The familiarity trap

Kayaking, like any sport, requires a modicum of skill to do well, it also requires repetition to build that skill. But, there’s a point at which we need to separate the two and understand what real skill is.

What am I talking about here? Okay, so let’s take my own practice of freestyle as an example. I have to practice most of the time on flat water, because that’s all I have close by to me. I’m still no flat water ninja, but I practice what I can, and I have good days and (very) off days. Some people can’t do any freestyle on flat water, and so in their eyes I might be seen as having some skill. To some degree that’s true, but it’s all relative. I can do what I do because I have practiced the movements over and over, and I try to advance myself by practicing unfamiliar moves as well.

To a certain extent, my practice on flat water could be seen as more drill like. Although there is still some variance, because my balance points are never exactly the same each time I practice a move, so my body still has to adapt to balance feedback. However, if I was to compare myself to other freestylers, am I skilful? Well, no, not really. I know of other freestylers who are far more skilled than I am or could ever hope to be, yet who have been doing freestyle for far less time than me, for the simple reason that they are better at throwing the moves on constantly varying moving water, where it really counts.

Sure, I can do a flat water cartwheel, and a semblance of a loop, but if you were to stick me in Twin wave or Muncher at HPP, or even inlet gate, could I pull off those same moves? The short answer is no. I can occasionally throw a loop in inlet gate mainly because it’s fairly uniform, although the last time I went there was before the pandemic nearly four years ago, so I’m not even confident I could side surf it well now!

The skill of variance

Being able to throw tricks on a wave like Twin or Muncher involves much more than just throwing the move. You have to feel what the feature is doing, and you have to position yourself in the right place, and then you need to be able to react extremely quickly when that position is right. That’s one reason why Dane Jackson is considered so skilful as a freestyler, even without a paddle. He can not only position himself with absolute precision, he can take advantage of it in the blink of an eye while others might miss the opportunity. He’s totally in tune with the water.

In other words, being truly skilful means you can apply the base skill in widely varying and changing circumstances. You can adapt on the fly and read things, and then take appropriate action without really needing to think about it. This has some relationship to the idea of the ‘flow state’, a buzz term that I’m not entirely comfortable with.

On a river there’s a similar disparity. For example, there’s the CIWW artificial white water course, and places like Tryweryn. At any given setting, CIWW rarely changes unless there’s been a major reconfiguration of the rapid blocks. Tryweryn is pretty much always the same, unless there’s the occasional 16 cumec release. In other words, you can turn up to these places and they always have the same eddies and the same waves and features. Contrast this with a river that, although it may be similar between visits, has an almost infinite variation in levels. On some rivers, a difference of only a few centimetres height can change the character of some of the features.

Then there’s the confidence aspect. It’s all very well having the base skills, but if the mindset is negative or you’re worrying about whether you’ll roll or not if you mess up, that can hold you back from even trying. Head games are a constant battle for me, the result of often anchoring back to stupid incidences, some of them happening over a decade ago! It’s an unreasonable mental position for me to take, yet it’s one I find extremely difficult to eliminate, but that’s another article entirely.

The familiarity trap

Just like flat water, places like CIWW and Tryweryn offer controlled ‘lab conditions’ for practice. But, we should always be mindful about what we are practicing for and the value of what we are doing. Tryweryn for example, has many small micro-eddies, and it’s a lot of fun to catch them. The problems begin when we’ve caught those same small eddies a million times over. Most of them require specific angles and timings that relate only to those eddies, and nowhere else on the river or anywhere else for that matter. In other words, we get good at catching very specific eddies on the Tryweryn. The same goes for places like CIWW. We get to know the lines and we can do them repeatedly, which makes us great at running CIWW, but not necessarily good at reading the water on an unfamiliar natural rapid. What starts out as skills advancement when we first achieve those moves reliably then becomes what I would call the ‘familiarity trap’.

Surfers have similar reservations about places like The Wave. The Wave in Bristol is an amazing place, and it’s great for practicing board moves like carving turns etc, and loads more. What The Wave doesn’t teach you is how to read the water, particularly on a sandy beach where there’s no consistent break, so you can spot when a wave is about to form and where you need to be to catch it. This is simply because at The Wave the waves form in exactly the same place every single time. You don’t need to think about that stuff. The waves are also exactly the same height and power, whereas in a natural environment waves vary in size and power on a constant basis.

That’s not to say that these places aren’t valuable. They are great places to keep your hand in and to have fun, but we need to be mindful not to confuse the ability to complete a specific moves through repetition and familiarity with the true skill of being able to pull off those same moves in natural, constantly variable or unfamiliar environments where we need to adapt on the fly and truly understand what’s going on.

I’m always very conscious in my practice of freestyle on flat water that it’s only one very limited component of a much wider skillset, and similar for places like CIWW and Tryweryn. But they are still very valuable if we use and think of them in the right way.