The sun has barely appeared over the horizon as Iris Vrabec prepares her gear. Unaccustomed to getting up this early, the bleary-eyed Vrabec has been making an exception to her morning routine every Tuesday for the past month so she can arrive at Dajia Riverside Park before 6:30am.
"I feel terrible about getting up for 6:30am," Vrabec said in a telephone interview with the Taipei Times, adding that she prefers Saturday practices because they begin in the afternoon.
Like many of the other 36 teams competing in the Mixed Open Division Dragon boat races, the German Dragons team member has been hitting the river twice weekly to prepare for the 2007 Taipei City International Dragon Boat Championship (2007台北國際龍舟錦標賽), which begins Sunday adjacent to Dajia Riverside Park (大佳河濱公園) along the Dajia section of the Keelung River.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF STMICROELECTRONICS
Organized by the Taipei City Government and run by Taipei Sports Office (台北市體育處), this year's competition will see a total of 2,587 people rowing for 125 teams in eight divisions in the 500m races.
"[The organizers] use a double knock-out system," said Brian Rusk, coach of the Cantai Dragons, a team associated with the Canadian Society in Taiwan. Rusk says that one team competes against another and the winner of that round then moves on to the next stage.
Relying on a double knockout system can sometimes cause heartache when two strong teams compete against each other.
PHOTO: HUANG MING-TANG, TAIPEI TIMES
"The Australian team was faster than us last year, according to time. But we went much further in the competition than they did," Rusk said.
Relying on time as a measure of success, however, causes unavoidable problems because Keelung River is tidal.
At "different times of the day we have different tides [and] the tide has a dramatic effect on your time," Rusk said.
Asked who Cantai's greatest competitor is, Rusk replied, "anyone who practices more times a week than we do." Rusk is particularly concerned about the varsity teams that practice four or more times a week.
"Also, the varsity teams are usually around 21 years old and healthier ... . Half of our team lights up after practice," he said.
Rusk added that though his team takes the competition seriously, most team members have full-time jobs.
The team from National Taiwan Normal University's Mandarin Training Center (MTC) is considered one of those varsity teams. Taking fourth place in the Open Men's competition last year and known as a solid competitor in each year's competition, the school consists of Women's Open (公開女子組), Men's Open (公開男子組) and Mixed Open (公開混合組) teams. The rowers meet weekdays at 6:30am in front of the language center where a bus takes them to Dajia Riverside Park for training.
Open Men's team rower Salvador Martinez Rompeltien from Spain said that getting together with a bunch of students from a number of countries to participate in the race is a cultural experience. "But I hate getting up for practice everyday," he said.
Ryota Hiyane, a student from Japan who has been in Taiwan for nine months, agrees.
"The training is pretty grueling," he said. "But we always meet on the weekends when we aren't practicing and go out for dinner."
If the German Dragons and Cantai Dragons are getting up in the early hours, STMicroelectronics trains a little later in the day, usually hitting the water in the late afternoon. The team of expats and locals have been practicing twice weekly for the past month.
"We have a lot of Europeans — Italians, French, German — in our company. For them, it's a good cultural experience. Also, [the race] helps team-building across cultures," said Robert Yu (郁正德), the team's captain.
Like the strict regimen followed by the MTC, the Aqua Fortis team, led by Jiang Xiao-ping (江孝平) is out on the water four days a week.
"We have no rival," boasted Jiang when asked who the competition is, "we'll definitely come first."
This kind of arrogance can be excused because he led the first place team last year, though it's not an attitude shared by Lin I-pin (林依蘋), spokeswoman for the Taipei Fire Department, the team that took first place last year in the Men's Organizational Division (機關團體男子組). Indeed, she was somewhat subdued when talking about the competition because her team has only recently begun practicing.
"We started practicing yesterday," she said in an interview on Monday. "But in the past few years we would usually start practicing a few months in advance." Lin attributes the late start to a decreased number of team members.
The traditional rivalry, therefore, between the police and fire departments might be anticlimactic this year, as the police department seems to have an edge.
Falling on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month each year, the dragon boat festival commemorates the attempt to save patriotic Chinese poet Qu Yuan (屈原), from drowning in a river.
Failing to save their hero, members of the public threw zongzi (粽子) — glutinous rice rapped in corn leaves — into the water so that the fish could feast on the snack rather than the poet.
Today, people still follow the tradition of eating zongzi and participating in dragon boat races in honor of Qu Yuan's spirit.
The Taipei City Sports Office said that the three-day festival will also feature various activities, including a DIY traditional art workshop, parent-child games and a "Standing Eggs" activity at 12pm on June 19, where the legend, which claims that everything can stand at noon on that specific day, will be put to the test.
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