Yukon Ho!

Interesting article on the use of caffeine as a stimulant.  At my current rate of two double shot coffees a day, with a diet coke in the mix, my tolerance is quite high.  Might consider ditching it with a month to go so I can use it to stay awake during the race.  The article is from trainharder.com, which I highly recommend checking out.

Thoughts on long Tideway paddle, aiming for 6 hours on the water: The timing throws up some interesting conundrums.
Given a following tide and a reasonable pace I’d expect you could get as far as the QE2 bridge or Tilbury area in 3 hours. Of course this could be an over estimate as conditions that far down could be choppy and slow you down, but your super tanker should cut through with ease!  Anyway there’s a tide timing point at Tilbury to get an idea of the timing.
so using Sat 4th April as an example
Leave Barn Elms midday 12.00 (11:00 GMT)
paddle 3 hours down river aiming to arrive at Tilbury for Low tide at 14:52 (13:52 GMT)
turn and come back on the flood tide 3 hours to Barn Elms

However, Low Tide at Barn Elms (Hammersmith Bridge) will be 17:30 (16:30 GMT), 2hrs after London Bridge at 15:30 (14:30 GMT). So you will be paddling back on the slack between tides - heavy and slow, so could take an extra 30 minutes or more. On a like for like 3 hour each way you would think you’d get back by 17:52, but I reckon that could be 18:30 or later because of the slack water affect - over that distance it could even add an hour, so total paddling time is now 7 hours, 1 hour more than intended - the last drag back would certainly test the stamina and resolve!!
Alternative would be to set out an hour later - downside would be the last section downriver will be against the tide in order to get far enough down to give a 3 hour return leg with the tide. As paddling time is the objective rather than absolute distance paddled, this should not be an issue and could help the mental side to have a mid session fight against the tide. So, leave Barns at 1pm and paddle for 3 hours. This should give you 2 hours with the tide and then the last hour against it, so you may only get as far as Woolwich/Thamesmead, rather than Tilbury, but you need to keep going until at least 4 pm and a bit. Then turn at say 4.30 pm (not forgetting to cross to the other bank!) and you should then get 2.5 hours with the tide coming back to arrive at 7 pm.

As the return should be quicker overall, you need to keep paddling out until at least 4:15 or 4:30 - the further out you go the faster the return as the tide will have built up speed and you shouldn’t catch up with the slack lo tide as LT Hammersmith is 5.30 pm so you’ll be 1.5 hours after that.
so choose a weekend with a middle of day low tide and off you go!
My head now hurts with all this black art calculation, so I’m off to lunch!
NB there may be a deliberate mistake in the calculations so do double check
NBB  you should check with PLA about transiting the Barrier

We have spent a while thinking about the big items: kayak; flights; big guns. Perhaps it’s worth thinking about all the other things we’re going to have to carry in our “Yukon Queen”. See below the official packing list (and extensive it certainly is…):

17.  Mandatory Equipment

The following items are considered mandatory equipment for each team starting the race, and are to be carried the entire length of the race course. Not carrying these items shall result in disqualification. Photos of many of these items will be available in a link on the race website:

1.  
   1. Each kayak must start with a double-bladed kayak paddle for each person in the vessel and a spare double-bladed kayak paddle.
   2. Each vessel must have a towline attached to the vessel.
   3. Each team member must carry a U.S. Coast Guard or Canadian Department of Transport approved Personal Flotation Device. This must be worn at all times when on the river or in the water (e.g. Swimming). The PFD must be equipped with a whistle. Self-inflatable PFDs are not allowed.
   4. Orange garbage bag (for signalling to be provided by YRMPA)
   5. It is required that a team wear a full coverage spray-skirt deck with snaps or tie downs while traveling on the river from Whitehorse to Lower Laberge and Carmacks to Rink Rapids. Lack of, or non-use of the spray-skirt on this section will result in disqualification. 
   6. A buoyant heaving line of not less than 15 meters (50 feet) in length and at least 1/4” diameter. It must be accessible to hand.
   7. Sufficient food and fluids to sustain team members throughout the course of the race.
   8. One Bailer (bucket or pump)
   9. River Map (available for purchase in Whitehorse or from yukonbooks.com)
   10. Race Bibs to be issued by YRMPA and signed by racers.
   11. Basic First Aid Kit (www.yukonriverquest.com/firstaidkit.htm)
   12. One emergency space bivy sack per person
   13. Waterproof matches/lighter and firestarter material on the person of at least 1 member of the team.
   14. One sleeping bag per person rated to -5C.
   15. A free-standing Tent(s) to shelter all members of a team.
   16. Watertight flashlight or navigation light for night travel and signalling (required by Transport Canada) – Petzel type LED either mounted on front of boat or in use as a headlamp on a solo kayaker or bow paddler of a tandem or voyageur team. Teams are required to turn on the light between dusk and dawn (midnight to 4 a.m.) and have adequate battery power for eight or more hours.
   17. 2 extra layers of warm clothing contained in a dry bag.
   18. Backpack stove and fuel with a pot capable of boiling 16 oz. of water.
   19. Sun screen

I hate to think how heavy our 40kg boat will be once we’ve loaded it up with all this…

Being the dilligent “Bigtime Consulting” employee that I am, I thought I should probably look through the bios of the teams who scratched to see if there was anything that would indicate why teams seem to scratch.

