By Corran Addison
It’s not because you’re old that you can no longer do the things you used to do. It’s because you stopped doing them.
Corran Addison is a regular contributor to the Paddler magazine and owns Soul Waterman
Mixing it up
From when I was a pre-teen, to my 30th birthday, I was squarely focused on kayaking. Sure, I snowboarded, and surfed, and rode bicycles, but those were distractions from kayaking. Every waking opportunity I had, I went kayaking. It seemed to pay off.
By the time I was 30, I’d been to the Olympics, I had three world championship medals, a world waterfall record, two dozen first descents and had invented the planing hulled kayak. That’s not too shabby I suppose!
I would argue however, that in many ways I’ve accomplished more since my 40th birthday (I’m now 50). I’ve raced superbike motorcycles with factory support, made finals in the world cup in Hawaii for SUP surfing, won the toughest SUP race on earth (the Dusi Marathon), surfed 40-foot waves, and run 20-foot waterfalls on a SUP.
In hindsight, if I’d done these things as well as kayaked as obsessively as I did when I was in my teens and 20s, I believe I would ultimately have been a better kayaker for it.
The evidence is there. I surfed and snowboarded just enough in my early career to borrow design ideas from both of those sports (the Fury had sidecut, and a surfing type hull), and many of the freestyle moves I invented in the 90s and 2000s were adapted from these sports.
More important than borrowing design or technique ideas from other sports however (unless that’s your job), is that doing other sports develops other muscles, new reaction times and solutions to new situations that can come up in your kayak, better balance and a wider perspective of your padding in general.
Dan Gavere, one of the 1990’s top freestyle paddlers, was also a professional snowboarder. Jimi Blakeney, also a top freestyle paddler was a pro-skater. Renowned extreme kayakers, Alan Ellard and Willy Kern are top rate extreme skiers.
But even those that didn’t stray far from kayaking mixed it up. World freestyle medalists Scott Shipley and Eric Jackson were both Olympic slalom kayakers. Steve Fisher was a flat water sprint and marathon kayaker. Norbert Sattler, the 1973 world slalom champion was also an extreme kayaker, and is responsible for having invented the ‘splitwheel’ in the late 1970s (a cartwheel that changes direction in mid move).
There are of course plenty of fantastic freestyle, slalom, or extreme kayakers who don’t dally much outside of their chosen discipline. But it is my belief that if they did, they’d be even better paddlers as a result.
Certainly, kayaking disciplines like slalom, or even better, something like sprint kayaking or surf ski paddling, improves fundamental baseline skills like the forward stroke in ways that are almost impossible to learn and perfect if you’re paddling only freestyle or creek kayaks. It’s one of the reasons I have my five-year old son paddling a surf ski; to work on his forward stroke and balance. These are skills that will serve him well later in his paddling career (as will his snowboarding, and even riding motorcycles). At five, his forward stroke is already better than half of all white water kayakers, regardless of how long they’ve been paddling.
As multiple Olympic sprint champion, Gregg Barton, once told me, “Learn to paddle a sprint kayak. It’ll improve your slalom paddling in ways no amount of slalom training ever will.” And he was right.
SUP paddling has in fact done wonders for my kayaking, in ways both foreseen and unforeseen. Racing paddleboards taught me a lot about reach, catch, rotation and balance all combined into one. Running white water on a paddleboard has vastly increased my balance, and more importantly, the subtly of balance and edging. While I’m ‘over the hill’ when it comes to any kind of serious competitive kayaking, I believe I’m a more subtle and refined kayaker today than I was at the peak of my career: if I’d had the skill toolbox then that I have today, I can only imagine where my paddling might have gone.
SUP paddling has also taught me to remain calm in the water. I never swam much as a kayaker. Since about 1982, I can count on one hand the number of times I swam out of a kayak, averaging about 10-15 years between swims. As a result, I was never a ‘good swimmer’. I don’t mean my swimming technique – I competed in high school. I mean my head. When I did swim, it was such a novel experience, that it was somewhat panicked.
Pounded in massive surf
Spending weeks at a time in Hawaii getting pounded in massive surf, along with pushing my boundaries in white water SUP paddling (which is paramount to swimming class 4-5 white water all day), meant that I got used to being in the water, in unpleasant situations, and I am now very calm as a result. Where once I was terrified of swimming (and luckily never swam somewhere that required a calm, settled mind to survive), it could well have happened, and I was ill-equipped to deal with it should it have happened.
Being held under for 20 seconds at a time at the North Shores’ notorious Wiamea in 20-foot surf, taking wave after wave on the head, with no end to the beating in sight, forces you to remain composed and calculated.
Racing motorcycles taught me to deal with fear. You think standing at the top of a dangerous rapid is scary? Try sitting on a machine that has a higher power to weight ratio than a Trident intercontinental ballistic missile, approaching a 80km/hr hairpin corner at 260km/hr with another bike alongside, playing a game of chicken to see who can break last and get the position into the corner. That’ll re-define fear for you!
Racing motorcycles also taught me to multi-task; one foot is changing gears, the other is feathering the rear break, one hand is easing the clutch and the other is playing the game of rolling off the gas and applying the front break; your main stopping power.
While your hands and feet are doing that, your legs are shifting you off the seat so you can hang off the bike, your outer knee is gripping the tank, your inner knee is sliding along the asphalt giving you feedback as to what the bikes suspension is doing, while your mind is making lightning fast calculations about when to roll off throttle, break, slide off the bike, feather the break through the corner, all the while gauging your speed relative to the tyres ability to stick to the asphalt.
And all of that with someone else doing the same alongside, just inches from you – hopefully a willing dance partner.
Subtleties
I’m not saying you need to risk your life to be a better paddler. That’s just part of who I am – I like scary sports. But even something as simple as snowboarding inbounds, or surfing chest high waves, will greatly improve your paddling. Surfing has a weight shift subtlety that kayaking simply does not encourage. The smallest changes of foot position, weight shift, bending or unbending knees, makes significant changes to how a board will go through a turn. Learning this in a kayak is very hard, but transferring it to your kayaking is not. Once you’ve learned these subtleties, and felt first hand how it changes performance, the motivation to apply it to paddling is natural.
You’re also not limited to other extreme sports. Gymnastics or Yoga contributes more than you would think to understand your body and what it can do. Diving competitively in high school allowed me to try new kayaking acrobatics (like the Pan Am for example) as I already had the muscle memory from similar twists and rotations acquired diving. Even sports like football or tennis help, improving hand/eye coordination.
Mixing it up has also helped me with age. Since I am well into the backside of the curve of my padding career, meaning basically that every day I am less good than I once was, doing all these other complimentary sports keeps my eye off that unfortunate reality, while still experiencing the excitement of learning; both the sports I’m doing, and what those newly acquired skills bring to my paddling, even this late in my career.
A better paddler than I had been
I found, briefly as I approached 40, that the reality that I could no longer do in a kayak what I used to be able to do, was affecting my desire to go paddling. The less I paddled, so the faster the inevitable downward spiral of paddling skills became. I realized that it’s not because you’re old that you can no longer do the things you used to do – it’s because you stopped doing them. As a result I drifted into almost full-time surfing, then SUP paddling (for my watersports). However, it was when I moved back to the greatest kayaking place in the world, Montreal, Canada, that I got back into a kayak, and realized that I was a better paddler than I had been when I almost quit a decade before, all thanks to the other sports I’d been doing.
Learn from my experience, whether you’re a young up and coming paddler who aspires to greatness, or an old cat like me, who just wants to feel like I still learn something every time I go out.
