Peter Kauzer heads to Reunion

Hello all

Next week we start the main season with the European Championship in Liptovsky Mikulas (Slovakia). It's gonna be a busy time with 5 weekends in a row of racing, finishing the first part of world cups back home in Tacen. So it will show who did a really good preparation during winter time, even though it is post-Olympic season.

This winter I've decided to try a new place for winter training camp. In previous years my "base camp" was Australia, but due to the Covid pandemic and strict restrictions in the "Land down under", Europeans had to choose other locations. This winter I've decided to visit beautiful Reunion Island, an island in the middle of the Indian ocean. I wanted to go already last year but I decided rather to go to Al Ain instead cause I knew what I could expect. But the conditions in Reunion are quite similar to the conditions that were at the Olympics. It was hot and humid and you could feel it.

The course in Reunion is not hard and big but it has other things on which you can work on to get ready for the season to come. It is quite small, the water is slow and you need to push hard all the time if you want for your boat to have the speed down the course. Maybe for someone is hard to stay there for more than 2-3 weeks but I have decided to go there for 7 weeks and I'm glad I did. I can say that training there is just what I needed, cause I'm used to put the paddle in the water let the boat glide down the whitewater but like I said, here you need to use more power and this is just the thing I needed to work on. At the course you have a gym as well so you basicly you have everything you need at one place. It was, at least for me, a good preparation for the season. So I hope I'll show that on the races this year. Competition is getting harder and harder every year and, sadly, I'm not getting any younger

Even though it was hard but the island itself has so many possibilites to do other stuff so you don't get bored if you stay there for a longer period. People there are really nice and also there is one good thing about it for us Europeans. It is French territory so it's like being in Europe and not on some island in the middle of the ocean.

We had also two races there. One of them was ICF Ranking race. I managed to win both of them and to be honest I was a little bit surprised about that cause it's not the type of course that favours my style of paddling.

So let's see if this years training in Reunion got me to where I wanna be. Good luck to everbody in the season and let the best man win.