2004-05-24 Mary Jordath at Rookie Night

When my best friend, Kevin Shriver, and I started racing, he thought I knew how to paddle better than him because I had been paddling canoes for more than 15 years.  In the beginning, Kevin used to listen to what I said to do, until we discovered that we didn’t know how to race.  Of course, that took us a few years and a lot of hard lessons to learn.  We were both 35 years old then and still near the prime of our physical condition. In one of those first hard lessons, we spent an hour and forty five minutes trying to pass a couple of skinny armed teenage girls in a racing canoe with black carbon fiber paddles in a race on Lake Phalen.  We would almost catch them and then we would fall back again when we got to the shallows and our wider canoe dogged down in the suck water.   They crossed the finish line just ahead of us and our wives laughed at us when they heard.

We were at the back of the canoe racing pack. Then, we decided that we knew the problem.  It was the canoe.  It couldn’t be that we didn’t know how to race, or that we weren’t working hard enough.   So we borrowed a faster canoe.  Then when we didn’t win some more races, we decided it was our straight shaft paddles.  So we bought some $85 bent shaft wooden paddles.  Then when we didn’t win some more races, we decided it was our canoe again.  So Kevin bought us a faster Jensen built woodstrip racing canoe called “Uff Da”.  It was named for the sound Gene Jensen and his partner made when they had run the canoe into a stump and came to a dead stop real fast.  

Then when we didn’t win some more races, we decided it was our paddles again.  So we bought some lighter carbon fiber Black Bart paddles.  We still couldn’t beat a married couple in their mid-fifties who regularly competed in the Hoigaards canoe races.  At this point, even though we wouldn’t openly admit it to each other, we each decided it was the other person that was holding us back.   Kevin wanted me to work out more and do some running to get in better condition.  I was convinced that Kevin’s paddling frequency was not fast enough. 

At nearly 50 years old now, I am finally began to realize that it wasn’t the equipment, or the canoe, or the physical conditioning, or the other person that was holding us back from winning races. To win at the top level marathon canoe races, we needed all those things.  However, the really good canoe racers can beat many local Minnesota canoe racing teams without those things.   It really boils down to the fact that we still hadn’t learned how to paddle as efficiently as possible.

Once you learn to paddle as efficiently as possible, you can start adding the other things and get better and better.  But until then, you can actually benefit from having slower canoes, heavier paddles, and a lack of physical conditioning.  A person in top physical condition with lots of muscle strength doesn’t have the sensitivity to learn how to paddle efficiently.  It’s too easy to use your arm muscles until they wear out.  That’s when you start getting passed by the more efficient paddlers who are a lot older and more out of shape.

Meanwhile, I tried to explain to Mary how to use her torso to paddle.  Since she had a lot of kayak paddling experience, she already had a better understanding of how to rotate her torso and use her arms like a solid horseshoe holding the paddle shaft.  On the way downstream, she paid attention.  We turned back upstream early before the pack made it to the buoy.  I told Mary it was not time to think anymore and made her paddle faster and harder.  We were able to keep up with the other canoes with experienced people in both front and back.  Mary said she was coming back.