Is another canoe race in the stars?

Pam LeBlanc paddles her canoe on Lady Bird Lake. Debbie Richardson photo

Apparently, my long-term memory sucks. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve chosen to ignore those unpleasant experiences.

Whatever the case, I pulled out my aluminum canoe twice this week and went for a couple of very early training runs on Lady Bird Lake.

If things go well, it means that the second weekend in June I’ll be paddling a very long way down the San Marcos and Guadalupe Rivers. Maybe.

Read more: Logjams, Hallucinations and Mother Nature

I blame Debbie Richardson. A veteran of 12 Texas Water Safaris, she lured me back into a boat, enticing me with descriptions of the fun we’ll have, slogging 260 miles from San Marcos to Seadrift, paddling non-stop in the equivalent of a floating Fiberglas bullet with several uncomfortable, foam-covered seats in it.

That fun will entail scrambling over bobbing mats of logs, brushing spiders the size of coasters off our shoulders, squeezing pre-crushed potato chips into our mouths, and dragging boats over long, muddy stretches of bank. We’ll laugh, we’ll sing, we’ll possibly vomit, and no doubt we’ll hallucinate along the way.

But reaching the finish line with my teammates Sheila Reiter and Heather Harrison in 2019 was, for me, one of my proudest moments. (Right afterward, I passed out on a folding cot beneath an open-air tent on the Texas coast. I don’t think I woke up for three days.) I want to do it again. It lures you back, as they say.

Stay tuned as I monitor our progress toward the 2022 race in this blog…