SAN DIEGO -- Megan Welsh grew up in Philadelphia, where the Jersey shore is a bit closer than Hawaii's shores.
So when the Pennsylvania kid grew up, became a nurse and took a job in San Diego, it's understandable that she had never heard of outrigger canoe racing, the state sport of Hawaii and a West Coast boating staple.
When someone suggested "paddling" was a good way to meet people near her new home, she was baffled.
"I'm like, 'Well, what's paddling?'" she said.
But Welsh, 27, is an adventurous and athletic sort. She played volleyball, basketball and softball as a girl, swam in high school and has taught fitness and strength classes since college, even while studying for a year at Oxford and doing volunteer work in Costa Rica. So, she contacted the San Diego Outrigger Canoe Club and gave it a try.
"It was love at first stroke," she said, laughing.
"To this day, each time I get in the boat and on the water, I'm like, 'This is the reason I moved to San Diego. This is why I'm here.'"
It has also proved to be the elixir Welsh needed as a night-shift labor and delivery nurse at UC San Diego. Her work can be intense, and so are her hours. Her three shifts per week run from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. She's often sleep-deprived and stressed, so getting on the water, being with friends and grinding through tough, full-body paddling workouts makes her happy.
"There are a lot of days I show up to practice and I'm like, 'I need this paddle more than anything,'" she said.
The first time she climbed into one of the club's six-person canoes was three years ago. Since then, she has graduated from novice into the club's more competitive boats, and this season (which runs May to September), she will be in the club's top women's boat in the highest class (unlimited).
For the past two years, she has paddled in club boats in Southern California Outrigger Racing Association weekend competitions from San Diego to Santa Barbara, done the annual 26-mile Long Beach-to-Catalina Island race and competed with her team in Hawaii.
And over the winter, she learned how to race in a smaller, lighter -- and oh-so-easy-to-tip-over -- single outrigger. She placed second in her first two events.
All those years Welsh spent working out in gyms, doing cardio, kickboxing and strength training turned out to be a great foundation for the sport.
"She's incredibly strong," said James Gonzales, coach of the club's men's team. "She's incredibly fit and her motor -- she can go and go. She's acquiring the skills at a pretty fast pace."
Learning the intricacies of the sport
Outrigger canoe racing is a physical and mental challenge. The paddlers must dig through the water at a rapid pace -- pushing through exhaustion -- and be in total sync with one another in their 45-foot-long canoes. Weekend races in the Southern California Outrigger Racing Association are 10 to 12 miles, and Welsh said it's a total body workout.
The six paddlers, sitting in small seats, drive forward with their legs from a lunge position, using their core, back and shoulder rotation to power their blades in a rhythm set by the stroker in the first seat.
"If your arms are the first thing that's tired, then you're not doing the stroke correctly," Welsh said.
Every paddler, depending on her seat, has a special task. Seats 1 and 2 set the pace. Seat 3 calls out the changes (when to switch to paddling on the other side), seats 3 through 5 provide the power and No. 6 is the steerswoman. Welsh -- who is 5-foot-9, with long arms and legs and good strength -- is usually in seats 3 through 5.
Gonzales said Welsh is "like a sponge" as a student.
"She's at a younger age, where she's got a lot of growth still in her and she's got the physical platform ... so she's going to get better and better," he said.
Welsh said she has to "give it her all" in a race, so she and her teammates are spent when it's over. "I noticed that last season, that it would take me at least four or five days to recover, I'm that sore," she said. "But it's a good sore."
As a newcomer, Welsh had to learn techniques that she said she still hasn't mastered. "Timing is everything," she said. "Everyone has to be in sync, everyone has to be communicating with each other. There are a lot of components. You can have a bunch of strong people in a boat with no communication and no timing and the boat goes nowhere."
In a long race, such as the annual race to Catalina, the team paddles for four hours. Her race in Hawaii in 2015 took a little under six hours. Still, as she and her teammates neared the finish of both, adrenaline kicked in and she said they were paddling hard. When they finished Catalina, tears flowed and hugs lingered -- even though they didn't win. It was functioning as a team that she said mattered most.
"It's so rewarding," she said.
Work, sleep, work out
Welsh has been obsessed with sports and fitness since she was a teen. She must work out every day. "Working out has always brought me happiness," she said. "There are days when I don't work out, my family is like, 'You clearly haven't been to the gym today.' So my mood depends on it."
Starting in March, she paddles in women's team workouts two nights and one morning a week. If she has a work conflict, she'll train with the men's team. On days she doesn't get on the water, she does strength and cardio training in a gym. She also does yoga once or twice a week.
But night work, she admits, often leaves her exhausted. "I go to work at 7 at night, get home at 8 in the morning, I get in bed at 9 a.m., sleep 'til 1, get up and train, come home and cook and get ready to go work another 12-hour shift," she said.
Working nights, though, is all she has known since becoming a nurse, and being a nurse is something she had wanted since she was a girl. She has training in so many areas -- she is a registered nurse certified in obstetrics, a prenatal/postnatal fitness instructor and a breastfeeding counselor -- that her role is diverse. She accepts the schedule as just part of the gig.
If Welsh has free time, she loves to try new restaurants and coffee shops with her friends -- mostly other nurses and paddlers. And though she eats a mostly healthy diet, she torches so many calories that she can occasionally splurge. "I allow myself treats when needed," she said. "I cannot give up coffee creamer for the life of me. I love coffee. I'm always caffeinated. And anything covered in peanut butter or rainbow sprinkles, I'm like, 'Please.'"
Now settled into her new life in San Diego as a full-fledged outrigger canoe racer, Welsh still recalls her first race day. There were hundreds of people there in a festival atmosphere. It was a social aspect of the sport she hadn't expected but quickly embraced.
"It was a whole island [in San Diego's Mission Bay] filled with all these people that love this sport," she recalled. "It's like, 'All these people know about this sport that I've never heard about?'
"It's a whole other world."