By now, I know I sound like a moaning stuck record when it comes to my continuing battle with head games, but if it helps anyone who is going through the same issues, then it’s worth it.
Last year I made some good progress with my confidence levels on a wave, and I started to feel more like my old self again. Still, of late I’ve taken a step backwards and I’m back to feeling like it’s an uphill struggle again. After doing EMDR therapy my mindset became more positive. I was no longer having flashbacks or visions of the day Emily passed away. But, I do seem to be having somewhat of a relapse. EMDR doesn’t solve the issue of grief, and with Christmas only just gone, quickly followed by what would have been Emily’s birthday, it’s fair to say that this is a difficult time of year. Work has also thrown me, with unreliable payments adding to my stress levels.
All of this added up is not conducive to a positive time on the river, even though theoretically being in the outdoors should be a welcome distraction. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so. On a recent Advanced First Aid course I found myself questioning every morning whether I was capable of getting through the day. I just thought about how, if Em was still here, we’d be doing the course together, or finding a way to turn it into a holiday by staying in the area for longer after the course was finished. Every morning I sat on the end of my hotel bed before I had to set off to get to the venue feeling absolutely destroyed. Thankfully, I did get through the course and I passed it, but it was a rollercoaster of emotional ride.
White Water Safety
The first aid was quickly followed by an Advanced White Water Safety course. Just the logistics of arranging for my dog to be looked after send me into a mental spin these days. I find it difficult to manage even simple areas of life logistics now. Each day feels like a battle to keep myself on track. I got through the AWWS course, but my head games were ever present, with the feeling that I was going to have an anxiety attack at any moment.
On the second day we did some stuff around Serpent’s Tail, a rapid that at one time I was thoroughly comfortable on. In recent years I’ve paddled like a total numpty on it, all tense and not getting where I want to go. It’s one thing to be learning from scratch as a beginner, but it’s another to know that you used to manage to paddle it with confidence and purpose, and now you can’t. The same goes for Town Falls in Llangollen. I’ve never had a bad experience there and the levels were such that it would have been a pretty clean ride through, yet I chickened out after seeing how bad I was on Serpent’s.
The yips/twisties in kayaking
My freestyle has also suffered a setback. I had intended for this year’s pool sessions to be a time when I was getting the Tricky Woo and maybe some combos nailed. Instead, as confirmed by my sports psychologist, Jake Brown from Mindframe Performance, I seem to be going through a kayaking version of the yips, also often known as the twisties.
What the hell is that, then? I’ve been quite surprised at how many people haven’t heard of these conditions and just give me a blank face when I mention them. The yips is generally known in golf, and it’s when someone who is experienced, and sometimes even an elite professional, will suddenly lose their ability to execute even the simplest of shots. They then end up overthinking things and it gets even worse. It’s a condition that has ended careers.
Likewise, in gymnastics it’s known as the twisties. Again, someone who is at the top of their game suddenly loses the ability to keep their spacial awareness while performing an aerial move and end up flunking it time after time.
Jake explained it to me as a person effectively going back to being a beginner, or rather having a beginner’s mindset. It happens as a result of different factors, often more than one. From performance anxiety (eg not wanting to fail in front of an audience or coach etc) to simply not having confidence in your own ability and having self doubt. In normal circumstances a learned movement just happens without thought. Much like the way you’d coordinate the use of the clutch and accelerator pedal in a manual gearbox car. You don’t think about the movement, you just do it.
The trouble is that when someone has something like the yips, they’ll start to think about the movements they need to do, and this effectively short circuits all the neural pathways that would ordinarily fire to execute the movement. The result is that you end up like a beginner, thinking about each movement you need to do as you do them. It’s like you were heading along a road on a route you know every well to get to a friends house, but then you come across an unexpected road block and diversion that takes you through a part of town that’s completely unknown to you. Now you have to think hard and work out how to get back on route, except that as you think harder about it, you just get more lost within the city.
So, how has this been affecting my freestyle? Well, for one thing I’ve gone from being capable of doing multiple cartwheel ends to rarely being capable of getting two, and quite often I can’t even complete a bow stall. The even bigger problem is that coaching doesn’t help. In fact, coaching is the absolute last thing that someone going through the yips needs, because it ends up with the participant focussing even more on the movement, which is precisely what’s causing the issue in the first place!
Jake has given me some mental tools to help get me back on track, and I’ve had more success since I’ve been employing them, although I still have a long way to go. The worst performance happens when there’s a gap in the pool and I know I only have one chance to try something before it gets too crowded again. Simply that pressure alone can make me over focus on what I’m doing and hence fail the move.
Part of the solution is simply to play without caring about the outcome, although it is easier said than done when you know you used to perform a particular movement in your sleep. But, what I have learnt is that a lot of what is happening to my freestyle is also happening with my river running, too. I’m thinking about where each stroke needs to be, where my edge needs to be etc, instead of going on many years experience of kayaking and just feeling it and letting my subconscious mind do what it already knows how to do without my manual input.
Of course, when you have self doubt, it short circuits the brain’s ability to do that. Combine that with all the other mindset issues I’m going through, and I shouldn’t be surprised that things are not going as I would have hoped they would.
The Kayaking Journal 
Thank you for writing this. I have been struggling with a similar thing in the last year and I’ve never considered to look at it from the perspective of neuro pathways. I just assumed more coaching is needed. Really gave me a lot to think about 🙂