Upping the Ante
I was recently teaching an ACA instructor workshop for Dartmouth’s Ledyard Canoe Club and one of the instructor candidates in the course started an awesome discussion that I want to throw out here as an introduction to some of the instructional writing that I will be putting up here on the blog. The focus of the conversation was on becoming a better paddler without simply stepping onto steeper and more technically challenging runs. The basic idea was that the students in the class felt like there weren’t a ton of options out there other than running more difficult water. Through the conversation, I am pretty sure we decided that running increasingly difficult whitewater, although ultra-fun when done right, was not necessarily the best way to improve one’s paddling.
Instead, we decided that the following options were more effective means of building the skills necessary to face new, more challenging runs:
-(here’s a time honored classic) Get Out There and Work the Runs You are Comfortable on: Take crafty new lines, experiment wih micro eddies in crazy spaces, or try leading full-length moderate to high speed runs without stopping.
-Hop in a Playboat: in addition to improving your edge control, playboating can give you the skills you need to use surface features to your advantage and get out of the chunky hole when you really need to (and hey, tearing up your local wave or hole and laying down hot new tricks is a blast).
-Attain: Follow the spawning salmon. There is something about running a rapid in reverse that dramatically increases your understanding of how rapids work. In addition, hard attainments force good form and timing. And come on, what a workout!
-Try a new Boat: Hop in something a little longer, pushing a big boat in and out of small eddies can really help a padler improve by forcing good form and full body rotation.
-Hit up the Gates: Paddling slalom gives boaters the chance to develop their skills by hitting tight lines in long boats and practicing an endless variety of new moves and sequences.
-Kick it DR style: Try hopping in a Wildwater boat or a wavehopper, paddle downriver or upriver fast, and really start to learn to understand where the cleanest fastest water is going.
Well, that’s it for now. Most importantly, get out there and boat!