January 12, 2006

Training
A wildwater training plan is being written and discussed. The plan is based on information gleaned from a former U.S. team member’s 25 years of experience as well as input from current U.S. team members. If you are part of Wildwaterusa.org you can be participating, gaining insight, and adding your own comments or questions.

Tom Weir and Geoff Calhoun, both current U.S. team members and U.S. National champions have shared training information regarding technique and time trial distances, including their own times! Geoff has offered valuable benchmark times for anyone interested in comparing their own speed against the world’s best racers.

Boats
In the never-ending quest to find new and used boats and ship them around the country, discussions of who’s building, who’s importing, who’s got something for sale and how it can be moved are always taking place.

Buddies
Find out who else is paddling in your area! Use WildwaterUSA.org to arrange river trips, training runs and travel to races in other areas. Paddlers in the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast, East, Northeast and Southwest are getting together on wildwaterusa.org.

The National Wildwater Racing Community
Paddlers in the U.S. have a distinct disadvantage compared to our European counterparts. The sheer size of our country causes us to become fragmented, often limiting paddlers to one geographical area. This can lead to an almost provincial way of thinking when it comes to Wildwater Racing. That might not be such a disadvantage if the sport were ten times bigger, but its tiny here compared to Europe. One of the main reasons Wildwater has stayed small is the difficulty we have, based on geography, to build a cohesive sense of a national racing community.

WildwaterUSA.org was designed to help bridge the distance between the various racing enclaves in our country, enclaves that can be literally thousands of miles apart. In order for the website to truly be effective, people need to participate. The benefits are obvious if you are a racer. If you really want to know what’s going on you have to be able to talk to people who are actually out there on the cutting edge. If you have questions about technique or training and you want your question answered by someone who really knows what they are talking about, you’ve got to get in touch with people who are U.S. team members or have won medals before, and WildwaterUSA.org may be the only way to do that.

We are working to make sure that every former U.S. medalist and U.S. Team member in the sport of Wildwater is participating in WildwaterUSA.org.

You can join by logging on to www.wildwaterusa.org. It's easy and it’ll pay off.