The Molokai-Oahu crossing will take our crews roughly between 5 hours 30 minutes and 6 hours 30 minutes to complete. The women can expect to be in the canoe for 2 hours 45 minutes to 3 hours 15 minutes as strokes; seats 2-5 between 3 hours 7 minutes and 4 hours and change; and the steerer may be in for the whole crossing.

The key to making your canoe go well in the crossing is to take advantage of the water along the way. The water changes every moment. The single most important thing you as a crew can do is to paddle as if connected at the top and bottom hands all the way down the canoe. Put another way, imagine your blades are all connected with thin wire; when the stroke goes forward, you all do; when the stroke puts her/his blade in the water, you all do; when the stroke exits, you all do.

Read more...

One of the most difficult decisions for a coach is when it is necessary to cut a paddler from a crew for an event or from a program. Even a well-formulated group of crew selection criteria do not make the task much easier; this is often because the paddler in question has both weaknesses and strengths. And this can be said of every paddler in a program; each have weaknesses and strengths.

If the selection process were simply about finding the 6 fastest paddlers the issue of who makes the cut could be resolved by time trials and seat pulls and there you are. But it is not. We select a crew and not a group of individuals. The fastest 6 may not (are often not) the fastest crew.

Read more...

Let me define what I mean by this; where is the water that will give you the best purchase/catch/hook? This is nowhere near as obvious as it first appears.

We all know that aerated water is not particularly grabby. If it is frothy or foamy, it does not allow a good pull. And we know that if we cavitate or tear water, we don't get a good pull. If the paddle moves relative to the water, the canoe is not moving an equivalent amount. Imagine spinning a car's tires on snow or ice. So we want to be connected to the water when we pull on it. Leaving aside the dreaded escape from the pull (moving your top hand forward creating the illusion of movement, or sitting up through the stroke creating the same illusion, or changing the angle of your blade to allow the water to shed, another escape) there are ways to improve your pull.

Consider this...the water nearest a moving canoe is moving along with the canoe. As a canoe moves through the water, it drags water with it. The closer the water to the canoe, the more it is moving with the canoe. If you are pulling in that moving water, you are actually pulling on water going in the same direction as the canoe is going and that means for any stroke length you generate, your canoe will move more than just that length. You have to get your blade right in close to the hull to get that really sticky water. Try it.

The opposite often happens in seats 3 and 5, moreso in the latter seat. The paddlers ahead have created a pool of water moving backwards. If you put your blade in the water, you have to pull longer and faster to move the canoe the equivalent of the stroke length. You know you are in that pool of water because your blade will feel fluttery. That is why I like to try to put paddlers with very quick hands in seat 5 if you have equivalent paddlers down the canoe. You need a quick catch and pull to counteract the effect of the moving water.

Now let's introduce waves into the equation. As a canoe moves through waves, whether into or away from them, the hull movement relative to the water will create light and heavy water for different paddlers down the canoe. If into the waves, the seats towards the rear will experience an easier pull as the stern drops into the wave. This is a time for those paddlers to pull faster and longer to propel the canoe over the wave. As a canoe tips over while paddling into a wave, the front seats have to pull deep to get the canoe to go over the wave. If paddling with the waves, the front seats will feel very heavy water as the canoe drops stern first into the trough and then the stern begins to rise. Meanwhile as the stern comes up the front of the wave, the rear seats will feel lighter faster water and they need to pull longer and faster.

Again we come back to stroke flexibiity. You are not machines doing exactly the same work at exactly the same interval all the time. Your stroke has to change, sometimes incrementally, and very frequently to take advantage of the water and create the best pull for the conditions of your seat at that time.

Bring your brain with you in the canoe. Look at the water for visual clues as to what will happen next. Associate the weight of the pull with the visuals. There are lots of clues out there.

Have fun.

BVB

For years we have been yapping at you about rotating and reaching and a quiet upper body and no bobbing or bouncing or leaning or rocking...well sometimes you have to do these (bad) things to make your canoe go.

I recently read a very nice little article on cycling. I know you are thinking "who cares Brent, cycling is not paddling!!". Actually it is, without the fixed fulcrum or pivot. Imagine pedaling with one leg...I mean that. You push down and pull through the bottom then you try to rest on the upstroke with the momentum of the stroke. Cycling is paddling both sides at once, a bit like kayak.

Anyway the thing that was interesting about the article was the idea that we must balance "effectiveness" against "efficiency". Effectiveness is the capacity to make your canoe go fast and efficiency is the capacity to make your canoe go well over time. Some strokes tend to favour effectiveness but cannot be maintained while some tend to favour efficiency but lose something in the effectiveness category. Paddling is a balance like life.

I have been a proponent of efficiency over effectiveness. I believe that it is better to be efficient than to be effective at any given moment. More for less... I start there.

