haiyan paddlethon

typhoon haiyan, you must've heard of it. my db club, scdbc, put on a 12-hour paddle marathon yesterday to raise money for haiyan disaster relief thru the tzu chi foundation. i only did two hours because i'm hella out of shape. but seriously, those two hours were enough. sheesh. did four laps total: two steering, two paddling and omg i nearly died. paddling was actually better than steering, tho i paddled after. hahaha. i wasn't even sure i could paddle at first cause my left bicep was sooo tired. crazy! later that night i was sitting on my bed cross legged, and i tried propping my head up with my hand while my elbow was on my knee and i couldn't. haha, my arm was shaking too much to hold up my head!

in the 12 hours we ended up doing 28 laps total and raised well over $5000. i think the first couple hours had extra boats. stronger teams can generally so a 3mile lap in 15-20 minutes but since this was a bunch of random paddlers doing non-stop paddling, we were averaging about half an hour per lap. ray, of areodragons, signed up for 8 of the 12 hours. 8 of the 12 hours!!! but ultimately he "only" ended up paddling for 6 of the 12 because he was too tired. he's amazing. seriously incredible. wow!

anyway, i gotta say tho, of my sponsors, i'm surprised at who donated and who didn't. i won't go into names here, but only one of my best friends donated. and besides rip and my parents, it was a kind of random mix of people i'm friends with. special mention goes to b, who pledged $20 a lap tho i only asked for $5 a lap. what an amazing guy! i'm lucky to have such generous friends. :)

time lapse video of our paddle. i show up steering just after the 2:15 mark. if you can't be bothered to watch the whole thing (honestly, i haven't either) after 3:30 you can see them paddling while it gets dark. towards the end someone has a glow bracelet on :)