Feel the Love
Let love guide your stroke, let respect steady your rhythm—and the water will return the love and carry you.
“Feel the love with the water.” —Said by our Head Coach during final preparations for the IDBF World Dragon Boat Championships in Germany in mid July 2025 (Sat 14 June 2025)
Summary
This invitation isn't just about synchrony among paddlers—it’s about forming a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the water itself.
Explanation
“Feel the love with the water” is more than a poetic phrase—it’s a quiet philosophy at the heart of dragon boating. It asks paddlers not to fight the water, but to meet it with care. To offer rhythm, not resistance. Strength, not struggle. And above all, respect.
In the boat, the water is not a passive element. It notices. It reflects hesitation and mirrors cohesion. It does not obey brute force—but it does respond to confidence, clarity, and consistency. When a paddler enters the water with a stroke led by love—not sentiment, but presence and purpose—and steadied by respect, something shifts. The water, in its own way, gives back.
This connection is intimate and physical, yet also emotional. It’s about learning to feel—not just the catch or the drive or the exit, but the quiet in-between. To sense when to drive, and when to yield. To listen to the boat’s breath, to follow the current’s cue. And to trust that the more you honour the water, the more it will hold you.
True flow arises here—not in dominating the conditions, but in allowing something mutual to emerge. The paddler doesn’t just move through water; they move with it. And when that relationship is fully formed—when love and respect shape every stroke—the boat becomes light. The effort dissolves. The rhythm carries. And the water, in return, carries you.
An After Afterthought
“You know I said it's true — I can feel the love. Can you feel it too?”
— Rudimental, “Feel the Love” (2012)
In the boat, this lyric becomes more than a refrain—it becomes recognition. Of shared intention. Of rhythm made real. Of the moment when connection is not imagined but felt—between paddler and teammate, paddler and boat, paddler and water.
This is the emotional current that drives dragon boating when it’s at its most alive. A power greater than muscle. A unity greater than timing. Love not as abstraction, but as a force—kinetic, reciprocal, essential.
About the Song and Artist
Feel the Love is a 2012 single by British band Rudimental, featuring vocalist John Newman. Known for their energetic blend of drum and bass, soul, and electronic music, Rudimental create soundscapes built around emotional intensity and communal energy. The song’s pulsing refrain captures the very essence of what it means to find flow in unity—with music, with others, with water.