I met Joe downtown yesterday morning for an 80-minute paddle in the harbor. We paddled easy, and I tried to will my stiff upper back to loosen up. Last night I did one of my tub-soaking-and-stretching recovery sessions, and I'll do another this evening.
As I've mentioned before, I spent much of last year living out of a suitcase while the burned-out building I bought got renovated into a suitable space for living and working. During that time most of my worldly possessions were packed in boxes and stored in a variety of locations. One space was a storage room off a friend's carport. When the time came to retrieve my things, I discovered the place had a termite problem, and several boxes of books and clothes had been eaten up pretty good.
I lost several books that have proven difficult to replace. One of them was Every Crushing Stroke by three-time U.S. Olympian, three-time world cup champion, and three-time world championship silver medalist Scott Shipley. When I began poking around online for a replacement copy, I was shocked to find that used copies were selling for hundreds of dollars in some places. Fortunately, after a few months I tried again and found that Mr. Shipley himself was selling some new copies on Amazon for around thirty-five bucks.
For the last couple of evenings I've been reacquainting myself with this unique and invaluable manual of whitewater slalom training advice. Even though I'm not racing much slalom anymore and this is not a slalom-racing blog, I still look to slalom gurus like Bill Endicott and Ron Lugbill and Scott Shipley for ideas. That's partly because I simply love slalom and had some amazing experiences participating in that sport. It's also because slalom training is full of principles that apply to all other paddlesports (and all other sports, period). It is very common for top athletes in disciplines like wildwater, rodeo, extreme racing, and sometimes even flatwater sprint and marathon racing to have slalom backgrounds. I also have seen good slalom racers enter an event in another discipline "on a whim," and finish at or near the top.
The first 20 pages or so of Every Crushing Stroke is a brief account of Shipley's life as a paddler and racer, from his childhood beginnings to his perch atop the world rankings. When Shipley was a boy, Washington-DC-based racers Ron and Jon Lugbill, Davey and Cathy Hearn, and several others were in the process of reinventing the techniques, boat designs, and training methods of slalom, and dominating the world in the "new" sport they had created. These racers were known for questioning the conventional wisdom: in a now-legendary (and possibly embellished) anecdote, Jon Lugbill was in Spittal, Austria, watching the 1977 slalom world championships (he was racing only in wildwater that year, having not even made the U.S. slalom team), and was harshly criticizing the performance of the winning C1 paddler, claiming he could have done the course much faster. Of course, he was met with much scorn and derision ("Who do you think you are!? You didn't even make your own national team!"). But Lugbill stuck to his guns and two years later he was world champion in C1 himself, and would repeat that feat four more times during the 1980s.
By the time Shipley was becoming a formidable racer in his own right, the methods and philosophies of those DC-area racers had themselves become the entrenched "conventional wisdom." But Shipley was unsatisfied: his class, men's kayak, was the only one in which the U.S. had not ascended the medal podium in that otherwise glorious preceding decade. A Pacific Northwest resident, Shipley lived far from DC's nerve center of U.S. slalom training and coaching, but that turned out to be a blessing: after the U.S. Team held a training camp led by a top French coach who shared the secrets of European dominance in men's kayak, the DC-area athletes largely reverted to the methods they were used to, but Shipley, uninfluenced by the DC "groupthink" back home in the Northwest, stuck with what he had learned from the French coach and over the next couple of years made himself one of the best kayakers in the world.
My own goals, meanwhile, are more modest than Shipley's or the Lugbills' or the Hearns': I don't expect I'll be conquering the world in slalom, flatwater, or any other paddling discipline anytime soon. I'm not even sure I can improve on my results from past years--at age 46, I may have already done the best I can ever hope to do. But I'm having some fun challenging some conventional wisdom of my own.
As I've said before, I was a distance runner in high school and college, and my training in the boat has always followed that decades-old running wisdom that says you log lots and lots of steady miles in the offseason, waiting to do shorter, higher-intensity stuff until the race season is on the horizon. The science behind this method is more than plausible: the aerobic system takes the longest to develop, so you spend most of your time working on it; on top of this endurance "base" you work on your lactic and ATP-CP systems as a major competition draws near.
But under the influence of newer research, largely relayed to me by Ron Lugbill's blog, this year I've been doing a lot of shorter, faster stuff a lot earlier than I ever have before. Or, to characterize it another way, I'm spending more time working on my paddling skill and less time dwelling on what energy system I might be working at any given time. And make no mistake: paddling hard and fast is a skill. A paddler with immaculate technique at one stroke rate and intensity might have terrible technique if you double the stroke rate and intensity level.
In short, this season I'm not doing the same-old, same-old. If it makes me better, great; and if I'm no better than I was before, at least I tried something new. I guess the Battle On The Bayou race this Saturday will be my first real indication of whether what I'm doing has made any difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment