Racing tomorrow; advice for paddlers from the world of music?

I've made something of a spur-of-the-moment decision: I'm going to enter a race on the lower Atchafalaya River down at Patterson, Louisiana, tomorrow.  It's a set of 3-mile races--one for solo boats, one for tandem boats, and one for bigger team boats.  I'll at least do the solo race and then see if anybody wants me to fill a seat in a team boat.

I attended this event back in 2017, and had considered doing it this year before deciding it was "one thing too many" for this phase of the season.  But then the race at Vicksburg got called off, and so here I am in the Bayou country.  I'm spending tonight in a motel up the road at Donaldson, Louisiana.

Before I left home this morning I did a round of the strength routine--just the leg and core exercises.  My arms feel about the same as they felt yesterday.

On the drive down here I heard something interesting on the radio that I should share before I forget about it.  Brian Eno, who has made a successful career making synthesized music and producing records for other artists, was a guest on the "Fresh Air" program on National Public Radio.  Asked by interviewer Terry Gross if he's worried about being bored because he's "too good" at what he does, Eno replied,

...it's not so much the over-proficiency that's a problem. It's the lack of alertness that goes with knowing how to do something well. Once you know how to do something quite well or you're familiar with doing it, a lot of times you automatically are falling into routines. You know exactly how that works. You switch it on. You do this. You do that. You do that. And all of that is sort of done on automatic. And while you're on automatic, you're not listening any longer. 

One of the reasons that people who don't play instruments well are sometimes able to do surprising things with them is that they're listening at a much more basic level than skilled performers are. They start asking questions like, hey, does this sound interesting? Yeah, it does - at quite a different point from where the professional performer would. He's already been through that. He's already working at a level where he considers all those questions have been answered long ago. They're not interesting to him anymore. 

So I think this is the problem. It's not proficiency. It's the switching off of your alertness that goes with thinking you are proficient on something. So the trick is to think of ways of surprising yourself back into hearing freshly again. And that's something that really requires thinking and techniques of thinking. It's something you can do quite consciously. You can set yourself exercises that trick you into hearing something differently.

Do we paddlers do something like this too--stop paying attention to what we're doing at a basic level once we think we have the basics mastered?  Consider the simple act of getting in the boat: I've done it so many times that I rarely think about it anymore; I just hop in the boat and go.  But when I'm teaching a beginner how to get in the boat, I'm reminded that there are in fact several steps: put your feet in first, put one hand on the back of the cockpit and the other on the dock, slide your rear end into the seat, and so on.  This is as basic an example as there is, but I have a feeling we tend to get complacent about some of the more important things, too.  I get to feeling really good about my forward stroke, but every time I have a more elite-level athlete or coach look at it, he or she always sees something I could be doing better.  I think occasionally breaking your technique down to its component parts, analyzing each one, and putting it all back together is a worthwhile thing to do.


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