So you’re thinking about getting a new board and know what its predominant use will be – flat water racing, racing in all types of conditions, or paddling downwind. You’re either looking for something highly specialized or something that is an all-round board that’s good in a variety of conditions. You’ve done your research. You’ve talked to other paddlers about the boards they’re on. You’ve looked at the catalogs of various manufacturers and read reviews on the internet. You’re about as well informed as you can be without actually trying the boards you’ve researched.
As we discussed last week, the most important thing to do after your research has narrowed your selection down to perhaps three or four boards is to try them. But what, specifically, can you do when you try them to truly find out which performs best for you? Ideally you want objective information about each one so you can make the most informed decision rather than one based on subjective feelings alone which can be deceiving.
If you’re looking for a downwind or ocean-only board it’s pretty hard to come up with some type of totally objective test. The problem with testing on the ocean is that conditions, even when they appear to be pretty consistent, are actually pretty random compared to flat water. While in flat water you can easily ensure conditions are the same from the test of one board to the next, it’s really difficult to do that on the ocean. The ocean is always changing and you just can’t do your testing with the same degree of control as you can on the flats. So lets look at appropriate protocols for testing to find the best flat water or all round board.
The first thing to consider is the type of event you want to compete in on your new board. If it is a 200m sprint on flat water you’re going to want to come up with a totally different test than if you are racing a 13-mile race in the ocean or in a mix of ocean and flat conditions like the Carolina Cup.
When I started my search for a new board I was looking for the ideal board for next year’s Carolina Cup. It’s the one big race my work schedule lets me do every year. It’s also easy logistically as it’s not too far away and I know I can race there on the board I train on. I’d love to race in more of the biggest events, but most of them conflict with my coaching responsibilities. If I’m looking for a board for the Carolina Cup, I’m looking for something that is good in the ocean. It has to be a good downwind board, a good surfing race board and yet fast enough in the flats that it isn’t a liability. While someone like Connor Baxter can race Carolina on a flat-water board like the Starboard Sprint, I honestly can’t see myself doing that. Given my relative strengths and weaknesses, I think it’s more ideal for me to approach Carolina from the opposite perspective – racing on a board that is a bit more all around in its characteristics and is going to help me in the ocean without penalizing me too much in the flats.
I decided to test four different boards based on what I thought would fit that description and that I could access to test. I knew I could use the advanced accelerometer/GPS that we are using with the Canadian Canoe Kayak Team to collect data during my testing. I was therefore confident that I’d be able to make a pretty accurate assessment of which board was fastest for me in the flats. Then I’d have to determine more subjectively which one allowed me to paddle the best in rough water conditions. That said, I still had to come up with a protocol for testing that would provide me with the answers to the primary question I was asking: “Which board would be the ideal Carolina Cup ride for me?”
The Carolina Cup is about 13 miles. It’s about 7 ½ miles in the flats and 5 ½ miles in the ocean, with the possibility of some surfing in one of the inlets and the need to deal with lots of chop and strong tidal conditions in the inlets as well. It’s a beach start and finish so you’ve got to ride something you feel comfortable on pounding out through the surf and surfing back to shore. Given the prevalence of flat water in the race and my feeling of mediocrity in the flats in the 2015 Carolina Cup, I decided the first thing I needed to do was find out which of these “all round” boards I was testing performed best for me in the flats. Once I was able to rank their flat-water performance I could experiment with them in big water.
Although a board’s max speed is interesting and provides an indication of how fast you might be able to make it go off the beach, it really isn’t relevant for 7 ½ miles of flat water. I wanted to do something that would test traveling speed and not just speed in a short sprint. I realized that if I was testing more than one board a session, and ideally you should in order to minimize the impact changing conditions might have on your results, I couldn’t make the test too long or fatigue would become a factor that affected the test results. After some consideration I came up with the following test protocol:
Test
|
Testing for
|
3 minutes at 7-mile
race pace, controlling stroke rate at 46 strokes/minute
|
·
Ave.
velocity
·
Peak
velocity
·
Ave.
