Lying on the ground at a scarily early time in the morning, grunting and grimacing while my teammates happily race each other through their last twenty push-ups, the thought "What am I doing here?" tends to spring to mind pretty easily. I used to blame it on an overdeveloped masochist gland, or on my parents for not getting me a teddy bear when I was three years old, but have found out that neither me, my parents, or even Freud are to blame, because it all goes back much further than that.

      It's all down to the fact that an ancient Chinese poet decided that he'd had enough and so was going to shuffle himself off this mortal coil. Honest. His name was Chu Yuan, and though I can't actually say I've read any of his stuff, it was either racy or politically sensitive enough to upset the Emperor who packed him off to live somewhere not very nice in China (as Emperors have a tendency to do) just to keep him out of the way.

      Despite being the world's first protest poet, Chu Yuan wasn't exactly a happy poet, not being able to write racy poetry with his mates and all, and so (as protest poets have a tendency to do) he decided to chuck himself into a lake, and then it was his mates turn to get upset. They must have been a pretty strange bunch, mind you, because their chief worry was that the fish would eat Chu Yuan. The thought that lying at the bottom of a lake isn't exactly good for one's complexion obviously hadn't crossed their minds. Anyway, they came up with the inspirational idea that if the fish were full, then they wouldn't want to eat Chu Yuan. Pure genius. So they decided to stuff the fish full of zongzi (rice wrapped in leaves). I don't know if your average fish is really a big fan of zongzi, but given the choice between that and moist poet flesh, I know which I would choose and I guess Chu Yuan's friends were banking on the fish having pretty similar culinary tastes.

      Anyway, the story so far is that we've got lots of people rowing boats around a lake chucking lumps of rice at hopefully very fat fish. How did this end up being dragon boat racing? At this point, no one is quite sure, but it must have been something like this: Mr. Wang (say) is getting a wee bit bored rowing around a lake all day lobbing lumps of rice at fish and thinks to himself, "I bet I can do this faster than my neighbor Mr. Chang (say). Mr Chang got mad and started rowing after Mr. Wang. The other poets saw what was going on and started doing it too. Then the villagers on the shore stared watching and cheering them on (mind you this was before television). How dragons got pulled into the races is not clear, but since they are considered pretty cool in China, they are usually included. Chu Yuan's mates may have had some strange ideas about fish, but they weren't crazy enough to paint the boat to resemble a hamster. I for one certainly would not crawl down to the Dan Shui River at 6:30 in the morning for the honor of being on the Hamster Boat team.

      So there you have it, in a nutshell, that's why we have dragon boat racing. I'm prepared to ignore the fact that Chu Yuan almost certainly didn't throw himself into the Dan Shui, and even if he did, the fish are the least of his problems.

      After finishing an exhausting day of rowing, I almost wish Mr. Wang had simply said, "Hey, Mr. Chang! I bet I can throw zongzi further than you!"