Words: Jamie Greenhalgh
Photos: Beth Morgan,
Penny Dixie,
Pete Rawlinson,
Jonah Morgan,
Nick Bennett,
Zach Basset &
Jamie Greenhalgh
Jamie Greenhalgh
Bio
Jamie is a white water kayaking coach from the United Kingdom. His business, Paddle365, delivers white water skills courses throughout the year as well as white water leadership and safety training for Paddle UK. His approach to coaching prioritises learning through adventure and challenge, and helping paddlers to feel the joy of skillful movement in a boat.
Embrace the chaos
Shut your eyes a moment and imagine you’re paddling a challenging section of white water. Sunshine, deep forests and crystal clear water. You launch and immediately begin the descent. Constant movement. Fast flows. Water runs down the paddle and laps at your deck, and you feel a sense of merging with the flow. As you paddle, you scan the water for clues about what’s to come. A surge of water on the bend. The approach to a horizon line. Which way is the water moving? Buy time by hitting the slack water or speed up toward the next target?
Each moment brings new information. A barrelling diagonal wave that leads to nowhere good. You push hard across and over, then ride the surge toward the next resting place. When paddling the river, your mind is solely focused. Each decision leads to the next move, and each move leads to the next decision. Paddle strokes flow from one to another without critical thought as intuition channels through the body and drive the boat forward.
Paddling in the mental state of flow, as described above, is one of the most fulfilling and addictive aspects of white water kayaking for a huge number of paddlers. But how do we get to the stage where this level of automation can happen? How can we arrive at the point where we can count on our technical skills to organise themselves and appear in front of us to be used without diverting precious brain power away from the river descent?
How can we hone our river reading skills to the point where we can scan and adapt our line without hesitation? Being highly skilful and adaptable in flow state might seem like the natural progression of having done a lot of technical practice, but I would argue that these adaptive skills are a separate skill area that can be trained for.
Why the unpredictable is important
White water kayaking at the edge of your ability is a challenging game where poor performances can be painful. A mainstream sports equivalent might be playing a football match where if the other team scores, you could get an electric shock, and the fans start throwing eggs at you. In an environment where failures can be such a negative experience, it’s no surprise that paddlers are often tempted to practice in a way that feels a long way away from the real thing. Rather than have to respond to changes, paddlers and coaches will often practice planned and predictable movements. Rather than link moves, the temptation will be to break everything you do into simple A to B, eddy to eddy movements. This is a problem.
If a boxer trains only on dummies before the fight, how will they know how to duck and weave around their opponent’s punches? Similarly, if that football team we referenced earlier only trains for their high-stakes matches by practising free kicks, corners and penalties, they might be in for a bumpy ride when the game kicks off.
The mismatch between the fast-paced challenges of white water river paddling and the methodical style in which paddlers often practice for it, has intrigued me for a long time and driven me to look for new exercises and practices that push our training closer to the dynamism of true river running. To replicate the challenges of white water river running, a practice should include:
- High challenge with low consequence
- Chaotic elements to force adaptive responses
- The potential for creativity
By embracing chaos, we make the mind work fast and force our skills to organise themselves and become fluid. Overleaf are a few ideas to jazz up your river running practice.
Play games
If the white water section is too easy to force you to think fast, turn your local white water course into a game zone. Playing together on the river is a great way to create a positive mindset, train adaptive skills, and have a lot of fun. I won’t make a long list of the white water paddling games I’ve come across or come up with over the years because the creativity of other paddlers (like you!) is what drives the world forward and makes it interesting, but here’s three:
Leapfrogging:
This is more like a playful paddling style than a game, but it is one of my favourite ways to train adaptive and fluid white water paddling in a group. In this style of river running, you and your friends flow down a section of white water while constantly rotating the lead paddler. Once they’ve made a move or two, the lead paddler/driver of ‘the megatrain’ will eddy out, allowing the whole team to pass them before they file back in to join the back of the pack.
