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| Traditional dragon heads grace the front of boats. Mark Thomson |
Modern crews sign on for ancient Chinese dragon boat racing
With no jock hierarchy to discourage participants and a lot of colorful visual exposure via the Beijing Olympic festivities, this paddle sport is seeing a growth spurt in the US.
from the June 20, 2008 edition
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No joke: It takes little more than a stray glance before paddles knock, elbows bang heads, or the boat veers into a bridge support beam. Living Root's team happens to know this from experience. After a few months of dragon boating, the paddlers seem to develop a super power where they tune into one another and the rhythm of the boat to avoid the handicap of "caterpillaring" – what the boat looks like when the team is not in perfect synch.
"You realize how important it is to really do things for the team. You get to race time, and you think, 'Ah man, I gotta do this! For the team,' " explains Kasdan, an intensive care nurse, who's never been involved in anything close to a team sport before.
Her teammate, Mr. Chung, agrees: "You know, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from with this sport. It's that everyone tries and works together. That's it."
Wanting something more interesting than a treadmill at the gym after work, he found dragon boating through Craigslist. The promise of a workout, once you grab a paddle, that hits muscles neither sportsman nor nonsportsman knew they had was a huge plus for him.
But it was the friendly competitive spirit of dragon boating that kept bringing him back.
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Three of the long boats are lined up now in the middle of the Charles, waiting for the starting horn. The 20 people aboard each boat are still – their diversity is moot now, they are one.
Kasdan closes her eyes for a moment, hands gripping paddle, body poised, like those of her teammates, leaning forward, waiting. She concentrates on listening for the signal. A couple of seats away, Chung is going over the route mentally, visualizing how his first few deep paddles will look as the team moves out and up to cover the 500 meter course. He reminds himself not to steal a glance at the other boats and to focus on the rhythm of the paddler in front of him.
The crackle of the starter's megaphone breaks the silence: "Drummers, are you ready?"
As the horn blares, each boat drummer pounds out a steady tempo and paddles plunge and pull – like 18 pistons in perfect time.
The instructions that drummers shout to their crews float on the breeze, heard on shore as Zenlike phrases, such as: "There is nothing but this boat." (Indeed, Kasdan explains later, "It takes so much mental energy to just ignore everything that's going on around you, to not take a peek to see where the other boats are.... The races are so fast, all it takes is a fraction of second to win – to change everything.")
Dragon heads bob neck-and-neck in a mad but mostly synchronized dash little changed from the sport's origins 2,300 years ago.
Living Root plows the distance in 2 minutes, 25.27 seconds – fast enough to get this ragtag crew a second place in the heat. "That was maybe the hardest 2 minutes and 25 seconds of my life" says Kasdan of the immense effort put into the race.
She pauses, considering her sport: "There's just no way my life would have crossed paths with all these people on this team if I hadn't joined dragon boating. That's exciting. That's worth it."
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