Monday photo feature

About the only picture that got taken of me on the Gauley this past weekend was this shot by Ruthie Norton, who had just arrived on the scene as her husband Curtis and I were running Pillow Rock Rapid.  Here we are down at the bottom of said rapid, I on the left and Curtis on the right.  At this moment I am soaking wet as a result of flipping next to Volkswagen Rock.

The marathon worlds

This was a remarkable month for canoe and kayak racing in the United States.  The U.S. played host to not one, but two world championships.  Of course, I attended the whitewater slalom worlds up at Deep Creek, Maryland, last weekend.  This weekend, the canoe and kayak marathon worlds took place at Oklahoma City.

Earlier in the year I had entertained thoughts of driving a big loop around the country and watching both events, but in the end I just didn't have the time or energy to do that.  It was tough to decide to skip the marathon worlds, because my friend Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, was entered in both the masters' and the open age groups.  He ended up in fifth place in Masters 50-54 and 20th in the open category.

The Oklahoma City newspaper did a nice write-up of Mike here.

The time for thinking is over. The time for doing has begun.

I'm some kind of tired after three straight days on the upper Gauley River in West Virginia.  I'm spending tonight at a motel in Grayson, Kentucky, my wet gear hung up to dry all over the place.

My friends Curtis and Ruthie, an Atlanta couple I met at the Gauley two years ago, joined me for the weekend.  I'd say I paddled reasonably well even though I felt rusty and wasn't very aggressive with any difficult moves or lines.  My back held up okay, though I could definitely feel that knot that I've had for so long.  I can't wait for my massage therapist to get his hands back on it this week.

My best day paddling was today: Ruthie decided to stay on the bank, and Curtis and I did a speedy run down the river so we could all get an early start toward home.  I think this is the best way to run a difficult river that you've run many times before: you know the lines through the rapids, and you just keep on moving without giving yourself a chance to think too much about it and get nervous.  Insignificant, Pillow Rock Rapid, Lost Paddle, Iron Ring, Sweet's Falls... we breezed through them all, and it reminded me of slalom racing, in which once you've started a run there's no longer any time to think about the moves; you just do them.

Another thought about the worlds

I'm still thinking about the slalom worlds last weekend.  Wow... I can't get over how good those paddlers are.

For most of the history of the world championships, a racer was allowed to participate in only one class.  Then, after the 2008 Olympics, I think, the ICF began to allow each athlete to race in two classes, if he wanted to.  One of the obvious results is that some C1 racers began to race in the C2 class as well.  One high-profile example was David Florence of Great Britain: already a top C1 racer (Olympic silver medal in 2008), Florence entered the 2012 Games in both C1 and C2 and came away with the silver medal in the latter class.

More recently, K1 paddlers have begun to take up the single blade.  When many-time worlds medalist kayak racer Fabien Lefevre moved from France to the United States and began competing for the U.S. team in 2013, he did so in both K1 and C1.  During the 2013 and 2014 seasons, it appeared that K1 would remain his stronger suit, but at the Deep Creek worlds this past weekend, he pulled off a stunning victory in canoe.

Meanwhile, on the women's side, Australian Jessica Fox, both of whose parents were world-champion kayakers, took up both K1 and C1 as women's C1 was added to the world championships programme in 2009.  She was soon among the world's best in both classes, and at Deep Creek she became world champion in both.

One of the interesting things about having all these kayakers coming over to C1 is that they have no problem switching sides with the paddle in C1.  In their elite-level kayaking experience they have become ambidextrous, and in C1 they can paddle on the right for moves that favor righties and on the left for moves that favor lefties (or, as Ron Lugbill suggests in this blog post about Lefevre's winning runs at Deep Creek, they can burn one set of muscles on the first half of a course and then run the second half with fresh muscles).

As I watched all this side-switching going on last weekend, it seemed to me that what was old was new again.  By the time I started whitewater canoeing at summer camp in the early 1980s, switching sides was considered unnecessary and was even frowned upon.  At that time river-running was still heavily influenced by slalom racing, and the U.S. C1 paddlers who had just begun their decade of world dominance had developed very powerful strokes across the bow that were just as effective, they claimed, as their "on-side" strokes.  Not wanting to be seen as a rube, I worked to develop good cross-strokes of my own.  My tandem canoe partner that first summer was a bossy sort who insisted he was a righty and I must paddle on the left, so over the next few years I paddled on that side and as a result, to this day I have much less coordination on my right side than on my left.  Back then I didn't care, though, because I eventually had good, solid offside strokes and in my fantasies the kayakers on the river "oohed" and "aahed" whenever I pulled off an impressive offside move.

