Ben Fouhy World Champion K1 1000m Kayaking New Zealand

Today I have the afternoon off so I thought I would do a quick update on our first week in Canada.
It has been very cold for most of the week, for the first day there was still a little bit of ice on the river banks, apparently it is normal for Northern Hemisphere paddlers to train in these conditions! The training with Adam has been hard, which is what I came here for, and I am now starting to settle in and adjust to the time zone.
Yesterday we drove out to the Niagara Falls, these were as impressive as you would imagine, while we were there we did two training sessions in Welland – 3 x 2k repeats in the morning and 6 x 500s in the afternoon, to say it was cold was an understatement, the lake was frozen over only weeks ago.

It has been a busy week with training, and getting things in order before the weekend when I fly out to Canada.

I am going to be training with Olympic K1 500m champion Adam Van Coeverden who was also the bronze medalist in the K1 1000m.

Judging by the change in weather over the last few days I think we are leaving at the right time, although I am not sure Toronto is the best destination with highs of around 10 degrees C!

After two weeks training with Adam we will fly to Poland where I will race the first World Cup regatta of the season, we will also be Joined by Steven Ferguson and our team manager from New Zealand.

I will be racing in the K1 200m , 500m and 1000m as well as the K2 1000 with Steven.

From here we head to Germany where we will spend two weeks training at the prestigious Duisburg regatta course before World Cup number two which is also hosted there.

This weekend we had the New Zealand Marathon Champs in Tauranga.  Despite the two and half hour drive, I lined up ready to race thanks to the comfortable ride in my Peugeot 407 SW.  I had a great race and was able to win my third New Zealand marathon title.

The following day I had the honor of lining up in the K2 with multiple national marathon champion and all around distance paddling guru Simon McLarin.  Mid way through the race we felt confident we were in a good position to win.  But as fortune would have it we would paddle over a log which was six inches below the surface and put our rudder through the bottom of the boat.  We were able to straighten up the rudder and continue, but we were carrying a lot of water and we were forced to stop and empty our boat every 20 minutes to stop the boat from sinking!  We would eventually finish third.

Today I got my best ever result in the King of the Harbour long distance surf ski race, from Auckland city to Waiheke Island. 

This race was part of the world cup circuit, and attracted competitors from Tahiti, Australia and South Africa.  The outcome of this race was always going to be heavily dependent on the conditions.  Fortunately the winds were light which suited me.  
 
Quite out of character for me (in surf ski races that is) I got off to a fantastic start, and had 3 ski lengths lead when we turned around the harbour bridge.  But that was about as good as it got for me, as I was soon joined by defending champion and eventual race winner Dawid Moche from South Africa.  We took different lines through the Hauraki Gulf and when we rejoined coming into Waiheke he had a 300m lead, I managed to pull this back to 20 seconds on the finish line.

It was a great a day for my partner Katie who won the women’s race 1 and half minutes ahead of a classy international field.  We were both part of the winning New Zealand team.