A Stand-Up Guy
STAND-UP PADDLE-BOARDING (SUP) can look a little tame. Tranquil backdrops, lapping waters, a lone paddler gazing into the middle distance: it’s basically canoeing for the Instagram influencer. But there’s another kind of SUP that burns your core, leaves your shoulders in bits and tests your balance, coordination and stamina. This is the world of SUP racing, and I am its newest inhabitant.
Balancing at the tip of a four-person board, I’m jostling for position with hulking eastern Europeans at the Dragon World Championships on Lake Annecy in south-eastern France. More precisely, I am up the proverbial creek de merde. Before I arrived a day ago as part of Team Nike Swim, the championships’ headline partner, I’d done a bit of paddle-boarding – but the 30 minutes I spent floating across the Swan River in Perth don’t seem
