Fighting head games

Head games are a part of kayaking, but they can reach a point where the sport just isn’t fun any more.

I love kayaking. I loved kayaking before I even did it, having wanted to try it since I were a wee lad. I still love kayaking now, or at least the thought of it. However, 2021 was a huge blow for my partner and I. The advent of the pandemic the year before was bad enough, but early last year we were served a blow that threw a wrecking ball through our lives.

At first we thought Emily had Covid, but through her work she was regularly tested and she was negative on multiple occasions, but as her breathing got progressively worse over a few weeks, multiple doctors diagnosed her with asthma. Eventually we took her to the emergency department at the local hospital where she was diagnosed with heart failure. She spent multiple weeks there while they tried to discover what had caused it. The long story short is that she was diagnosed with Sarcoma, a very rare form of the C word (I refuse to even write the word).

What is already extremely rare was made rarer by its location, in her heart, the left ventricle to be precise. And worse, it had spread. Consider that Sarcoma only makes up only a small percentage of all C cases generally, what my partner has makes up only 0.02% of that. Oncologists, cardiac specialists and consultants will go entire careers without ever encountering a case like this, and in some cases they have never even heard of it. It’s vanishingly rare, and ever since that point of its discovery our lives have been ruled every single day by it, and the gruelling treatment she is having to undergo.

Kayaking isn’t the same

I still try to go kayaking. Emily tells me to keep going, but without my adventure partner it just isn’t the same. In ordinary times we do everything together. We go hiking, we go climbing, we go kayaking, bike riding, the list goes on. So when I’m out on the water everything just seems empty, without that spark of enjoyment it used to have. I still keep trying my flat water freestyle locally and in the pool, but those long drives to and from the river for trips are just soulless without her by my side. Plus of course I am always worried about her while I am away.

It’s a ‘first world problem’ in the grand scheme of things, and completely insignificant, but it won’t be surprising to learn that my skill level on the water has also taken a nose dive. It had already taken a hit due to Covid restrictions, but it is now worse. My key strokes and boof strokes are mistimed, with poor technique, I don’t have the same confidence to arc into drops like I once did, I’m blowing eddy moves I used to do with ease, I’m generally tense in the boat, and I’m lacking the confidence to even do tailies in the flow. It’s as if I’ve reverted back to being a beginner again, and it is very, very frustrating. I know what I want to do, and what I need to do, but it just isn’t happening.

I know that research shows that skills are never truly lost. They are inside you somewhere and just need to resurface through practice, but as I say, it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of what’s been happening. But everything feeds into everything else and makes a self fuelling circle. What happens in our personal lives has a direct effect on how we are on the water. It’s nothing to do with skill level, but everything to do with how we are feeling within ourselves.

Somebody for who life is fine, or even going extremely well, will quite often have a much more positive attitude to the way they paddle and how they mess about on the water. When I think back to when I was paddling at my best, I’d just started going out with Emily, my work was going well, and I was spending a ton of time on the water mixing it up constantly between practicing slalom, attempting freestyle, and river running. I was never going to be Aniol Serrasolses, but I generally felt confident on the water and if I wanted to make a move or a position on the river, I generally could.

But to get to that point I had to get through another down period just after my dad passed away in 2012. Once again I felt really good and I was making good progress, and then that hit me like a train. It was during the period following that when I had the shittest swim of my life, a recirculation on the Swale. Even before that, I was getting on rivers with a really dark feeling inside of impending doom. Not a great place to be when the idea is to be having fun. So after that incident I decided to really dial everything back and try to just enjoy kayaking for the sake of kayaking, regardless of the grade. I took the pressure off myself to feel like I should be running certain rivers or grades. I started to view my technique errors on the river for the silly things they were instead of as major problems with my paddling. Far better to be someone who could own grade 3 than to survive down grade 4/5 or starting the day feeling like they were going to die.

In short I probably need to go back and listen to my younger self right now when it comes to techniques since I’ve started to take the skill level drop to heart a bit too much. I no longer have the desire to work towards harder rivers. I’ve been in enough stupid hairy situations and known enough people now lost to have pointless delusions of paddling grandeur.

Why have I just typed all this? I don’t really know. It’s kind of a therapy in itself. But I suppose if it has a purpose it is to say that if your boating isn’t going as you’d like, if you are lacking confidence you once had, or you feel like you’re taking a backwards step, take a look at what’s going on in your life right now and see where you are generally. It’s most likely not your skill level that’s the problem. The effects of what’s happening in our personal lives can reach far and wide into everything we do.