Both of these activities looked like a lot of fun. Obviously paddle boarding has gained a lot of popularity the past few years. You can’t go to a lake without seeing them everywhere, and we even saw them on the river a few years ago when we went rafting down the Colorado. My friend Jeff picked up a couple earlier this summer and while I was in California for training, I had a couple of opportunities to try it out!
Under his expert tutelage, I was able to stand up almost immediately. Now, if you’ve never tried this, you probably assume that it looks pretty easy. I know I did. I thought, “how hard can it be to just stand on a board?” Well let me tell you, it’s harder than it looks! You really have to use your entire core to stay balanced, and then you have to paddle without disrupting the flow of everything. I did pretty good my first time and didn’t go into the drink until we were almost done. Oddly enough, my feet hurt the most out of everything, and I think I just lost my balance. Before I knew it, I was wet. But, as it was in the 90s, that wasn’t all bad.
We went one more time to the same lake before I returned home, and again, it went well until the end. I had back-to-back dunkings before calling it quits. It is quite the workout, more so than you would first imagine, but it is a tremendous amount of fun. I’m pretty confident that we’ll invest in a couple of these by next summer. I still want to try kayaking at some point, but I’m going to check this one off the list!
Big D's 50 Before 50 