The Ragged Edge...

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