The 12th of January marks a year of the Sunday paddles. What started as a break from the tension of living surrounded by smouldering bush-fires, dense smoke, and intermittent evacuation orders quickly became a minor obsession. At some point I decided I would paddle every Sunday for a year. I pulled together an email list of South Coast and ACT paddlers, and every week I planned a paddle and sent an email out to the group.
My record is not perfect. I cancelled two Sunday paddles due to weather and missed one Sunday due to unavoidable travel. Group paddles were shut down due to Covid for a short period of time but as soon as the "group of 10 to exercise outdoors" order was issued, I resumed the Sunday paddles, and I continued to paddle solo or with one or two other people during the Covid shutdown.
Some days I paddled by myself, although that was rare; usually at least one or two other people joined me. Some of the people on the email list showed up to one paddle and never came again, and some have never been seen. We paddled short days, long days, out to islands, along the coast, and once even up a river.
In the early days, I had long talks with Splashalot about the purpose of the Sunday paddles as I was frequently frustrated when the nice long paddle day I had planned was shortened because almost everyone wanted to turn back. Often, Doug and I paddled twice the distance of everyone else as we would paddle to the meeting place, paddle with the group and then paddle back to our home beach again.
At some point, as always happens, chaffing against constraints wore a hole in my resolve and I came to accept that the Sunday paddles with some exceptions would be mostly easy outings. Longer, more difficult and faster outings became something to be done on other days with a select group.
I was keen to mark a year of paddling in some way. My first thought was to do a suitably long and hard paddle but that would have appealed to very few people in the group, so then I thought it would be ideal to do a trip that would be open to everyone no matter how rusty their paddle skills were. Secretly, I was hoping to see some more women show up for the paddles. Most days, even on the Sunday paddles, I am the only woman.
In a metaphor for life, there were only two of us on the paddle - Doug and I. I was disappointed. I had made a big batch of chocolate chip biscuits to share (I don't usually bake being a no sugar, no grains, no industrial seed oil kind of person), had spent a day paddling around the week before to find a good camping location, and was looking forward to marking what felt like the culmination of a significant goal with some of my friends.
But this is the reality of life. If you have a goal you must persist whether or not you have company along the way. Enjoying the process helps, a friend or two to travel with you is an extra bonus but, mostly what sets apart the losers from the winners is that the winners never quit.
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