welshkate

Something that has been helping me improve ‘mentally’ is visualizing moves, thinking them through and practicing paddle placement and edge transitions before even setting so much as a toe in a boat. This was something I did with Jesse at 24/7 when he was trying to explain a cartwheel to me. I believe it is a valid and valuable way to aid the teaching of play boating- at least for people like me (thinker, doer). On the weekend EJ showed me and theDave the upper body moves for the blunt and we practiced all the paddle moves and edge transitions standing up in a car park. There is so much to think about in moving water (whether it be a river or ocean wave) that its sometimes hard to think about what you need to do, combined with timing. If you can teach your body some muscle memory prior to getting in the water, surely it will help out in the water? Time to put it to the test.

Back up to Spencer’s last night. I decided that I want going to push it too much. I had a few nice rides with some spins to warm up. EJ was trying to coach me about how to throw a right blunt. It is such a fast move and he said to me that you have to throw as fast as you can. I just couldn’t get it- most of the time I ended up just initiating a cartwheel. I think with time it’ll come tho…I can sometimes do these moves in the ocean but it’s hard to transpose to the river. I gave up on blunts and switched to trying my loops. I got a few attempts but got flushed. Then I thought about what the guys taught me. The moves are: shove end forward, stand up (lean back), tuck forward then lean back to finish, throwing the paddle behind the head. I actually thought about what I was doing as I was going through the motions, and success…throwing the paddle back is key. It’s kind of like hucking a waterfall- there is actually some time to think while you are executing a move. There is a definite correlation between my loop success rate (currently about 10 % to 20 %) and my tiredness. It seems the more tired I am, the better my loop- last night, my last ride was a spin followed by two consecutive loops (flushed off on the second loop). I can only conclude that I’m trying too hard earlier in the sessions. If I learned anything last night it was that I have to learn to relax on the wave/hole.