So the unusual times continue with Covid-19 restrictions, but wishing all our Club members, visitors, guests and the canoe & kayak racing community all the very best for Christmas and New Year.
We hope that you are able to make the best of the situation, wherever you can within the restrictions and changes to your normal life.
It's certainly been a roller coaster ride of a year at the Club. From March kicking it all off with Lockdown-1 and closure of rivers meaning no paddling, to paddling pairs, paddling sixes, into Tiers and then Lockdown-2 in November, back to pairs, into Tier 3 with sixes again, followed pretty quickly by Tier 4 just before Christmas and pushing back to pairs again.
This has kept us all on our toes and, as a Club, we've been amazingly resilient to the sudden changes and ups & downs. The care and respect shown between members throughout is a credit to us all. Of course nobody told the River Thames to back-off this Autumn, so it has also being doing its best to challenge us too, with flow rates & river levels going up-and-down faster than a training squad doing burpees (that's quick ;-) ) If we pick one word to sum-up 2020 then may be it should be "Adaptability", and with that the Club is becoming all the stronger for it, both individually and collectively! With short Notice sessions have been moving back & forth between Longridge and the Jubilee river, we're so lucking to have the Jubilee so close when river levels do jump up. But the most innovative Club solutions have probably come off the water and making the most of the digital and virtual worlds. Our Committee meetings have grown in regularity and productivity, and we were even able to hold a whole-club EGM, as we switch to on-line platforms.
Over everything though, if there is one change that is going to have long-lasting benefits to all of us that join in, it has to be the Club stretching & core sessions that now run on-line twice-weekly. These deserve a review in their own right, so watch out for a blog post on this soon!
From the 2020 chaos, and in despite of it, we've been able to start building some amazing plans for 2021. No matter what is thrown at us, there's an exciting year to come.