Dacks and Toga Active Life August Issue For Web

active life Profile
Bob & Heidi Underwood
A Life Together Training & Competing
Bob and Heidi on their way
out to an evening group ride.
Photo: Jody Katz
By Alex Kochon
From their shared past in
competitive kayaking at the
national and international level,
Bob and Heidi Underwood have
built a life around competitive
sports and personal challenges.
Before Bob and Heidi Underwood were runners, before
they did triathlons, before they were educators, administrators,
coaches, and nonprofit founders, they were paddlers.
Bob was the youngest of four brothers who grew up
on Caroga Creek in Johnstown. Heidi was the youngest of
two sisters and made memories canoeing with her dad near
their home in Stillwater. When Heidi was 11, she and her
father did a five-day cross-state canoe race. She was the
youngest competitor.
At age 13, Heidi was named to the USA Canoe/Kayak
Junior National Team as a flatwater kayaker. Around the
same time, in 1982, Bob made the Whitewater National
Team as he was finishing up his studies in geology and
environmental science at St. Lawrence University, where he
cross-country skied collegiately as well.
Nine years later, the weekend after returning from 1991
Canoe/Kayak Slalom World Championships in Yugoslavia,
Bob and Heidi were married. They started a life together
in the Queensbury area, where Bob began teaching highschool
earth science in 1985, and bought the house that’s
now their home on the east side of Lake George ten years
later. They had two kids, Will and Emma; Will works in
Colorado and Emma graduated from the University of New
Hampshire in May. Also in May, Bob and Heidi welcomed
a new addition to their home: a golden-retriever puppy
named Uncas.
But what happened in that time before kids and dogs,
before they conquered multiple Lake Placid Ironman triathlons
(Heidi did four from 2003 to 2010, and Bob did three,
most recently when he turned 50 in 2010), and before Heidi
won the Mohawk Hudson River Marathon in 2000?
Bob, 56, and Heidi, 47, won multiple kayak national
championships and met because of their shared Olympic
aspirations. Bob qualified for 1988 Olympic trials after following
the lead of his oldest brother, Jim Underwood, who
was eight years older and preceded him in making the national
team. Jim and Bob won several whitewater national
titles together as a two-man team.
Today, Bob and Heidi work in the same office at Adirondack
Enrichment in Glens Falls, where Heidi, a speech pathologist
and St. Rose graduate, is the director. Bob, the
school administrator, retired from teaching and coaching
at Queensbury two years ago after
33 years with the district. He
initially coached JV soccer, then
headed up the varsity crosscountry
running, nordic and
alpine skiing, and track teams
for more than 30 years. Bob
also currently owns and operates
Underdog Race Timing, a
race management business. In
August, their nonprofit, Under
The Woods Foundation,
will host its 10th annual summer
camp for children on
the autism spectrum or with
other developmental disabilities,
called Camp Under The
Woods.
The Underwoods figure
they spend more time together
than most couples,
but as they celebrated their
26th wedding anniversary in
June, they wouldn’t have it
any other way.
Active Life:
How did you meet?
Heidi Underwood:
Through Olympic kayaking. I was actually
in high school [laughs] and we were
both on the national team, so you travel in
the same circles. You get on a flight and
you’re like, “Oh, we’re on the same flight!”
AL: How many years were you on
the national team together?
Bob Underwood: I was a whitewater
paddler. I would do flatwater some years
and some years I wouldn’t, so I was kind
of on and off, and Heidi was more of a
flatwater paddler. Then Heidi started
doing whitewater and we were on the
whitewater team together for four or five
years, and that’s when we started dating.
AL: How did you get involved in
kayaking at that level?
HU: I used to do open-boat whitewater
racing, the Hudson River Derby that’s
been around forever, which I did as a kid
— Bob did, too — and then just through
meeting different people, I got into flatwater
kayaking and racing and I did it all of
my high-school career. That was the sport
I did even before I got into high school.
Initially we lived in the Latham/Loudonville
area and we trained on the Hudson
River right down in Albany, but my
parents bought an island in the middle
of the Hudson River when I was going
into 10th grade and I trained right on the
canal there, so I was pretty lucky. A lot
of your training is on your own, but being
on the junior national team, we had a
coach from Poland, so they would send
you your workouts through the mail.
You would go to a camp in Florida
during breaks [and] have training clinics
up in Lake Placid. I spent a lot of time in
Lake Placid and we raced and trained
on Mirror Lake.
BU: I grew up in Johnstown. My father
used to do canoe trips so he had a kayak
and we lived on a little whitewater stream
so we got into whitewater paddling. There
was a guy from the U.S., Jamie McEwan,
in the 1972 Olympics, he got a bronze
medal in whitewater canoe slalom. Then
my brother Jim got into racing and we just
started going to races. Back then, there
was a huge number of whitewater races
all over the Northeast — the Hudson
River, the Sacandaga — there were races
all over the place, and as you start to
race more and more, you train harder and
move your way up.
It’s different than what Heidi experienced
with the flatwater national team.
Since it was an Olympic sport, they had
much more of an organized program with
training camps. With whitewater, it was
an Olympic sport with one Olympics back
Above: Bob Underwood racing at
the 1991 ICF Canoe/Kayak Slalom
World Championships in Tacen,
Yugoslavia. Left: Bob Underwood and
Heidi Becker, now Underwood, at the
opening ceremony for 1991 Canoe/
Kayak Slalom World Championships
in Yugoslavia. Photos provided.
in ’72 in Munich, but then it was gone
and it didn’t come back until [the 1992
Barcelona Olympics]. So it was different,
there weren’t training camps, but we
had a good group of paddlers around us
that did whitewater paddling and whitewater
kayaking. Actually, it’s weird — in
Johnstown, there were a whole group of
guys that were into it and did really well
nationally.
[Note: Bob eventually switched to flatwater
kayaking and went to 1988 Olympic
trials in that discipline.]
AL: What other sports were you
doing at the time?
HU: The only thing I did in high school
was running. Nobody really knew about
me and kayaking because you don’t see
it. So I was always a little runner.
BU: I ran cross-country and track and
then I skied, and I actually went to college
and skied for St. Lawrence. More in high
school and in college, I was more of a
skier, and then I did a lot of [kayaking]
junior-national races and things like that
in the springtime and summertime, but I
really didn’t start to seriously train until I
got out of college.
[Bob was a Junior National Champion in
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