Initially I was looking for:

* What percentage of teams scratch

* What stage they tend to scratch at (early, late, mid-way through the race)

* Whether they have extensive experience of the race (or other races), or whether they are obviously novice crews

Looking at the data it’s difficult to draw conclusions (which in itself is actually quite good news) :-).

Of the 98 teams that started in 2008, a total of 19 teams scratched after leaving Whitehorse. This makes something like a 20% scratch rate. One team even scratched before leaving Whitehorse - I guess nerves or illness might be an issue in the immediate lead-up.

The key points that people tend to scratch are between Little Salmon and Fort Selkirk, with 17 scratches in that 24 hour period. Interestingly, most of the scratches seem to have happened during the day-time of the second day; presumably it is the effort of working through the night that causes a lull the next day.

Of the teams who did scratch, a total of 8 seem to have had previous experience in adventure races, but just 6 of those had extensive paddling experience (by my reading of their bios, however subjective that might be). 5 of these teams stated a time as part of their objective.

So we should:

Watch out of the second day; it seems like this is the time many teams crash and have to scratch their race.

Keep a wise head on, and avoid hubris; this is a very long and arduous race. It doesn’t seem to be the case that experience sees racers through; the mix of teams who scratched doesn’t indicate that they were those least likely to be fully prepared.

My parents are going to be providing support.  Found a useful post at the yukon river forum on their ‘duties’.  Sounds a gruelling couple of days for them too..

Vsupport writes….

Actually being the support person on the race can be a lot of fun. I’ve been part of the support crew for one of the voyageur teams for many years now and every race has been fun and very tiring.
Things to do to make it a good experience;

1. Show up for the pre-race check in and meetings and the get together the day before the race.
2. Everyone one needs a bit of extra help down on the launching site before the start of the race, so be ready to help not just your crew but others.
3. Once the racers are off get in your vehicle and drive too just past the Tahkni River Bridge and watch the teams paddle by.
4. After that take a leisurely drive to the Carmacks checkpoint/stop and if you are tenting find a good site.
5. The racers will start arriving in Carmacks early the next day and if you want to help at the landing site, volunteers are always needed, put have a lifejacket with you if you are going to be helping on the dock. Carmacks checkpoint is crowded during the day so getting things ready for your race can be a bit of an organizing nightmare. Lots of people from all over the world here so its interesting wandering around talking to people if you like doing that sort of thing. It can be very hot or very wet and cold in Carmacks so come prepared with adequate clothing.
6. Once your team leaves, you can break camp and easily be at Five Finger rapids in time to see them come through and if you still have the energy to drive to Minto landing you can watch them go by there as well. Minto landing is the last place until Dawson that you will be able to see the teams past by. If you have made it this, far you are probably dead tired and I would suggest sleeping here and then taking a leisurely drive to Dawson the next day were you could then catch some more sleep.
7. In Dawson, you wait and check times at the finish line, but you can also be down at the landing area helping teams get their boats and gear out of the water.
8. Once your team arrives, they will need your help so you will be very busy taking care of them.

It is all a matter of what you want to make of the experience, but if you do it, right you are as much of the race as the racers themselves. By the way it’s a balmy -29c here in the Yukon where I live.

Found this linked to from Surfskibc’s Weblog.  A trainer has put up his coaching videos dissecting paddle strokes of top paddlers and some beginners.  It’s a great resource.  A list of his videos can be found here.  Here’s one of my favs with a good sound track and some rather nice paddlers.

The Boat: an extra 4″ makes all the difference!! having the seats wider apart could also reduce the bow high aspect of your current boat which means it isn’t cutting through the water properly. As for the width (and length for that matter), it is the waterline shape and dimensions that matter not the overall size, so I hope that 4″ is not sticking out up front above the water line :-).

Paddles:  the extra weight of split paddles is usually in the middle of the shaft which is not the bit your moving about as much as say the blades and the swing weight of the blades may still be the same, if this makes you feel better about that.

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.

So it’s probably worth mentioning that Toons has taken it upon himself to wage a one-man class war. I don’t think there’s many kayakers who love rowers, but the do seem to be blissfully unaware of the rules of the river at times. It can even get to the point at which (like today) their coaches actually get vaguely embarrassed and start mentioning to the legion of 8s, scullers and pairs careering down both sides of the river that there’s a kayak, obeying the rules and hogging the bit of the river immediately next to the towpath which they really ought to look out for.

