While the pandemic didn’t prevent paddleboarders from getting on the water this year, it did cancel nearly all of the organized races that they might have enjoyed. But that didn’t stop Carleen Birnes and Nicole Stimpson, two paddleboarding enthusiasts from Annapolis, from competing.
Facing a lack of regional races, the two women decided to create not just one race, but the CHES•SUP•PEAKE Fall Race Series, a points-based “friendly competition” consisting of four three-mile-long paddles held on the South, Magothy, and Severn rivers and the Chesapeake Bay from September 18
through October 10.
“Nicky and I had discussed putting a points series together last year, and the big void in our racing scene this season served as the catalyst we needed to get it going,” says Birnes, a personal trainer who fell in love with and began teaching SUP stroke through her company, Mantra Fit, seven years ago. She already had experience organizing races, having created and led a weekly Wednesday night SUP race series that’s run for the last four years, and was confident that there would be strong interest from the close-knit community of paddleboarders that she’d met through these and other races.
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