Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Preface--The Surf Kayaker of Serendip

So how the heck does a guy living in Delaware wind up on the USA West Coast Surf Kayak Team and competing in the World Championships?

Serendipity.

It turns out that many of the people selected for the US West Team weren’t able to actually go to the Worlds, so with a month to go the team put out a call in their newsletter (which I receive for some reason) for volunteers for the team. On a whim, I threw my name into the hat, and it turns that because of my experience as a surf kayaker during my postdoc years in San Diego (1983 – 1991; I was pretty seriously into it) and, more importantly, because they must have been fairly desperate to fill out the team, they invited me along for the ride.

She Who Is Small But Mighty ok’d the deal (did I mention that we are all mostly paying our own ways here?), I had enough frequent flier miles for a ticket to Lisbon, and I started to frantically whip this poor late-middle-aged body in shape.

And here I am.

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