Masters Dragon Boat Paddlers Prove You’re as Young as You Think You Are
October 3, 2008
Don’t be surprised if the paddlers receiving medals at San Francisco International Dragon Boat Festival on Treasure Island are in their fifties and sixties instead of their twenties and thirties.
Just ask 53-year-old Randy Chin. During practice with his team, the Alameda Dragon Flyers, he noticed that 25-year-olds seated behind him paddled only half of the time than he did because they were exhausted.
“Even though people are in their 50s or 60s, they can paddle for an hour and a half,” said Chin, who is vice president of information technology for Boudin Bakery when he’s not on the water.
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Chin is a firm believer that age does not matter, but conditioning does. Neither should not assume that size is proportional to ability, according to Citania Tam, a paddler in her fifties on the Dragon Warriors team.
“I’ve seen very skinny and small paddlers be the best ones, just as I have seen big and strong ones or ones older than me be extremely good,” said Tam, a clinical social worker who has paddled for seven years.
Two-thirds of the 50-member Alameda Dragon Flyers team are 40 years old or older; about 15 are 50 and older. The eldest member is 74.
Many of the older paddlers use dragon boating as just a small part of their exercise regimen. The Dragon Flyers’ coach, Ken Granberg, 69, swims three times a week, jogs and goes to the gym twice a week and kayaks — on top of his job as an attorney.
Chin’s exercise regimen includes running three or four days a week, weight training twice a week, yoga , swimming and biking. He runs marathons and at one in Honolulu, Chin outran people half his age and finished in the top 10 percent of 26,000 participants.
“Many people in their 20s and 30s find it hard to fathom that people in their 60s or 70s can still do something,” Chin said. “Just because you’re over 50, things don’t go downhill. I got re-married at 51, and life is great. My wife and I go to spa getaways, and we saw Gwen Stefani in concert. Life doesn’t stop when you hit 50. It’s a journey.”
There are modifications, albeit minor, that must be made for older paddlers: They are less physically flexible, Granberg said, so the stroke has to be adjusted. But it’s a small difference, and the boat can still be synchronized.
The sport, with its many hours of practices and exhausting physical nature, is also more attractive for those with grown children, according to Tam. She added that if she had small children, she probably would not have participated.
Tam, an immigrant from Hong Kong, has seen the sport evolve over the past four decades — and across oceans. She noted that only male fisherman participated in dragon boating in Hong Kong and China in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Ordinary people in Hong Kong did not dragon boat,” Tam said, “so of course when my friend from the Foster City Y.M.C.A. told me to come on down and it was available for me, an ordinary person, I jumped into it.”
However, Tam said that when she began the sport, she couldn’t do more than two push-ups and sit-ups.
“In my first race, I felt like I was gonna die in the middle of the race — and you cannot stop,” she chuckled. “But now it doesn’t bother me as much.” She said that her overall health improved tremendously.
Yet the draw of dragon boating for people of all ages may be that it does not require just pure power or strength. “If you incorporate proper technique and finesse, along with the right team spirit attitude, you can have fun paddling at any age,” Chin said.
In fact, perhaps physical capability has little to do with success in the sport. In a cheerful, youthful voice, Chin said, “It’s more of a mental state. If you feel like you’re going to be old, you will be old.”
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An inspirational article. It makes me want to join a Dragon Boat team.