Liptovsky

We are now in Bratislava after a week in Liptovsky Mikulas, Eastern Slovakia.

We were in Liptovsky for a three day race that doubled as an International Ranking Race and also selection for Slovak, Russian and Polish selection. Understandably, this led to some pretty high quality racing.

Results can be found here

I was really pleased with parts of my racing but wasn’t able to put it all into a full run. A sure sign that my technique is changing was the number of penalties I got. I think I missed 4 gates and hit 10 in 5 runs and that included one clean run. I have been working hard to become more aggressive with my paddling and these sort of weekends are going to be inevitable but I used to pride my self on my lack of penalties and so the shift in mindset is going to take time.

Bratislava is three hours from Liptovsky and is a city of 500,000 although it seems bigger than that for some reason.

We are staying in an apartment not far from the Tesco shopping centre in a group of flats that I have to admit always regarded as the “ghetto” when I had been to Bratislava previously, especially as our car was stolen from the Tesco carpark in 2004. It is not the ghetto of course and it teaches me another valuable lesson that the facade is no indication of the person inside. Having said that, we were advised not to leave anything inside the car at night or to leave it too close to the path in case it is vandalised.

My shoulder has flared up again. It seems to get worse on the courses with the bigger whitewater, it must be the extra strain. I am going to take some time off the water and wait for it to get better now. It seems like the only way after trying to push through and manage the pain for a few weeks.