February 9, 2011
 

Dear Wildwater Racers and Friends:

Welcome to the first e-Zine for 2011.

Check out the first article in this e-Zine for news about the upcoming NRC Glacier Breaker Weekend. The Glacier Breaker includes a wildwater sprint race on Saturday and a wildwater classic race on Sunday. NOC welcomes the US National Wildwater Team's training camp for the Glacier Breaker. These athletes will be training on the Nantahala Thursday to Sunday.

Next is news about the Webster Wildwater Weekend which will take place April 2-3, 2011 in Webster County, WV. The downriver race on Saturday features plenty of whitewater action on the class II-III Elk River.

We also have a report from Susan Hollingsworth on the Seattle Training Camp. Thanks to Tom Weir, Andrew McEwan and Jennie Goldberg for helping organize, host and coach the event (and to Susan for sending me the article).

The "Chute the Hooch" training camp and race was another success with head coach John DePalma (who is on the board at Lanier Canoe/Kayak Club and has considerable fame in Marathon and Sprint circles). He was assisted by former Wildwater Team members Martin Bay, Tierney O'Sullivan and john Pinyerd. See the article by John Pinyerd for more about this event.

In more news about the website, I updated the "Techniques and Training" section of www.usawildwater.com to include a link to a video on Stroke Analysis by WildWater TV Italia, the "Athletes" web pages for current and former team members, the 2011/2012 calendar, and the final 2010 USA Wildwater rankings.

Don't forget our Eastern and Western Junior Wildwater Team Trials (on March 26-27 and April 16-17, respectively)! More about these events can be found on www.usawildwater.com. Also start making plans for the U.S. Wildwater Nationals which are being held in conjunction with FIBArk (June 15-19) and the Senior Wildwater Team Trials (August 26-28 on the Russell Fork River near Elkhorn City, KY). A special thanks goes to Jack Ditty for his hard work getting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to provide a special release from John Flanagan Dam for the Senior Team Trials.

Train hard and, most important, have fun!!

Chuck Brabec
Editor & Webmaster, USAWildwater.com