The same applies to paddleboarding too. The Kid and I had our 2 hour stand up paddleboarding lesson, SUP as it’s referred to officially. It was rather windy on the lake but the instructor took us out for our lesson anyway. It was kind of relaxing and took some strength to paddle, but I’m not sure it qualified as cardio. I’m glad we did it early enough in the day so the sun wasn’t so much of a beat down.
Tyler was our instructor and he was very Spiccoli-like in the way he spoke. Wuh-ho gnarly, dude, and all that. It made me wonder about the chicken/egg question. Which comes first, the gnarly speaking or the liking of water sports? It turns out that the company he runs is non-profit and all proceeds go towards a charity of their choice. This year’s charity is park related that helps clean up and maintain local parks. That was a nice surprise.
The first part of the lesson went very quickly as Tyler hopped off the dock onto a floating board. He got on his knees and gave us a 60 second, this is how you paddle lesson. He said the ultimate goal is to end up standing and paddling. He hopped back on the dock, dropped our boards in, and said go! I’m glad that it wasn’t complicated to figure out. We slid gently onto our boards and began paddling on our knees. It wasn’t too difficult until we got to the end of the dock area and suddenly the wind picked up and drifted us quite a bit the wrong direction.
After running into a wall of floating truck tires and briefly going off course, we got the hang of it and finally stood up. I was surprised at how easy it was to balance on the board. It didn’t take that much effort unless a boat had just buzzed by. Yes, we were on the lake with boats. We paddled for about an hour around to a secluded little cove on the lake, and Tyler let us stop and swim for about 10 minutes. I chose to sit on the board and float instead of steeping myself in fish pee. I enjoy chlorinated, man made bodies of water. The Kid swam though (with a life jacket, don’t worry!) and said the water tasted weird.
The return trip was much easier with the wind at our backs and took less effort. We paddled standing up like we’ve done it before. All in all, it was fun and I’m glad we gave it a try. The company has meetups on a regular basis where they get people together to clean up a park and then have free paddleboarding afterwards. Very cool opportunity to do some volunteer work. Tyler said they also teach yoga classes on the paddleboards so it might be something we check out in the future. Now we know what SUP!
Have you tried SUP? What did you think?
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