But now, all of a sudden, some of the best C1 paddlers in the world are switching, and nobody dares call them rubes.  Switching is not only acceptable, but maybe even cool.  And it's making me wonder what other relics we might bring back.

Back in the "salad days" of whitewater racing in the 1960s and 70s, it was not uncommon for racers to compete in both slalom and wildwater from the recreational level to the world class level.  The world championships for both were held together at the same site until about 1993.  But with slalom's return to the Olympics in 1992, specialization became the rule.  Soon virtually no slalom racers were doing wildwater anymore, and in the mid-90s the wildwater worlds went to an even-numbered-year schedule and was completely separated from the slalom worlds.

Every time I watch the winter Olympics on TV, I am struck by the format of alpine skiing: there is the downhill event, the slalom event, the giant slalom event, and the "Super G" event, whatever that is, and each racer typically does them all.  I think it would be very cool if the summer games had a similar format for canoe and kayak racing--slalom, downriver, some kind of giant slalom, with each paddler doing them all.  The specialization urge has already been relaxed somewhat now that each racer is allowed to race in two classes; why not take that next step?

Alas, the summer games is already cluttered with too many sports, and canoe and kayak racing does not seem to resonate with a big enough TV audience.  In fact, I fear that slalom may not survive on the Olympic programme for the long haul.  But hey... every reality starts with a dream.  Maybe if (when?) slalom is dropped from the Olympics we can re-invent whitewater racing at the world championship level with this multi-event format.

Good old vacation time

I spent the last several days hanging around the town of Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania.  It's an interesting little town whose economy in based largely on tourism--specifically, rafting and bicycling.  The rafting takes place on the Youghiogheny River, of course, while cyclists pass through town on the Great Allegheny Passage, an old railroad bed converted to a bike trail that goes from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC.

During this stretch, I spent the morning outside a raft company that doesn't seem to mind me mooching their wi-fi signal.  The rafting season was winding down, so the mood was pretty laid back.  I sat at a picnic table and checked e-mail and Face Book and stuff like that, and I also did my stretching and rehab exercises, and wrote some postcards to friends and family.  The ideal vacation activities, in other words.

After lunch I was in the boat.  On Monday I did "The Loop": the Yough makes a big goose-neck bend right at Ohiopyle, and a paddler can run this couple of miles of river and then use a trail across the inside of the bend to hike a half-mile or so back to where his vehicle is parked.

On Tuesday and yesterday I paddled the Yough from Ohiopyle to a place called Bruner Run about seven and a half miles downriver.  I ran shuttle with my bike by way of the Great Allegheny Passage. Driving down to Bruner Run I took a road with many steep hills that would have been a real epic to travel on my bike; but the old railroad bed of The Passage follows the river and never exceeds 1.5% in grade, so it was a delightful way to run shuttle.

My upper back felt quite sore while paddling the first two days, but yesterday it wasn't as bad.  I can still feel that knot, and I hope two or three more massage sessions will work that out when I get back home.  In the meantime I will continue to stretch and do my exercises and avail myself of whatever youthful flexibility that provides.

I spent last night at the Sunset Inn in Friendsville, Maryland.  It was nice to sleep in a bed after four night of camping at Ohiopyle State Park.  This morning I plan to drive up and see if the upper Youghiogheny has a water release today.  I have a feeling it will not--I think normally it runs on Friday and Monday--but it can't hurt to check.  My friends coming up from Atlanta for the weekend have decided not to come farther north than the Gauley, so if I'm going to run the upper Yough it will have to be today, if that's possible.

Slalom worlds debrief

Well, what all can I say about my weekend at the slalom world championships?  All kinds of things come to mind.

The worlds were actually a four-day event.  Qualification rounds took place on Thursday and Friday.  Arriving on Saturday morning, I got to watch the semifinal and final rounds and team races for each of the five classes (men's and women's single canoe, men's and women's kayak, and men's double canoe).  I'm actually glad I wasn't there all four days, because being a spectator at a slalom race is surprisingly exhausting.  Saturday was very sunny and I got a bit of sunburn, and on Sunday it was quite breezy with a couple of heavy showers, and that was a drain on my energy.  And of course I spent much of each day on my feet, wandering up and down the course.

