I’ve been traveling a lot this spring for my coaching job with the National Canoe Kayak Team and fortunately that means I’ve been in some pretty good places for SUP training.
Indian Harbour Beach, Florida provided miles of excellent paddling water-sheltered canals, the Banana and Indian Rivers (which can get very windy with surprisingly large choppy waves) and of course, just a kilometer away, the ocean. This meant that for eight weeks I had access to every type of condition that I would see in the Carolina Cup. It was the perfect training environment and I did my best to take full advantage of everything it had to offer.
This week I find myself in Gainesville, Georgia. Our team is here racing on the 1996 Olympic course on Lake Lanier in selections for world cup races in Portugal, Germany and Denmark throughout May. As a venue for flat water training and racing it is ideal, but at first glance it isn’t the ideal place to develop advanced SUP skills. Or is it?
Obviously I have no access to the ocean here so there is no opportunity to work on beach starts (mine need work) or downwinding or surfing. Lake Lanier is an ideal place to do flat water workouts, either long steady workouts covering great distances (the lake goes on forever) or some type of structured interval training. I’ve already done a couple of these workouts this week, and they hurt a bit given that last weekend’s Carolina Cup seems to still be in my muscles.
Yesterday I was looking for something different to do and it seemed like my options were limited until I decided to use the canoe-kayak racecourse. There’s nothing exciting about these courses for me as I’ve paddled on them all my life. But I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to paddle on the course in an entirely different way that’s possible only on a SUP.
Canoe-kayak/rowing courses are laid out on flat water over 2000m. Canoe-kayak uses the bottom 1000m while rowing uses the entire 2000m. The canoe course is divided into nine lanes, each nine meters wide. When the rowers use the course it is changed to six wider lanes. Buoys that are strung along cables that run the length of the course underwater mark the lanes, and at the Lake Lanier course they are ten meters apart. That means that on the 1000m canoe course there are 100 buoys on either side of the lane you paddle down. The photo below, though it is actually of the London 2012 Olympic course, does a pretty good job of illustrating this. You can actually see the narrow canoe lanes in the bottom half and the wider rowing lanes at the top of the course.
What better place to work on buoy turns than on a regatta course with so many buoys? I structured my workout around one lane of the course and zigzagged up the lane, doing a right shoulder turn around the first buoy on the left of the lane and a left shoulder turn around the next buoy on the right, then going back to another right shoulder turn around the buoy after that on the left side. Weaving around the buoys on either side of one lane in this fashion meant I did 50 buoy turns in each direction over the 1000m course. I only did three sets of this and found it was plenty, and then went on to do some extra steady paddling.
Obviously, doing buoy turns involves walking back and forth on my board and doing so many turns on such a tight course meant that I felt my legs burning pretty quickly. I also found that accelerating the board out of every turn mean that I was working really hard, constantly having to restart a board which had slowed in the turn. While the distance between buoys was quite short and prevented me from attaining full speed between buoys, I still found that it was quite hard work aerobically and quickly I was working close to threshold.
The first two 1000m pieces were pretty solid and I was really pleased with the quality of my turns and my ability to quickly get up to speed out of them. The last one was a little messier as my legs were like jello. I felt my feet a little less coordinated underneath me, and my paddling a little weaker. Still, I did more tight turns in a short time that in any workout I’ve ever done in my life.
I think this is a pretty good example of taking advantage of unique opportunities that your training environment may provide you. I can paddle on flat water anytime at home, but don’t often have a chance to paddle on a canoe kayak course anymore, especially on a SUP. When presented with the opportunity I took advantage of it and found a way to work on skills that are a big part of racing. in the same way that I would by doing extra beach starts when I am training at or near a beach.
Unique opportunities for training can arise from the physical environment you’re training in as well as from the people you have an opportunity to paddle with. I strongly suggest taking stock of the environment that you are training in, in an effort to see exactly what it has to offer. A smart racer will identify unique opportunities to work on specific skills needed for racing, or will use the others training in that environment to push him/her to a higher level. A smart racer will also learn from those other paddlers, particularly if they are strong in areas that the racer is weak in.
It’s fun and mentally healthy to train in different environments from time to time. It’s a great way to mentally recharge and refocus, and can be a great way to develop and perfect skills if you take the time to fully identify what your new training environment has to offer. Take a careful look around you. Are you using your training environment as well as you can?
