fearlessness

the Chinese are fearless. they are nonchalant about sanitation. they get too close to cliffs, traffic, and train platforms. maybe it's their history that makes them so.

i feel like i have a little of that fearlessness. touring china on my own certainly takes some courage. i can barely read or write and even my speaking and listening skills aren't that good. sure, i do a lot of prep at home (i booked all my hotels in advance this time [tho i didn't last time]) but still, i've left most things unplanned. some of it is laziness, some of it is a prudent wait and see. a lot of it is for the adventure of being alone in a foreign place. i often think "what's the worst that could happen? plausibly, anyway?"

i think you learn most about yourself when alone. and i think i've come to learn a lot about myself this trip.

ps, i get that i'm not the most brave ever, touring china. i DO speak the language, after all. it's not as if i were touring japan or wherever.

ti 2015 review 2

ti sunday morning we headed out a bit later than saturday as the whole house overslept, lol. i was hoping to get into the finish line / judges' tent but that stuff is pretty sensitive so i didn't think i'd get the chance to, and i didn't get to. which is fine since i've never done that at lb anyway, and we have a totally different camera / computer system.

anyway, most of the morning i worked at the registration tent signing in volunteers and such. that was interesting because after two minutes of training, the lady walked away to do her other stuff. lol.

later, i got to work marshaling, which is where you call teams to wait in the tents before they go over to the docks to load onto the boats. marshaling can be pretty frantic, but it's much better at ti than at lb. a lot of that has to do with venue, i think, how there is a lot more room to space things out. anyway. so there is, like, the marshaling tent with two staff there who count wristbands and such, and there is a single marshaller who calls teams over. i hesitate to call anyone the head marshaller, because it's not quite clear at ti who's in charge. anyway, so i was the marshaller who was alone. of course. because why wouldn't i be alone in a key position after only minimal training? lol, i also tried to tweet out the heats, but for some reason we couldn't figure out the password and such so we abandoned that. i would have loved it tho since i manage the tweets for the scdbc, haha. working this department was so good tho. marshaling is where i think we most need to improve at lb. (excluding behind the scenes stuff where we could improve the absolute most) but anyway, i have a few ideas about noise control which might help the lb situation. hopefully i'll be able to play around with things here.

after the tourney we helped pack up a little and at night we went to the unofficial paddler's party. i got drunk, lol. i didn't even really know until i looked back on my goodnight texts to rip. sheesh. but basically, i played a drinking spin game on a phone with some totally random people and had a bunch of beer. blech.

monday morning i spent with thaddeus helping with a little tear down. we visited two cdba practice sites: lake merced and jlac. so great that i finally got to see these place he's been talking about for years! he also gave me a tour of their equipment storage where i got a few ideas. it was very useful.


all in all i had an amazing time. i learned so so so much! the stuff that won't translate to lb is fine, because i learned how ti does it and that's a great thing anyway. i'm told that eventually i'll take over the scdbc. which is not something i'm looking forward to, but even i have to agree that currently there is no one else available, or even seemingly interested. most of our staff do their own thing and kind of keep their head down. i'm always interested in learning all i can, and i'm constantly looking for feedback. i actively want to improve our club and our tournaments. and i don't think there's anyone else as outwardly aggressive as me in wanting those things at lb.

ti 2015 review 1

ti was great. seriously. I've been wanting to go as a volunteer for a couple years now and this year I actually did. why did i want to go volunteer? ti has an excellent reputation for being well organized etc, lb does not. so i wanted to see what i could learn and hopefully bring back some changes to lb. thaddeus (cdba safety director) and I talk a lot and have been talking about cdba / scdbc steers reciprocity and he primarily came to BLB this year to volunteer steer so this was an excellent year to go up and volunteer. even better, I could leave sf directly to start my China trip a little early!

so, friday I drive up with xg. friday night was mostly the paddlers' party then some planning with thaddeus on guest steers for saturday. it was my first time going to the ti paddlers party and it was at a very pretty rooftop bar. great because I got to meet a lot of cdba people. thaddeus was staying at mabel and ben's house for the week. mabel is cdba and ben, her husband, is renegades(?) team chef. anyway, they were so kind to let me stay with them as well! it made more sense that I stay with thaddeus rather than the team at the team hotel because as volunteers our schedules are different than paddlers'. we even got our own rooms at ben and mabel's!

saturday!! we woke up DAMN early (earlier than i ever do for scdbc races, ha) and got to the site. in the early morning i worked the registration tent handing out paddlers wristbands and checking in volunteers. after the captains meeting i headed over to the dock to help out there. i'd met kerry, the dockmaster (at several well respected tournies, actually), before and he vaguely knows me (we're fb friends and he actually pm'ed me fairly recently) but i was really surprised how much trust he placed in me. i figured i would be helping people in and out of boats, easy stuff, while keeping an eye on operations in general, but instead he introduced me to the crew as co-dockmaster! pretty nice what the "safety director" job title will get you, huh? anyway, kerry explained that icdbf training is where they basically just drop you into the situation and get very little pre-training. so he did the first race, and from there i basically took over all major duties for the next 10 heats with him supervising, then he left, i think. lol. it was pretty crazy! i mean, jesus, thank god i have enough leadership skills and a strong enough personality where this worked, but i can see this type of training completely backfiring on, i think, most people!

but that's the great thing. dockmastering is a complicated job that i will not be needing with scdbc likely ever. our venues are drastically different and unless we change locations it's just not a skill that i'll need. also, i'll likely never be docking/marshalling again since i'm "moving on up." honestly, marshalling is not the hardest job. it's generally where you place the least experienced volunteers. lead marshalling and dockmastering is, of course, much harder, but i've moved away from that department. but anyway, the great thing is what i learned, and that's that this type of training is NOT an effective one. i've been to ti a couple times, but years ago, and well before i got involved with race officiating, so i don't remember the dock process very well. being thrown into the fray the way i was, meant that i learned a lot, but it was mostly me doing it as i would do it, with parameters. but since i didn't really get the chance to observe beforehand, i didn't have any time to come up with a good system, it was just figuring it out on the fly. and there's incredibly little down time, so i couldn't work out a better system. also, i'm very aware that this isn't my tourney, and i know they do things a certain way already so i didn't know how much leeway i had to change things. kerry told me that certain boats were to load from or off certain gangways so i followed that. if he hadn't given me that directive, i would've for sure done it differently. there were inefficiencies in the system that i would have fixed if i knew i were allowed to. but, again, it's not my tourney, and he has to dockmaster the rest of the weekend, so i don't feel comfortable "training" the teams to do a certain thing when he's going to do it a completely different way the rest of the time. i want to be respectful of the system already in place. but, yeah, i learned a great lesson in leadership that morning.

after lunch i was on the starter's boat with kim. who is practically "famous" for her skills as a starter. she's amazing and i learned a shit ton. i didn't get to actually do starting, but she answered all my questions in such a thoughtful way. even better, these skills will directly affect me since i'm a starter at baby and big lb. i'd never gotten any training as a starter, so this was a super valuable experience. i know i'll be better for it, and in turn, our tournies will be better too. and that was the whole point!!
furthermore i learned her philosophy about officiating which i think will be the biggest lesson i take away from this weekend. 

saturday night was mostly just resting, hahaha. 

(i didn't go too much into what i learned about specific tourney things, let's be honest, most of you don't care)