Left On A Beach

We humans are funny creatures. Our goals and aspirations capture our minds and our souls, and yet, our pursuit of those goals so often devolves into dismal drain circling as we spend all our efforts trying to improve aspects of our lives completely tangential to the capacities needed. Rock climbers, for example, need to be strong, but there is a point where every climber is strong enough and the way forward is to climb (as opposed to lifting more weights) frequently under a variety of circumstances with a spectrum of other climbers. The principal is the same for every skill sport: to improve you must actually do the sport.

Our kayak club has a fairly strict grading system. It kind of works and kind of doesn’t. People are only graded once and the criteria used to define the grading system have gradually got longer and more difficult over the years. Many people who qualified a decade ago would no longer pass the current requirements. Some of that is “scope creep,” some is age, some is deterioration in physical capacity (related to age but not a necessary corollary), and some is lack of targeted practice. A few kayak leaders want to increase, yet again, the difficulty of the grading system. Putting aside that top-down edicts rarely work, there are operational difficulties with implementation and the “solution” ultimately will not solve the problem.

Individuals, but most particularly adults, improve at skill sports because they are motivated by some larger dream or goal to improve. Treating adults like kindergarten children and attempting to enforce skill improvement never works because adults, unlike dependent children can simply walk away. Improvement, however, for many paddlers will come simply from paddling more often, in a greater variety of circumstance with a diverse group of paddlers. A day rock gardening along the coast, will demand a range of paddle strokes not required for an enclosed waters paddle around the harbour. Similarly, a coastal paddle necessitates surf landings. Exposure to these different environments will perforce trigger skill development in a naturalistic setting. If landing on a surf beach is a requirement of a particularly rewarding trip, motivation to learn that skill is high.

There is a point where the acquisition of skill in a vacuum is actually counterproductive. Skill acquisition, for most paddlers, abides by the basic rules of economics. If, for example, I spend all my time and effort (money in economics terms) on skill A, I have no resources left for skill B. The kayaker who spends an inordinate number of days practicing sweep rolls in the river is missing out on the skill development that comes from simply paddling, and risks being left behind on a beach because, while their calm water roll is top notch, they have never actually spent time paddling out through surf breaks.