I continue to get in the boat a few times each week. Some days I'm rarin' to go, and other days I don't feel much giddy-up at all.
This week we've had a run of very hot weather. We've hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit at least a couple of times. Going out and paddling is sort of my outside time for the day when it's like that; the rest of the day, especially when the temperature peaks in the afternoon, I'm sticking to the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible.
The oppressive heat motivates me to get good and wet. This is definitely the time of year for practicing remounts. And nothing feels better in this weather than a cool hose bath on the dock after paddling.
Of course, the most fun way to get wet is surfing some wakes. I had a couple of opportunities to do that earlier this past week; one barge rig in particular was generating some very nice waves. But these waves reminded me how important balance is: a number of times I let waves get away because I was too off-balance to execute the strokes I needed to.
Balance is something I've always struggled with to some degree. Or, to put it another way, one of the ways elite paddlers separate themselves from everybody else is through their ability to execute strokes even when their bodies are in the most awkward, off-balance positions. It's not surprising to me that a lot of world-class paddlesport athletes did some gymnastics when they were younger, or diving, or some other activity that requires some acrobatic maneuvering. U.S. slalom racer Casey Eichfeld, who is currently hoping to make his fifth Olympic team in 2028, did some ballet dancing when he was a kid.
That's not my background at all. I was never that kid who was always turning cartwheels, or doing backflips, or showing off tricks from the high diving board. Even doing a simple dive was something I couldn't really manage: throwing my whole body into an upside-down position was just beyond me. Aside from that, I wasn't really athletic at all until I reached middle school, when I found that endurance-oriented sports (namely distance running) were what I was good at.
But around that same time I found that I really enjoyed navigating rivers in a canoe. Some of the people I was doing it with paddled kayaks and knew how to roll, and that made me want to learn to do that, too. I spent the next few summers trying to get my roll down, and the sensation of being upside down, heels over head, was not easy to deal with for this non-acrobat. But eventually I figured it out, and my whitewater skill level took off from there, once I was no longer so worried about swimming whenever I flipped.
Mind you, I still would never be mistaken for an acrobat. The ability to roll is really just the bare minimum for paddling whitewater at a high level. Because the surface of a whitewater river (and also the ocean, which I would get into paddling later) is not flat, a paddler must constantly adjust his center of gravity to stay in control. Elite-level whitewater (and ocean) paddlers have a keen awareness of their positions in three-dimensional space that I've just never been able to achieve.
But before my readers smother me in pity, I'll just note that years of trying my best have resulted in at least a modicum of competence. When I paddled a double surfski with Jasper Mocke in South Africa last January, Jasper remarked that I was much better than their average camp attendee at moving my hips with the motions of the boat and not resorting to braces to keep myself balanced.
This story has a familiar moral: you never know what you might achieve if you just keep going at it. Even though these days my life is full of all the usual fallout from a death in the family--cleaning out the house, sorting out personal effects, probating the will, all that stuff--I'm still making time to get in the boat and, at the very least, go through the motions.
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