The sport has changed fairly dramatically since I was racing.  It might not be obvious to the person whose exposure to the sport is confined to watching the Olympics on TV every four years, but to anybody who has participated, the differences are glaring.  One of the biggest is the length of the boats: four meters had always been the minimum for C1s and K1s until 2005, when the International Canoe Federation reduced it to three and a half meters.  It's a good thing the boats are shorter, because the courses have become much tighter.  In a typical race run today, there are few moments when the paddler is not pivoting his boat or working his edges.  And world class races are held almost exclusively on artificial whitewater courses rather than natural rivers.  This gives the race organizers maximum control over water flow; it makes it possible to hold elite-caliber events in Olympic cities that have no whitewater rivers nearby; and it's more televisable.  Personally I prefer a natural river, but it seems I don't often get my way in these modern times.

The individual world champions for 2014 are as follows: men's single canoe: Fabien Lefevre, United States; men's double canoe: Luka Bozic and Saso Taljat, Slovenia; ladies' kayak: Jessica Fox, Australia; men's kayak: Boris Neveu, France; ladies' single canoe: Jessica Fox, Australia.  But impressing me more than anybody else was the Czech Republic's Štěpánka Hilgertová.  Why?  Because she is 47 years old, just like me.  I've mentioned in recent posts how my back ailments are making feel more mortal than ever, and it was inspiring to see Hilgertová sailing into the finals alongside women less than half her age.  I believe Hilgertová's first world championships was the 1989 edition on Maryland's Savage River; since then she has won two world championships and two Olympic gold medals.  This weekend, she finished about two and a half seconds out of the medals in fourth place.

Quite a few former U.S. team members showed up to see the worlds take place in their country for only the second time.  The ones I saw included Davey Hearn, Bill Hearn, Jennifer Hearn, John Sweet, Jon Lugbill, Ron Lugbill, Bill Endicott, Scott Shipley, Adam Clawson, Rebecca Giddens, Eric Giddens, Lecky Haller, Boo Turner, Jason Beakes, Scott Strausbaugh, Dana Chladek, Brett Heyl, Aleta McCleskey, Joe Jacobi, Kent Ford, Matt Taylor, Kara Weld, Sam Davis, and Norm Bellingham (he was actually on the national team in flatwater, but he started out in slalom).  There were probably a few others I either didn't see or am just forgetting.  And then there were quite a few former racers like me, who weren't good enough to make the national team but still love being around the sport.

Whew... time to decompress.  I am spending much of this week in the town of Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, some 30 miles north of Deep Creek.  I am camping in Ohiopyle State Park, and I plan to do some paddling on the Class III lower Youghiogheny River, making sure I still have a modicum of whitewater skill before I join a couple of friends to take on the Class IV-V upper Youghiogheny and upper Gauley Rivers this weekend.

Right this minute I am sitting outside a raft company building, using their wi-fi signal to catch up on this blog and respond to some e-mails and do a few other Internet-related things.  Later today I hope to do a round of my rehab exercises, which I've neglected since leaving home.  I may or may not try to get on the river today--it's turned chilly today and I'll have to see how my back is feeling.  The rest of the week is supposed to be warmer.

Monday photo feature

Here are a couple of photos for this fine Monday.

I spent Saturday and Sunday watching the world championships of whitewater slalom up in Deep Creek, Maryland.  Quite a few people I raced with in the 1990s and early 2000s were in attendance.  At left above is C1 world champion and Olympian Davey Hearn, one of the true pioneers and all-around nice guys in this sport.  With him are his alarmingly-tall son, Jesse, and his brother Bill, who did some very respectable racing of his own back in the 1980s.

And here, Davey's wife Jennifer poses with the earliest star of whitewater racing in the U.S., John Sweet.  Mr. Sweet was a many-time national champion in both slalom and wildwater racing.  He was also in on first-descents of quite a few rivers in the Mid-Atlantic region, including the Gauley.  Sweet's Falls on the upper Gauley is named after him.  Many former racers showed up in their old national team gear, and none of it was more awesome than the 70s-era apparel that Mr. Sweet has on in this photo.

