First wakeboarding competition......

Two weeks ago I participated in my first wakeboarding competition. It was a team event at my local cable park, Box End Park in Bedford, UK.

The format for the competition was that each of the four riders in a team would have twenty minutes on being pulled behind the parks wakeboard boat and fifteen minutes on the cable per rider, the individual scores for each rider would be added together and the team with the most combined points would win whatever category they were in.

Many lessons learnt from this day..............

Having decided the order of who would go when on the boat (based on who the team thought would score most points and thus have most of the twenty minutes allocated; I had no input to this I might add :-).............), It was decided I would go last. Probably should have argued against this in hind site (wonderful thing eh?).......None of us on the team are particularly great boat riders and personally my goal for my allocated time was to at least pull off a heelside wake to wake jump.......

Well I did this on second attempt, but not before I had managed to fall really heavily trying to go way bigger than I was able to !!

Result was that when I pulled a muscle in my back and jarred my shoulder, which I noticed about fifteen minutes later when I was sitting waiting for our cable time to start.

First lesson - Don't let the occasion go to your head !!

Decided that even though I was still hurting from the boat set that I couldn't let my team mates down and proceeded to the cable at the appropriate time............rode really badly due to the fact that I could not turn at my hips easily without my back hurting (and partly through lack of practice !!). Hurt even more when I had finished.

Second lesson - Know when it is time to call it a day.....

When the results came we were surprised to find that we were fifth (out of eight) teams. Not bad considering that I had amassed approximately 10% of the overall team score. Ha ha.

Third lesson - Don't set your expectations too high, disappoint is never far off.........

Good experience though, and I would like to thank all the staff at Box end Park for a good time had by all (despite feeling sore for the next week!) - the event was extremely well organised and I hope that more competitions are held at the venue in the future.

Next competition................probably the race for last orders at the bar !!