Everyone should know the concept of the minimum effective dose. The smallest amount of anything, be it medication, supplementation or training, that produces the desired effect. As a concept, it is worthwhile to think about when planning your training for a big event or trip, but, in practice, it is impossible to determine in advance, and probably equally infeasible to estimate afterwards. You might get through the trip but perhaps, with a little more or a little less training, you might have been faster, or less tired, or more able to do extra distance.
After a big trip, I always think about whether or not my training was adequate. Less often, I wonder if my nutrition was adequate. Nutrition on trips is much harder to control than training. I would love a steak, salad and potatoes every night on a sea kayak trip but it is just not possible. Nutrition often falls into the category of just doing your best while recognising that best is nowhere near ideal.
Before we started and certainly once we finished paddling from Strahan to Southport, I was convinced I would never undertake such a trip again. It was not so much the trip that put me off but the training. As I enter my 7th decade on this planet (I’m 61 this year), I realise, with a good dollop of dismay, that while I can continue to stay active and do lots of things, my ability to recover from “lots of things” is reduced and takes more time; steak, salad and potatoes for dinner every night notwithstanding. The corollary is, if I’m doing more kayak training, I have to decrease the other activities I do in order to recover. Trail running, bush walking and climbing all fell away in the months leading up to our Tasmania paddle trip.
My schedule was roughly – every seven to ten days (dependent on recovery): one long paddle day up to 50 kilometres, one day working speed: 12 to 15 kilometres on the ocean maintaining as fast a pace as possible (trying to maintain a pace of about 8 km/hr), one day on skills, and one day paddling in “Tasmania like conditions” – wind, rain, big swells (or all the former together). Additionally, I strength trained three days per week, albeit focusing on maintenance not building, and, I ran the Saturday Park Run for metabolic conditioning.
Doug and I did all our training, with the exception of two days, on the ocean. While I think it is possible to train for flat-water paddling on the ocean, I don’t believe one trains appropriately for ocean paddling on flat-water. The two are different in so many ways, not least getting comfortable paddling in difficult conditions.
Various friends and acquaintances had different ideas about how we should train for such a trip, and these varied from doing all our paddling with loaded boats, to training almost entirely using intervals or sessions of no more than three hours. As none of these folks had successfully completed a trip like ours, I felt confident giving these ideas no further space in my mind. Talk, as Mark Twight said, minus action equals zero. Additionally , there is fairly well supported research evidence to suggest that none of these suggestions is actually a good way to prepare for long endurance events.
Overall, I think my training was effective, although towards the end, a good deal of mental discipline was required as I was thoroughly sick of spending so much time in a small boat on a big ocean, week after week, and month after month. I don’t think I could have got away with less, but I’ll never really know. I was certainly tired after a long days paddle with a loaded boat but not overwhelmingly so. Weather days were occasionally welcome!
When the trip was over, I felt surprisingly “run down.” It’s hard to explain, but I did not have my usual energy and, although we did some bush walking afterwards, the bush walking trip we did was much less than I would normally have been satisfied with doing. I lost three kilograms on the paddling trip, a percent of my body weight that would be declared a rampant success for any weight loss program or treatment. In retrospect, I think the weight loss was the cause of my general run down feeling.
It’s not quite three weeks since we finished up our big trip with an easy 18 kilometre paddle into Southport on a sunny and calm day. I swore I would never do a trip that required that much preparation and training again, but, already this morning, as I strolled along my local beach on a drizzly morning, I started thinking, maybe it wasn’t so bad.
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