I'm going to the worlds (as a spectator)!

Yesterday I went ahead and bought tickets to the Saturday and Sunday sessions of the whitewater slalom world championships up at Deep Creek, Maryland.  So I guess I'm really going now.  I'd been waffling because of a variety of issues (my back, some impending construction work on my building, a few little woodworking projects), but life is short... right?  I'll get to see semifinal and final action over these two days.  After that I plan to stay in the area for another week and do some paddling on the Youghiogheny and Gauley Rivers.

As I've mentioned before, this is the second time the slalom worlds have been held in the U.S. in the event's 65-year history.  The first time was 1989, just a few miles from Deep Creek on Maryland's Savage River.  That was one great weekend for the U.S. team.  The team put an exclamation point on its decade-long dominance of the C1 class, taking first, second, and fourth in the individual competition and winning the team competition.  Jon Lugbill won the individual title for a record fifth time, with Davey Hearn taking the silver for the fifth time (each time, he was second to Lugbill).  And the U.S. athletes acquitted themselves well in the other three classes: Dana Chladek and Cathy Hearn won silver and bronze, respectively, in ladies' kayak; Jamie McEwan and Lecky Haller teamed up for a fourth-place finish in C2; and Rich Weiss should have won the silver in men's kayak (a controversial five-second gate-touch penalty, later refuted by video evidence, knocked him down to fifth).  Weiss was later awarded the International Olympic Committee's Jack Kelly "Fair Play" award for not making a big deal out of this injustice.

Davey Hearn's wife Jennifer has posted some pretty awesome photos of those 1989 world championships on her Face Book page.  I don't know how to link to them here, but it's worth going to Face Book and having a look (she's "Hearn Jennifer" on Face Book; whether you can view the photos may depend on her privacy settings).

Meanwhile, I'm still doing my rehab exercises and got in a round of the September strength routine yesterday.  I was supposed to get a massage this morning, but the therapist had to cancel again for reasons related to his dad's health.  I plan to leave town tomorrow after lunch, so it remains to be seen whether I'll get a massage before then.

Monday photo feature

Here's another whitewater slalom photo in honor of the world championships starting this Wednesday at Deep Creek, Maryland.  The slalom worlds have been going on since 1949, but this is only the second time that they have been held in the United States.

In this photo, which I took at a World Cup series event on the Ocoee River in 2000, Cathy Hearn of the U.S. glides into an upstream gate.  One of the finest athletes the U.S. has ever had in any sport, in my opinion, Cathy grew up in an era when it wasn't particularly fashionable for women to be good at sports.  Going into the 1977 world championships at Spittal, Austria, a U.S. athlete had never medaled, but Cathy and two teammates struck bronze in the women's kayak team event.  Then, at the 1979 worlds at Jonquiere, Quebec, Cathy took triple gold, winning the slalom individual, slalom team, and downriver team events.  She went on to win numerous medals over the next two decades: in slalom individual competition, she took silver in 1981, bronze in 1989, and bronze in 1997; in slalom team competition, she won bronze in 1981, bronze in 1987, silver in 1989, and silver in 1993.  She also was on the U.S. Olympic team in 1992 and 1996; she almost certainly would have been an Olympian in '80, '84, and '88 as well, except that slalom was not restored to the Olympic programme until 1992.

Still rehabbing

In the last several days I've done a couple of rounds of the September strength routine and paddled my whitewater boat in the harbor.  A front came through Friday and the weather has cooled off... finally.

I went back to the massage therapist Friday, and he did some deep work on that stubborn knot in my left shoulder.  He said my "trap" muscles are very strong and highly developed (from a lifetime of paddling, I reckon), and he had to spend much of the session working on them to get them to relax enough that he could get at the knot underneath.

We talked more about the exercises I've been doing.  The muscles that open up my shoulders have become very tight, he said, and the exercises are designed to loosen them up and "rip those fibers apart."  I love the imagery.

The pain of inflation

This morning I did the September strength routine.  When I last did it I noticed that the exercise ball was a little soft, so I aired it up before working out today.  A couple of the exercises were quite a bit more difficult as a result.

I was supposed to get another massage this morning--the first in a couple of weeks because the therapist was on vacation last week--but the therapist had to cancel because of a family emergency this morning.  I certainly hope all is well with him, and I hope we can reschedule soon because I can still feel a hint of that knot up in my left shoulder area.

