Manca Notar takes it all!

On Saturday, October 6th the final race of the Bavarian SUP 4 Lake Trophy took place with the Chiemsee Marathon. Different from last year, where the weather was 3°C and snow/rain, the lake showed itself at its best to the 55 Stand Up Paddlers. With a cloudless sky, no fog to hide the beautiful mountain backdrop, reasonably warm at 18°C and a nice breeze of 15-30km further out on the lake.

It was a 13km counter-clockwise course (that turned out to be a bit shorter, about 11-12km, depending on what route was chosen), circumnavigating the two islands Krautinsel and Herreninsel of Bavarian’s biggest Lake, Chiemsee (80 square kilometers). The race started in flat water with a bit of downwind towards Krautinsel, then came passages of side-wind around Herreninsel and from there some headwind back to the shore.
For the Ladies, Naish’s youngest racing sensation Manca Notar from Slovenia came in 1st before securing her 10th consecutive win. This also meant that Manca was the overall winner of the 4 Lake Trophy (all races combined). Congratulations from all of us here at Naish!

Manca’s comments: “Right now I’m driving home from the SUP race in Germany, holding my laptop on my knees and I’m thinking how everything started.
I’m a windsurfer, kitesurfer and stand-up paddler. In the beginning of the year Robby Naish accepted me onto his Naish International SUP team. This is really what every aspiring stand-up paddler wants. And this was just the beginning. I went to my first international SUP race in France. I competed in the “under 18” division and I won. That was a successful achievement for me. But after that, I knew that I was able to compete at a higher level. I was training harder.

I started competing in the women’s division, where the concurrence is stronger. In every race I was standing on the podium. These were International races in Germany and France. But then after 4 months of successful competing and training I wanted to attend the European championship, and I did. I wasn’t expecting any good results. That was just another bigger challenge for me, but I knew and believed, that I could make it to the podium. I was very successful and now I am on the 2nd place in Europe. After that, summer holidays started and they were the perfect opportunity for me to train more and harder. And it was worth it to train harder, because with today’s win I have 10 wins in a row (from Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria) and I am taking home the overall win of 4 Lake Trophy in Germany.

I’m training even harder and sometimes it’s difficult to combine that with high school and it will get even more challenging. I have amazing support from my parents, who helped me get involved in professional competitions. If you wish something so much and you are having fun at the same time, everything is possible. When I was just a little girl growing up doing these three sports, I dreamt about the kind of life I have now.

In the next two months I will attend one of the most prestigious races in Paris, which will be for me like “the cherry on the top of the crème”. That will be the end of my 2012 season and I’m already excited about the races in 2013.

Now I’m dreaming about races outside Europe and how it would feel to win them. I have really high goals, but if you don’t have high goals you can’t even reach small ones. The more I have in sports, the more I want. This is some kind of obsession of having fun.”