If you want to train yourself to scan the river for eddies, you can set it up so that each person’s goal once at the front is to eddy out as soon as possible. If you want to train for fast-paced decision-making and finding the best downriver moves, you design it so that the front paddler must stay up front for a minimum period before ducking out.
Leapfrogging is excellent because it allows each group member to share the decision-making challenges that come with being at the front and forces those behind to maintain awareness of their spacing and surroundings and push themselves to paddle on the leader’s line. I’d recommend using this either on an easy river that you don’t know or a challenging river that you know. If you can leapfrog down one section, you stand a better chance of being able to flow smoothly down another.
HORSE:
A small group of paddlers take turns setting a trick or a move for the others to attempt one by one. When one fails, they get a letter and are one step closer to being a HORSE. I love how this game invites paddlers to showcase their strengths and face their weaknesses.
Synchro:
A small group of boaters paddle a continuous loop together in a play zone that involves flow and eddies. The key is that their continuous movement from a birds eye view should create a fun pattern. By involving a cross-over or two, you’re sure to get some clashes and tight manoeuvring around one another, and then you can add some tricks for extra points from the imaginary judges. I enjoy how this game creates light-hearted fun while opening the door to creativity and chaos.
All games can be improved on, so I’d recommend you try one of these, and then after a little while, get together and ask, “How could we make this more fun and interesting?”’ Try out new rules and new games to keep life as fresh as possible.
Use the competitive disciplines
Competition is a great way to create an extra challenge if you’re practising for river running in a setting where the river won’t be throwing down many surprises. Slalom, freestyle, and wild water racing (more exist) will all offer different challenges that will force paddlers to apply their existing technical skills to new problems and may lead them to develop some new ones. Making difficult manoeuvres fast against the clock, as in slalom, or turning a beatdown into a creative display of skill, as in freestyle, is a surefire way of sending a paddler right into a flow state and forcing the emergence of the adaptive skills and creativity that will be called upon when you get on your next challenging river.
Competition paddling is very different to river running. I know that many paddlers driven by a thirst for adventure might get completely turned off by the idea of getting serious about competition. On the other hand, it will be great for all sorts of things that apply straight across, such as composure and mental game. You might even find you like it.
Time to broaden your horizons
Routine is the enemy of dynamic paddling, and mixing it up by getting out there and exploring new areas is really healthy. Once you’ve paddled all the lines of your local river, it’s time to make plans to paddle someone else’s. There is no substitute for gaining real river running experience, and although the stakes are potentially higher, the learning moments come thicker and faster. You will also spend more time in the state of flow, testing and expanding your intuitive river running skills as described in the opening.
When approaching paddling in a new area, it’s important to make sure you take steps to give the best chance of successful adventures:
Who are you going with?
When planning a trip to paddle a new area, it will be really important to find a great crew whose capabilities and priorities align nicely with yours. If you’ve all had similar ideas about how you’d like to do things, the trip has already started well.
Have you done your homework?
When we paddle somewhere new, we feel like we’re stepping into the unknown, but nobody is really doing that. Running new rivers takes planning. Checking out guidebooks, maps, and river gauges and engaging with local paddlers to share their knowledge are just a few things that I’d consider essential for going somewhere totally new to paddle. The secret is to make stepping into the unknown feel more like stepping into the understood.
Are you prepared for rescue situations?
My favourite quote on safe decision-making comes from Mark Twain, who said, “Good judgement comes from experience, while experience comes from bad judgement.” When you push your kayaking, you will get things wrong, leading to bad situations, which is a natural part of learning. However, you will also need to fix those bad situations before you can unlock the possibility of learning from them. So make sure your white water safety skills and equipment are equal to the task you’re taking on!
The key to it all… If you want to paddle challenging stretches of white water with the fluidity and ease of a pro, then you need to let a little bit of chaos into your practice. If you can practice in the chaos, you can perform in the chaos.