Monday photo feature

With the world championships for whitewater slalom less than two weeks away, I reckon I'd better post a photo or two of this fascinating paddlesport discipline.  Most of my slalom racing took place in the 1990s, and one of the world's top racers of that era was the man pictured here, Scott Shipley of the United States.  Shipley won three world cup series titles and was a three-time silver medalist at the world championships.  The scene in this photo, taken by yours truly, is actually a long way from the international limelight.  It's a relatively rinky-dink event on the White Salmon River at the tiny hamlet of Husum, Washington, in the summer of 1998.  Shipley held off a challenge from another elite racer, Eric Jackson, to win that day.

Shipley's boat here is four meters long, the minimum length back then.  After the 2004 Olympics, the International Canoe Federation shortened the minimum length to three and a half meters.

My home gym

Today I did another round of the September strength routine, which, as I've mentioned before, includes my rehab exercises and some core work on the exercise ball.

I've never belonged to a gym or a fitness club.  Back when I was in school, and later when I was a school teacher, I could use whatever weight room facilities there were on campus.  But these days, my house is my gym.  Allow me to guide you on a tour of my equipment.

My exercise ball.

 My gymnast's rings.

My smartbell.

My rubber bands.

Assorted dumbbells and other weights.

My ten-pound medicine ball.  I used to have a five-pounder too, but I seem to have mislaid it.

And finally, the kittycats who keep me company while I work out.  Irrelevant, you say?  Well, pardon me, but this is my blog, and I can post pictures of my kittycats on it if I want to.

Work and play

I have continued my rehab exercises, my exercise ball drills, and my whitewater boat paddling this week.

In the boat I've been trying to put as little stress on my arms as possible, and do most of the work with my legs, hips, and torso muscles.  For example, when practicing sweep strokes, I plant the blade in the water and try not to move it from that spot.  This means that I don't jerk it with my arms, but use my core muscles to move the boat around the "pivot point" of the blade's location in the water.

My traditional low-brace C1 roll seems pretty reliable, paddling on the left (my dominant side) or paddling on the right.  I'm still struggling with the cross-brace roll, however.  About a week ago I managed two or three successful ones, but I haven't been able to do one since.

Staying in motion

I have been doing my rehab exercises pretty religiously, and I do think they're helping.  The pain is not gone--it lingers along my spine up near the base of my neck--but that knot that's persisted since March seems to have gone down, and I hope several more sessions of deep massage will work it out. The therapist is on vacation this week, so my next massage is scheduled for next week.

Yesterday afternoon I did some more drills in my whitewater boat down at the harbor.  I'm keeping these sessions short--30 minutes--and doing the drills as precisely as I can.  For the first 20 minutes I do stroke drills, mostly ones like compound reverse strokes and sweeping draw strokes that require me to open up my shoulders.

Then for 10 minutes I practice rolls.  I think many experienced paddlers tend to take their rolls for granted and forget that they need practice like any other skill.  Over the last few years, during which I've paddled whitewater only very occasionally, my roll has been adequate but certainly not crisp.  In these sessions I've been trying to make nice, clean hipsnaps and not put any pressure on my paddle brace until the boat is upright.  I've been rolling on both sides even though my dominant side is my left and that's what I use in any serious whitewater.  I've also tried to do offside rolls on a cross-brace, but have succeeded at a low rate there.  Twenty years ago I was quite good at such rolls, but I'm noticeably less flexible these days.

This morning I started up a new strength routine.  Besides my rehab exercises, I'm trying to do a lot of core work this fall, and this month I'm doing some exercise ball drills.  There's a good video of some exercise ball drills here, featuring Chinese whitewater slalom Olympian Jing-Jing Li.

Monday photo feature

Here I am doing some surfing on the Caney Fork River in Tennessee's Rock Island State Park back in 1998.  That boat is still my main whitewater river-running craft, and lately I've been taking it down to the harbor to do some drills and rolls and other things that I hope will sharpen me up for some whitewater boating later this month.  I also hope this activity will help correct some of the muscle imbalances that have caused my back pain; if nothing else, it's a fun, non-stressful way to spend some of these hot late-summer days.  Photo by Sonny Salomon.