Getting Uncomfortable:

Most of us when we get in a canoe or kayak do exactly the same thing, everytime, over and over and over...this is a mistake. There are at least four good reasons to change things up; one at least is physiological and the others may be a combination of the physical and psychological.

1. If you train the same way every time you go out you will successfully create a physiological rut out of which you cannot easily emerge. It is often said that if you train only long slow distance that you have effectively trained yourself to go slow. You may be able to go long, but you will go long slowly. If you train too hard you will overtrain and get hurt or be chronically fatigued. And go slow...

The heart is a muscle, a wonderful, complex, and essential muscle. The paradox of the heart is that it is a muscle that sends fuel to the muscles including the heart. So there you are pounding away in the canoe and building your biceps and triceps and deltoids and lats and trapezius and pectorals and...your heart.

If you went to the gym and did nothing but lift little weights with many repetitions with legs or arms, you would develop endurance in the muscles you were training, but not much strength. If you did nothing but lift huge weights only a few times, you might develop your power but not your endurance. The trick to making muscles really strong (powerful and capable of enduring) is to make them do work in a full range of motion and with varying levels of stress. This is true of the heart too. You have to mix it up.

I am not speaking as a physiological expert, but rather as someone who had read a fair bit about training and done some paddling and running and cycling along the way. The heart needs to train at different heart rates and under different loads in order to become stronger and more flexible. The stronger the heart the more blood it can pump in a given time period, and the more blood, the more oxygen to the other muscles so that they can make your canoe go.

2. But there is something else that happens as your heart rate climbs; you begin to stress your energy system and it responds by getting better at managing that stress. If you train at or near your lactate threshold, and occasionally beyond it in measured doses, you will begin to get your body accustomed to managing more stress, which will permit it to do more work at a higher intensity. In fact some research has revealed that the body will actually create more mitochondria (the little cell engines that allow us to do work) when it is stressed near or above the lactate threshold, or where your body is working anaerobically (a different and less effective system that cannot be maintained in a pure form for more than a few seconds). That threshold will climb. The closer it gets to your maximum heart rate the more efficient you have become. Great endurance athletes have a lactate threshold that is very close to their maximum heart rate. Think of it as horsepower in your car at or near maximum RPM.

3. The other thing that happens is that as you train your "flexibility" is that you become psychologically capable of going into the "red zone", and capable of enduring it, rather than giving up. Some people get there and go "wow ouch" or "wow I am uncomfortable". Yep it hurts. Great cycling racers like the American Tour de France yellow jersey winner Greg Lemond has said that everyone suffers but the pros suffer for a shorter period of time because they get the finish earlier. They actually probably suffer more for a shorter period of time because the more elite an athlete you are, the more you get used to suffering, and accept it, when you realize it won't kill you.

4. Finally I suggest you also need to develop not only muscle memory (the basic mechanics of the outrigger stroke) but muscle flexibility when you mix up your efforts, your speeds, your stroke rates. You have to be as happy at 56 strokes a minute as 64 stroke a minute. You may be going exactly the same speed whatever the stroke rate but you will be using a different stroke to go that same speed. That matters when the conditions call for something different. A headwind may dictate a long pull and the headwind may be so significant that you cannot up the recovery rate, so you are rating low. But when you get a tailwind you may have to make up for it by short catchy explosions but with a quickish recovery to make up time on the other canoes.

Racing canoes is like the bear story...Two guys see a bear in the woods and it starts to charge them. The guys begin to run away. The one says to the other "can we outrun it?" and the second guy says "I don't have to; I just have to run faster than you". Racing is like this. You don't race the clock; you race other crews.

You might be asking why we have not done more rate change drills and more heart flexibility workouts until now. The answer is that you cannot work these skills, these physical limiters, until you have succeeded in achieveing a mechanically good stroke. It is essential that you know what a stroke ought to look like before you start fiddling around with different rates and different efforts and varying degrees of work stress.

There is much more to this than I have included here but the thing to know is this; do not go out and paddle your canoe at 58 strokes a minute over the same course everytime you go out. It may be Zen but it will be a very slow Zen. Try shallows, head wind, buoy turns, current, tail wind, rate up over the flats, rate down, use catch drills, push off drills, surf pickle boats or the Coho waves, go play in the Tillicum chute when it is running, pull long or short, top hand high and lots of down drive or just lower arm pull with a stable and quiet top hand, rotate with stiff arms, and always always always WORK THE GLIDE. A power phase is just to get glide. Glide is the goal. Glide is the reward. Glide is the thing that matters; how fast and long your canoe goes when you are NOT pulling on the blade.

Brent