London to paddle again.
I would also like to take this opportunity to mention GoPro. Widely known by paddlers as the most popular helmet camera, I shall be using a GoPro HD to make my videos which can be seen on my youtube account. Please click on the link at the top of this post and take a look at the great cameras.
Ill be posting the video that was taken at London asap :)
David