But there is a time for that ragged effort that is NOT efficient, NOT pretty, NOT technically correct, and that needs to be in your quiver of paddle tricks too. This is the capacity to go all out without any consideration of how it looks or feels or whether it is sustainable; max effort. Huge explosive efforts that look like sh*te but are the culmination of everything you know about canoeing at an instant...BANG! And BANG again!!

If you are wondering why we have not worked on this before, I can say that I believe you need to reduce the variables and increase the constants before you begin to reintroduce variables that are dictated by physical capacity, by psychological hardness, by guts. I think you start with good technique and then teach a departure from it to achieve an extraordinary output. Think of it as desperation paddling. Some of you have not seized it yet.

The boys muscle the stroke. The girls don't have the muscle and so have to go BIG to make their canoe go. You can paddle all day at 90% and 60 strokes a minute. But can you catch a wave? Can you bury a competitor? Can you show them you are better, stronger, want it more?? Show them you are better! Challenge!!

We have tried to teach you stroke flexibility. We want you to be able to "tap into" that extraordinary stroke when you need it. You need to be able to go from 60 SPM to 80+ SPM in an instant. Do what you have to do to make your canoe fast. Go to the "ragged edge"!!

Add reckless paddling to your arsenal.

BVB

There is a song by the Doors that is based on a poem by Jim Morrison about the doldrums or Horse Latitudes, the seas near the equator where the wind does not blow. For sailing ships this was a nightmare. It is said that captains would order the crew to jettison cargo, cannons, equipment, horses (yes Spanish ships carried horses) anything to make their ships light enough to catch the little breaths of wind (remember a leaf blows across the surface and a log moves with the water...our canoes are leaves that become logs when full of water).

Read more...

So what is the use of a race debrief? Beyond "talking story" which is FUN for sure!...

Well, consider it kind of like the cognitive (mental) version of post race eating and hydrating. The event is fresh in your head. The legs of the race, moments, conditions, high points, low points, aches and pains, personal surprises, etc...

Remember that every person in the boat is experiencing the same set of objective facts, but each will perceive things differently based on his/her strengths, weaknesses, physiology, fitness, seat position, head-space, etc.

Read more...

This document is a brief summary of a very fine book by Joe Friel about training effectively (FN#1). Friel’s sports are cycling and triathlon but the principles applicable to these sports and long distance outrigger competition are very similar; each is an aerobic endurance sport with periods of high effort and at times extreme anaerobic effort within (over-efforts that cannot be sustained, such as a race start in outrigger). On a bicycle and in running there are sprints and hill climbs, and in paddling, passing a canoe, coming out of a turn, or catching a wave.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce some concepts that are utilized by coaches in attempting to achieve high performance from their athletes.

Read more...

There has been some discussion recently about changing paddles and I thought it might be a good idea to chat about some of the factors that go into paddle choice for individuals and for crews.

Generally speaking the dimensions of a paddle are dictated by what we do with it and the materials and tools that are available to make it. Check out some of the early outrigger canoe paddles and you will see paddles with no handle, long shafts and enormous rounded blades. These paddles were very heavy. It is likely that the Polynesians did not have an effective way of shaping a handle hence the bare-ended shaft. The wood they used was ...

Read more...

I am constantly amazed at how much people move around in a canoe when paddling and how awkward their posture. Maybe trying a few things while alone might demonstrate the inefficiency of it.

Everyone should try this experiment:

• Sit in your chair at your desk or at home. Start by sitting bolt upright with your shoulders over your hips. Now lean forward from the waist to about 30 degrees from vertical. Hold that lean for a half hour. You gettin' tired? Are you feeling that in your back?
• Okay. Now sit in your chair again and rock your upper body out 8 inches to the side once a second for a half hour. How's that feel? Good?
• The last lesson is this; sit in your chair upright and now bend forward at the waist 30 to 45 degrees and bring yourself back to upright once a second for 30 minutes. Fun eh?
• If you really want to make this interesting, sit on a swiss exercize ball and do the same things. Tiring isn't it?
• Now just sit upright on the chair or ball and put your arms out in front at shoulder width. Swing your shoulders left to right and right to left with your arms out front. Easy right? It is easy because you are not using core muscles and trunk muscles and hips and hamstrings to hold your position. They can all be used to drive the canoe.

I have said this a million times (maybe more like 50 or so), if your movement or posture is not making the canoe go, do not do it. You are wasting valuable energy.

Here is something else to try; put yourself into position as if about to catch with a good power U. Does it feel awkward? Are you comfortable? Can you hold that position for a long time? Find a comfortable position by moving your trunk and your back and your shoulders while still maintaining a power U. There is where you want to be at the catch.

Brent

One of the trickiest parts of racing is the turn. The tightness of the turn, the angle of the turn (total change of direction), the wind and water conditions, and other canoes all play a big role in how to complete your turn to best advantage. Let's start with some immutable truths about turns. Our focus here is on OC6s.

1. Turning slows your canoe. There is just no way around it...(get it...around...it) your canoe will slow down while turning. Why?

Read more...