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Dragon Boat Festival
North Glenmore Park
Friday, August 24 - Sunday, August 26

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Walking through the sparse trees of North Glenmore Park in the late summer, I found my way toward a group that had collected on a patch of grass next to the Glenmore Clubhouse. Invited by a friend from high school, I stood among the members of what was to become Powered by Gas, the ATCO Gas and Pipelines sponsored team, as they stretched in preparation for a 90-minute practice session in a dragon boat. Behind their ritualized conversations on corporate life and fossil fuel distribution, I could hear a forceful and rhythmic call to “Push!” reaching the shore as another team slid across the water in preparation for the Calgary Dragon Boat Festival.
Dragon boat racing has been a fixture of Calgary’s summer events season since the first festival in 1992. This year’s races on the Glenmore Reservoir will run from August 24 to 26, when nearly 100 teams will compete before thousands of spectators. The reservoir banks will be crowded with a colourful array of food stands, musical acts and cultural exhibitions. Calgary’s festival has grown to become one of Canada’s major racing events, and it attracts serious racers from across North America, as well as much more casual participants, like me.
As I stepped closer to the water, I pushed thoughts of the scale of the event out of my mind and tried to focus on the task at hand. The team I joined had been pulled together almost at the last minute. With nearly 20 members from different sections plus two non-employees, I wondered what it would be that could bring this team together. At the first practice, after introductions, instructions and stretches, we wandered down toward the water to equip ourselves with life jackets and paddles. A single unit, breathing and marching in unison we were not. Corporate divisions became faintly visible during lulls in the practice, when people settled into familiar patterns and gravitated toward their section mates. As I waited to enter the shipping container cum equipment locker to pick up my gear, I eyed a warning taped to the door. “How’s your butt feeling after a practice? If it doesn’t hurt now, it will tomorrow.” Even if we weren’t all paddling together with perfect timing by the end of the session, at least we’d soon share each other’s pain.
With race day quickly approaching, we embarked on a crash course on timing and technique. We were paired by height and lined up to board our boats in 10 rows. As we pushed the boat away from the dock, our paddles touched water and we were off. Most beginners have paddled a canoe. Canoe-style paddling quickly leads to wet teammates, broken rhythm and, as the shallow scars of my borrowed paddle attested, colliding hardware. With the liberal use of sporting metaphors, our instructors, Josh, Judy and Gerald, explained that dragon boating demands a different combination of movements. Like a luger at the start of a run or a pole vaulter at the moment of launch, a dragon boater must plant the paddle firmly into the water and pull. The power of the stroke comes from the rotation of the back and shoulders. As we splashed through three practices, the instructors guided us through the fundamentals of form and the subtleties of timing, as we drove our paddles into the reservoir and propelled ourselves forward over its surface. Our first sprints were clumsy, but as we learned to reach and pull, the boat began to pulse with the power of 20 backs.
At the final practice, hunched over my paddle as our boat returned to the dock, I read the map of aching muscles that had recorded my path to that point, and started to sense that the team was becoming a unified force. Canoe strokes were gradually turning into vaults across the water. Tips on technique and words of encouragement started to enter conversations that had been dominated by small talk cast in the idiom of the natural gas industry. In each member, things that were familiar had started to shift in subtle ways toward something new and shared. In the rhythm of our strokes and the rhyme of our motions, a unity had been slowly building and, come this weekend, dragon boat racers we will be.