2004-06-28 Tim Risdal at Rookie Night

Tim listened very carefully as I gave my usual lecture on how to paddle.  Tom Noles stepped in to help explain the stroke.  We aren’t the fastest canoe racers, but we’ve both spent a lot of years learning what we do know.  You don’t necessarily have to be able to do something to understand the theory.  Understanding theory is only one part.  It’s not even a necessary part for those lucky gifted athletes.  However, it is a necessary part for those of us older and less athletically gifted to be competitive.  You can make the most of your limited strength and stamina by learning the theory of efficient motion.  Then there is also the problem of having the motivation to work hard.  Efficiency combined with hard work can produce a successful competitor. 

Once on the water, Tim carefully tried to follow the instructions he just heard while the other paddlers around us just paddled like normal people.  He was doing what Tom and I had told him, but he looked like he was doing a slow motion caricature of a paddler.   I started offering slight modifications.  “You don’t need to bring the paddle blade so far up in the air on the return stroke.”  “Think about the blade going downward instead of backward.”  “Think about your arms and shoulders moving together like a big horseshoe holding the paddle.”  We stayed behind the rest of the other 10 canoes.  By the time we had gone 2 miles, Tim’s stroke started looking better and better.

On the way back upstream, I told him to stop thinking and just paddle at a faster pace.  He was still able to keep most of the form of the stroke.  We were fighting over the wakes of other canoes and keeping up with some of them.  Peter Hanson was a bit close to shore in the woodstrip solo racer he borrowed from Tom Noles and the canoe wakes flipped him over in shallow water.  It sounded like the canoe hit a rock, but it didn’t.  Tom was not happy that he loaned his canoe out.

“Deadhead!” warned Ed Arenz as we crossed his stern wake.  BANG!!! we jolted to an instant stop from about 4 miles per hour.  My 1 inch diameter aluminum foot brace snapped in two as my full weight hit it.  We hit the floating end of a mostly submerged and waterlogged 4-inch diameter post and drove the other end down into the mud at the bottom of the river.  If we hadn’t hit it just as we were putting the paddle blades in the water, we would have flipped the canoe, but we miraculously stayed upright.  I asked Tim if there was water coming in from the bow because I was sure that the wood strip canoe had to be broken.  Other canoes caught us as we started paddling again to overcome our unexpected gift of inertia.   

Back at the parking lot, mosquitoes swarmed on us while we checked the bow of the canoe.  I couldn’t believe there was no damage from the impact.  Tim thanked me and said he would be back next week.  It was good to have someone be such a good student.  We dumped the water and I tied the canoe on the van in a hurry.  I took off before I could get bit by any more mosquitoes.