Conversing with Life: SAVA sprints

Sunday, October 09, 2005

SAVA sprints

My first dragonboat competition! And I still don't know what SAVA stands for. Apparently it's some company devoted to sports, arts and community work.

It's held at the bedok reservoir. Just look at the crowd! The atmosphere was carnival. I've never dragonboated (new term invented!) in a reservoir before. Closest was when I went canoeing with kwanghow at macritchie. So I was definitely looking forward to hitting the water.

Our event was the Northeast CDC community club, which pitted us against other constituencies in the northeast. That's me with my training mate, Azhar. We were the pacers during the team trainings.

That's the dragonboats racing against each other. There were a total of 40+ races. Ours was race 39.

That's my team. Lots of guys except for one gutsy girl, Yiling.

The idea of the community club was to get residents from the constituencies to take part and have a good friendly race. It was a spoiler to find out that the other constituencies had taken the easier route by adopting dragonboat teams from schools in their constituency. In the end, we were racing against republic polytechic, ngee ann school, seahawk team etc.

But we held our grit and finished the race. We were last (we took a detour) but we gained experience. The very old saying goes, "failure is the stepping stone to success." We will heed that and strive on.

Singapore Regatta. Here we come!