I don’t particularly see the point of installing a cox in a boat if they’re about half the size of the crew, and therefore can’t see past the halfwit, pondlife muscle-marys in front of them to steer in a sensible direction. Likewise, one would have thought that a sensible approach when this is clearly a constraint might be to have the coach in the accompanying boat look out ahead. This, however, isn’t the case, and in the concentration required in order for them to watch people pulling hard on pieces of wood, they lose all spatial awareness and regularly barge us out of the way and into the bank.

I put all this down to ignorance, and the fact that it’s a sport that attracts people looking for a pursuit with a very low intellectual content. Toons has another theory. For Dave, every rower is called either Tarquin or Sebastian and rows for Eton old boys. It’s not a class war, but Toon’s abuse at the passing rowers is taking on a socialist slant.

This may be simply because he’s a bit more eloquent than me. Usually when they pass all I can do is grunt, swear and look at the clock. However, I’d like to think that Toons will carry on in this vein all the way down the Yukon. I’m looking forwards to overthrowing the bourgois Grizzly bear regime, and freeing the benign otter proletariat. Hopefully a bolshevik vigour will keep Dave going once the lack of sleep and halucinations set in. I’m bringing a stereo and some Soviet marching songs.

A good friend of mine at work recently won a prize for writing a paper (and presenting it) around how to adapt some key principles developed in the book “The way of the cockroach” by Craig Hovey. Although I’ve not read the book itself, I’m trying to use a bit more method in my approach to training, so I thought I’d see if I can use some of these ideas to make our training more efficient. Over the next few weeks/months I think we’re going to try to use some of the project management methodology that Toons and I use at work to help continuously improve the gain from our training.

One of the great difficulties I find is being able to learn from my mistakes when training; methodology is a way round that. It should help us to deal with the real difficulties of doing a race like this i.e.:

* Keeping the goals small and achievable

* Managing the logistics

* Recognising what we’ve done well and is working for us, but also removing the work that we do which isn’t useful.

I’ll leave the detail around the methodology itself to Toons; he’s the expert. Hopefully the posts in the future will have a bit of structure to them, and this should help us to document our journey as well as focus on the most important things.

So; “the way of the roach”, interpreted for extreme kayak racing:

1) You have nothing to fear but yourself: The biggest obstacle to us, throughout our training and our race I feel will be our own mental state. Physically this is a huge challenge, but if we can remain positive and constructive throughout we’ll succeed. Morale in a bag (haribo) may be required…:-P

2) Don’t always listen to your heart: With such a long preparation schedule it’s really easy to feel guilty about not going to the gym. Toons and I are fairly motivated people, and I often find myself feeling physically exhausted but still pushing myself really hard in the gym. Sometimes you just have to listen to what your body is telling you; when it says it’s tired it usually is. So far we’ve avoided injury, but I’m going to make a really big effort to make sure I’m pragmatic about the risks I take around overtraining. It’s something I want to make doubly sure I avoid.

3) Always be the last bug standing: I’m concious at this point that we need to be ready for a marathon, not a sprint. This isn’t a 6 week training schedule, and if we cut ourselves off from the world then we won’t be human at the end of it. We’ve made fairly big sacrifices (teetotal toons, swigging a spinach smoothie every morning probably more so than myself…!), but I’m really looking forwards to the breaks we’ve put in the diary. Bring on the surf trip, when we’ll probably do extensive Keanu Reaves impersonations whilst bouncing over body-boarders in the white stuff.

4) Even the smallest opening can be a huge opportunity: We need to be sure we’re making the most of our time. Over such a long training schedule, small things might make all the difference. I’m really keen to get our turnaround times down; half an hour each training session will really reduce the overhead of training on our personal lives over the weekend.

5) Feast where others see only garbage: Yes, protein shakes may taste like a blend of flour and cocoa powder but they are a necessary evil. We may even get some muscles at some point.

6) Grow your eyes in the back of your head: There’s no point in us being the size of He-Man if we’re not in time, and paddling with good technique. It’s crucially important that we look out for each other, and spot technique flaws in our own paddling. Attention to the bits of the stroke we don’t normally consider is probably pretty important. For proof we haven’t been able to do this so far, please see attached picture… admittedly taken after a punishing 90 min run.

7) Move while your enemies mull: Yep, 9am Sunday morning starts.

Rest up to wreak havoc: The biggest thing that has helped me so far has been nice long periods of sleep, helping to get my head and my body in the right place. It helps that most days I’m eating constantly up until the moment I go to bed…

9) Don’t be there when the lights come on: We need to make sure we’re not seen by the club to be taking advantage of their facilities, even though (to be fair), we’re in and out of the boathouse constantly over the weekends. To that end we’ve been working on clearing up, drying and generally keeping the boathouse tidy over the period. Hopefully that’ll keep the guardians of all things BCC happy.

On a more serious note, the guy who wrote the white paper made a much better job of it than I’ve done this… It’s really awesome to be associated with people who are at the cutting edge, and writing stuff accepted by the global test community at the big corporate I work in. All credit to him for doing such sterling work and giving me something to nick an idea from!