Training

We hold 5 hour-long practices each week from April to September at the Dragonboat Docks on the Schuylkill. Three are always held in the early morning of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The fourth is held either on Friday or Saturday morning depending on if/when the Schuylkill River is occupied with college crew races. The fifth is held late in the day on Sundays. These practices are not mandatory but the more you train, the faster you get, and the faster you get the more likely you are to be selected for races. More on selection here.

Dragonboat races are short, ranging from 200 meters (finished in less than a minute), 500 meters (about 2 minutes), 1000 meters (about 4 minutes), to 2000 meters with three 180 degree turns (done in about 10 minutes). Each practice is structured to prepare us to race these distances and is split into “pieces” of varying lengths. Each piece is followed by continuing to paddle at a light jogging pace and then resting for a minute before starting the next piece.

One of the advantages to practicing with a team like the PDBA is that on any given day we have enough members showing up to fill two or three dragonboats. Seats are filled as we arrive at the dock first-come first-served, but for the most part the most experienced and fastest paddlers sit up front where they can set the pace and everyone else in the boat can see them. Once we push off the dock we immediately begin about 10 minutes of simple technique drills to warm up.

The coach keeps pace in a motorboat so he can get a good look at us from the side. He hopes to see that all of the boats are about evenly matched in power and experience. If that is not the case then he calls on the boats to move alongside and hold fast to each other and then switches individual paddlers until the two boats are evenly balanced. From then on every piece is an all out race, red boat vs white boat. It’s all good natured with a lot of joking and trash talk between each piece, but the intensity is never absent.

We’ve been doing this every year since 1983, but along the way we’ve added practices in single-seat outrigger canoes called OC-1(See the racing section), and we’re going to be adding less intense rookie practices in the early evenings in 2026 (See the recruiting section).

These practices prepare us to race as a team, but another race happens unseen before any of us ever get to the starting line. One of our goals is to prepare our paddlers for selection for world championship races. We have more paddlers than there are seats in these championship boats. Unlike land-based sports you can’t sub-in fresh paddlers in the middle of a dragonboat race. We also provide individual boats and can help arrange individual lessons to prepare our members for the time trials on which selections are based.