Past weeks...busy weeks

How did our selections go? That question will be answered in this post. So we recommend you to read the whole article...

But first of all we do like to talk to you about our trainingcamp in Pau. A french city close to the mighty 'Pirineos' and the atlantic ocean, ... some call it paradise. We combined slalom training with some creeking, but because of the long during winter in Europe there wasn't much water on the rivers in the mountains. Still we managed to paddle 'Le gave de Brousset' in France and 'Rio Forcos' in Spain.
To reach the put in for the 'Rio Forcos' we had to drive 40 minutes on a small road to 'Bergau' which is a lovely little village and from there we had to hike with our boats for about 30 minutes but it was all worth it, what a beautiful river!

After this, we went to Anglet near the atlantic ocean to catch some waves, but the weather was terrible. After all we decided to give it a try and went into the water. We have to admit that learning how to surf in a storm is not the easiest way...

The week after that (so last weekend) we had our selection races in Goumois. It was really cold again like most of 2013. We managed to paddle well, just not enough to be selected for 2013. But we have made a lot of progression and reached a good level for paddling C2 only one year, so we are still on our schedule for Rio 2016!

Click here for a short video on the swiss news about the belgian selections at Goumois

What will come up next?

• End of june: creeking in the alps
• 13/07 - 14/07: Icf World ranking Ivrea
• September: trainingcamp Augsburg
• 2/11 - 3/11: Lee Vally, London

And for now, we will be in editing mode for our video... Dropping soon!

Teaser!!

BOOOOOM! Here's a little teaser from our upcoming video about our 2013 winter!



Enjoy!

Busy P-eeters/sleebus

WOW it’s been 2 months since our last blogpost! We haven’t stopped kayaking though. Last two months were filled with a lot of regular training on our flatwater channel in Mechelen and in the gym.

We did have some other training sessions on Mava, one of the 2 whitewater ‘courses’ with gates here in Belgium. Also went a couple of times to the second course, the dijle, a river with a few gates and even less current.

Some other, more boring, thing that took a lot of time was VTS (= Flemish Trainers School). Each and every Saturday (and some Fridays and Sundays) we needed to follow classes to become a kayak initiator. Wasn’t a lot of fun but hopefully it will pay of some day!

Last week Bram stayed in the Alps. Not for kayaking though, but for boarding! One week snowboarding in the beautiful Alps with awesome snow this year! Hotel was next to a river. The water level was to low for paddling, but even then the urge to paddle some class 4 and 5 rivers grew bigger and bigger!

Luckily we almost leave to Pau for a slalom training camp! We need some good whitewater for improving our C2 whitewater skills. Also the weather will be a lot better we hope. Here in Belgium it’s still only -2 / 5°C. We also take our creekers with us, so hopefully there will be water so we can HUCK!

Right now a last busy week with lot’s of schoolwork, some VTS classes and some preparing for our trip to Pau. But after that it’s going to be an awesome week with lots of whitewater, both in slalom as in creeker! 

Until next post, BITCHES!

Freedom!

I want to announce the end of our isolation!! Happy, stoked and lots of other emotions because we are finally permitted to move again! Right on time, I was actually fearful that my joints were rusting.

Ok I have to admit, we did run a lot (pretty sure we run faster, further and with more swag than Steven Pauwels right now) and we did paddle a couple of times. This prevented us from going insane as we predicted earlier in our blog.

The day after our last exam we immediately started our rehabilitation program by going to Liège for some slalom training on whitewater. It was suuuuper cold and windy that day but we were stoked to be back in action!

This week we also had the luck that the Belgian rivers had some water, so we were able to paddle the Hulle and the Vresse. Had really nice runs on these rivers, especially the Vresse was superb!

Yesterday was a bit of a bummer, went all the way to Germany wanting to run a pretty nice waterfall. But some or actually  A LOT of trees were blocking the river and it was way too dangerous to run it.  Instead we went hiking in some German forest.

After all a pretty epic week to start our 2013 kayak season!