distance per stroke
|
1 minute all out
|
·
Ave.
velocity
·
Peak
Velocity
·
Time
to peak velocity
·
Distance
to peak velocity
·
Ave.
distance per stroke
|
Obviously, you’re interested in velocity when you’re trying to figure out which board is fastest. I think distance per stroke is important as well as it tells you how far you can make the board move when the blade is in the water and how well the board glides between strokes which is going to be really important in a long race. In the three minute race pace test, I controlled stroke rate at the approximate rate I’d use for an 8 mile race as I was interested in knowing how the board would perform at the pace I’d be paddling at in Carolina. And, because even when using a StrokeCoach or metronome, it is hard to maintain identical stroke rates for the duration of a three-minute test from test to test I decided to normalize stroke rate by calculating a velocity/stroke ratio for each test run.
In the one-minute all out test, time and distance to peak velocity indicate how quickly you can make the board accelerate. These are important pieces of information which shed light not only on how you might be able to make the board perform on the start, but also how well you might be able to accelerate to catch a draft during the race, catch a bump on the ocean or pull away from someone at some point on the course.
I tested each board against each other and against the board I used in the 2015 Carolina Cup and was able to rank my performance in the flats on each. I found that each board was pretty easy to paddle on the flats and required little adjustment time on flat water so I was confident in the quality of the results I got for each board. Once I had obtained a ranking on flat water I was able to experiment with the top ranking boards on Lake Ontario is various choppy and downwind conditions. This testing was more subjective as with constantly changing water conditions it was too difficult to do a test with a suitable level of control. As it turned out the board that performed best for me on the flats seemed easily superior in most of the rough water conditions I tested in.
Clearly I’m fortunate to have access to some technology that makes this type of comparative testing pretty precise and extremely easy. But with a GPS, a stopwatch(or just the chrono on your GPS), and something that measures stroke rate like an NK StrokeCoach you can pretty easily do a similar test yourself. You’re just going to have to do more math than I did when you interpret your data. In fact, you don’t even need a StrokeCoach as you can simply count strokes for each test run and then calculate a velocity/stroke ratio like I did to normalize stroke rate when you are compiling your results.
When developing your own test protocol here are some things to consider:
-
What boards are you
testing? Do some research and determine
a maximum of three or four
boards that you want to test. You can’t test everything. - Determine what questions you’re
trying to answer. Are you looking for
the fastest board in a
200m sprint or for a 5-mile race? There is a big difference and you’re making an assumption
that may not necessarily be true if you assume without testing that the board that’s faster in the
sprint will be faster over distance. - What variables are you going to
control? What exactly are you going to
measure? To me it
makes sense to try to control stroke rate from board to board as you test. You can measure
time over a certain distance or distance travelled over a given time. If you count strokes this
can give you what you need to determine distance per stroke. You can determine velocity by calculating distance travelled in a given time or simply go to your GPS data to see if it can
provide it for you (it will depend on the type/model of GPS you’re using) -
Where are you going to
test? You need flat water with constant
current (preferably none) and
pretty constant wind conditions. You’ll need it to be straight for whatever distance you’re
testing over. -
What is your schedule for
testing? You can’t test more that a
couple of boards in a day without
fatigue becoming a factor that will affect results. You’ve got to test boards back-to-back on the
same day to get a true comparison. Comparing tests on different days can bring conditions
into question. Wind, current and water temperature will all affect board speed. You can’t
assume these conditions will be the same from one day to the next. But you can test by
elimination.
For example if a is faster than b on day 1 and c is faster than a on day 2 then you can assume c
is also faster than b, etc. -
Are you certain of your
results? When you narrow it down to what
you think are the two
fastest boards, test them against each other again to be sure. This is especially necessary if
you’ve established the two fastest boards by elimination and haven’t tested them back-to-back
on the same day.
There are some things I discovered in testing and experimenting with various boards that definitely seem to affect whether or not the board was a good match for me. I may be stretching it a bit to draw conclusions about them, but I think they might be useful for you to consider when you’re trying out boards. I’ll share them in next week’s Tip of the Week
