I made it  back to Zurich so it is time for a short recap on the last three weeks in France. The whole point of these three weeks was to pick up my new board in Vannes and get the maximum amount of training time possible before the next semester at university starts. The conditions were at times very difficult, but nevertheless I made it through the three weeks without skipping any session due to weather. 

So after picking up the board and the ten kilometer time trial on the river Odet (which you find in this post), the trainings continued despite the heavy storms during the first two weeks. I did a lot of the training sessions within the harbor due to the better protection against wind and chop, which made me do laps of about one kilometer to the end of the marina and then back. In between the storms we had one sunny day and as I promised to myself, that I would paddle at least once in these three weeks in shorts I did a short session.

The light was perfect and I actually went down in my neoprene pants and top, stripped to the shorts and did some beachstarts and turns for the camera.

Then I came back in and went back to neoprene and booties for the actual training session.

It was absolutely worth taking the 9°C air and water to be able to say that I paddled in shorts in February.

After another stormy days I went for exploring the river Aulne from Port Launay to Térenez, as I described in this post).

This session really helped me keeping up my motivation for the next stormy days, because it allowed me to get out of my little harbor laps for once and paddle a longer stretch on flat water with almost no wind.

On one really stormy day at the end of the second week I decided to go back to the river Odet to seek some protection of the storm. Well I found about 500m of flat water, not more.

The storm was howling and the hills around the river made the wind coming from every direction. Luckily I only had to do a interval session of four times four minutes full speed.

Despite the fact that I could not do more than four minutes into one direction without hitting storm gusts, it was a cool session because the darkness and the storm made the river look like some kind of a magic forest.

Finally the last week came and with it some good luck with weather. During the last week the overall training load was reduced to get some regeneration for the second 10 kilometer time trial on Thursday. Tuesday of the last week was the best day of the whole three weeks. In the morning it was very cold – some of the puddles in our street were frozen when I went for the first training – but sunny and almost no wind. In the afternoon the temperature got warmer and I was able to squeeze in a little SUP surf and beachrace training in small waves.

It was a reminder how quick the weather can change in Brittany from absolutely freak storms to calm and beautiful.

It was a good training to surf my new raceboard and paddle it out through the break.

The last remaining thing to do was the repetition of the ten kilometer time trial, as a reference for improvement. So on the last day I went back to Benodet to do it on the exact same course I did it in the first week. The conditions were windier and with more current than I expected. I had to fight the first five kilometers against the current and the wind, which was mentally challenging. For the first half of the distance I was not able to go faster than 8 kilometers per hour, so I knew it was going to be very hard to make up the lost time on the way back down.

Luckily the wind stayed the same for second five kilometers and I was able to catch up alot of the time lost and in the end I beat the time of the first time trial by 3 minutes.

For the cool down after the trial I paddled to the river mouth of the Odet, which was a worthy end for my three weeks of training.

So long story short: I had a great time in France, with more wind and rain than expected, but in the end I think it was good training. One last picture and I am out: