Yukon Ho!

Dave: Paddling a K2 has reminded me things that I forgot about training for the Devizes to Westminster race.   One of the things I get obsessed with is my partners paddling stroke.  Their style and cadence often irritates me with a detrimental affect to my own paddling.

It’s hard to paddle at someone else’s stroke, though after 10+ hours, it’s fantastic to zone out and just follow.  On Devizes I was always at the back, I don’t think we can do this on Yukon as it would be too mentally tiring to always be in the front, setting the pace and navigating the river all the way.  I still think that Simon, my DW partner, worked 10-20% harder than myself just from being the front man.

Paddling as a team is frustrating for a paddler as we’re used to being independent in our boats, we have our quirks and ’style’ and it’s difficult to then adapt to someone elses stroke.

I found last time it was a matter of  accepting the front man is in charge.  Obviously if there are style problems then it’s right to try and improve them but I found if I concentrated on my own style and then made sure we were in time the boat moved smoothier and I was happier.

That said when Pete is setting the pace and goes into super fast cadence and is able to achieve a decent stroke while I feel like I’m a windmill in a hurricane I will still moan, grumble and blame him.

Pete: This weekend brought a number of these things to light; I think we’d been practicing previously with Toons taking the back seat most of the time. For me at least, a few things became evident when I tried the back-seat:

1) Every so often we’d go round in circles; my feet would slip off the rudder pedals and they’d spring back up the boat, meaning I’d need to remove my deck to replace them. I’m getting quicker, but I need to figure out a way of sorting this. Clearly doing the Yukon with the rudder stuck hard one way is not effective.

Sitting up straight - good posture

2) When I’m working hard I want to go faster than Dave. When I’m chilling out I don’t have an issue with the cadence, but I think it irritated both Dave and I that we were out of our natural sync. I need to find some more power in order to get up to maximum output when paddling at a slow bpm; I think this comes with technique, and posture (see photos, taken when I was trying to do demo strokes!).

Toons happy in the back

3) When we’re relaxing I’m not yet totally tuned in to Dave’s catch. When we were out in the dark I don’t seem to “see” the catch point of Dave’s blades as well as he sees mine (probably just a lack of time in the boat together), putting us out of sync and meaning that our paddling is a lot less than “fluid”

Poor posture - head down

So I have a lot to take away from this weekend, both around my technique and around my attitude when I’m paddling in the back. I think some whale song on the stereo might well be a good plan…

In particular:

What did we do well this week? Clearly we started to do what we needed to with me getting into the back.

What did we do badly? I think I need to be less “intense” in my sessions; I need to remember that it’s only 50% about the exercise, and that the 50% technique is equally important

What is there that is clearly an issue? The setup of the pedals is something we definitely need to revise; I’m going to think about this for next weekend

What is still a puzzle? I think, for me at least, I still need to figure out how to get those last few newtons of force from my paddle stroke, and what I need to be concentrating on in my head in order to “benchmark” that perfect stroke.