Sometimes It is Not Even Fun

It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun and sometimes it’s not even fun. We are bumping our way up the Murramarang coast in our sea kayaks. The forecast morning southerlies switched early and so we are plugging into a 10 knot northeasterly from the get go. At North Head, where we leave the semi-sheltered waters of the bay and paddle out into the open ocean there are two swells, one northerly and one southerly. On top of that colliding mess is a rambunctious sea left over from the strong winds of the last couple of days. Calling the seas confused is an understatement; befuddled, bemused, bewildered, baffled might be more appropriate.

A kilometre of so beyond North Head I start to feel rather queasy, a feeling which increases the further north we go as the jostling in the kayak increases. We are off-shore far enough that trying to keep my eyes on the horizon that keeps disappearing as we fall into a trough is difficult and looking at the sea horizon is nausea inducing.

Truthfully, I am a bit tired. Saturday was a haul into a moderately strong wind in steep seas and then, because I am fearful of losing all my muscle mass from endurance training in the kayak, I strength trained on Sunday.

As we paddle north, I think about one of my young relatives who said, after running a marathon, that she “was tired of structured training.” I remember thinking at the time, as I juggle staying fit for sea kayaking, rock climbing, trail running and bushwalking, that training for one event, a simple one at that, for four to six months sounded like a snap. After 30 plus years of training, I have little sympathy.

Some days are hard and fun in a weird kind of way, and some days you have to persevere even when it is not fun at all.

First Real Distance Day: Richmond Beach

It is only when we get a couple of kilometres out into the bay that we start to feel the wind. The weather tracking stations are recording NNE winds in the range of 15 to 20 knots, and I have the familiar feeling of being back into training mode. Before we went to South Australia, we spent a lot of time paddling into the wind; which is good mental and physical training.

At North Head, the seas are steep, over a metre high, curling white at the top. We decide to make Richmond Beach our turn around point. Landing is generally easy unless there is a big southeasterly swell, and the beach is less steep than others along the Murramarang Coast.

We paddle in to check Oakey Beach, where the swell almost always dumps onto the beach, and then, with a little shelter from the wind, we continue north to Richmond Beach. I feel strong enough to continue to Durras, or at least further north, but today is the first real day of distance kayak training and I am leery of over-reaching early and ending up with an injury. At almost 60, I no longer believe I am bulletproof.

With the wind behind us, we make fast time back to North Head. There are a couple of small boats out, evidence that the Christmas holiday rush is building up on the south coast. Today is the kind of day when we would normally be alone on the ocean.

The five kilometres back to our home bay is the strangest I have paddled in the dozens and dozens of paddles I have done across the bay. There is clapotis all the way, so that the kayaks begin to surf down a wind wave and then hit a small wall of waves coming in the opposite direction. This is perplexing. The current just does not run that strongly out of the Bay and the Clyde River is long past peak. The current effects may be due to the wind over the land, which is blowing WNW at 15 knots. The result is that we have a bit of a headwind in both directions, doubling the training effect.

Dancing With Fear

R is rising up and down in the break zone. One hand grasps her paddle, the other the over-turned kayak. She is 100 or so metres off-shore. Far enough that we cannot help her and I have to zoom right in with my camera to take a photo. I feel a bit guilty. There is nothing pleasant about failing five attempts at a roll in the surf and eventually wet exiting, finding yourself far from shore, no help at hand, a long swim in; the swim of shame that hurts as much from defeat as it does from taking a beating in the incessantly breaking waves. I know, I have done it so many times.  

The last few days have been a blur of paddling in big swells and windy conditions that culminated here, on a windswept empty beach with a decent swell rolling in and a messy sea whipped up by northerly winds.

This is my fourth day paddling in a row. I pack my gear the night before, in the morning, I get up, give myself a pep talk and head out kayaking, each day doing something I dread, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. Mostly, I am trying to get my roll, which is reliable on both sides in reasonable conditions, bomb-proof when tossed about in the surf. I have failed so many times that envisaging success is getting harder and harder, but is essential for success. If you don’t think you can do something, you are certainly right.

I have been thinking a lot about fear and habits, learning and confidence lately. One thing I have learnt in this life is that you don’t change yourself by force of will, you change by habit. If you want to get fit, lose weight, write a book, become a kayaker, you have to put in place the habits that fit people, lean people, authors and kayakers practice. First the habits, then the belief – “I am a fit person/lean person/author/kayaker,” and finally, if you can keep the habits going through easy days and hard weeks, you eventually become fit, lean, a writer or a kayaker.

But humans respond to aversive stimuli no differently to any other biological animal and if the habit you are building day by day involves an immediate but negative reward continuing to pursue the habit goes against all our evolutionary drives and requires a certain degree of mental tenacity to persist with.

Faff your roll in the surf, bail out, get beaten about the head by the kayak and the surf, swim into shore through a rip towing a 5 metre boat full of water with one hand and grasping a paddle in the other, empty boat, repeat, requires the unthinking persistence of a ferret on the scent of a rabbit. Dreading getting back in the boat in the morning seems a not unreasonable response.

And then, there is fear. Coincidentally, the day after I read about using immediate aversive rewards to help rewire unhelpful habits in James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits” and realised that my dread of rolling in the surf was supported by science, I read the text below that Will Gadd (well known Canadian alpine climber, kayaker, general bad-ass) wrote about fear:

Fear is not the enemy, or to “be overcome.” It’s one of the most powerful tools I have for surviving and thriving in daily life and high-stakes environments—if I choose to engage, dance with it. Listen to it, understand it, learn and grow with it, use it to change. Or ignore it, understand less, shrink mentally, die either slowly from living in fear, or quickly because my mind shuts down when it should be open.

I used to feel ill before I competed in anything. I had a bag of fears bigger than Santa’s gift bag, and it was hard to move with that load. I finally stopped and asked, “Why?” I feared the results. I feared climbing/flying/paddling like shit in front of small or massive crowds. I feared so many things I couldn't focus on the act of competing. And that was the answer: I was worried about the wrong stuff. I started worrying about the right stuff. It didn’t make the fear go way, but it drove me to train harder, stop worrying about results, and perform at my best. Overcoming the fear and competing wasn’t enough; understanding it and using it was. I use that same tool for new routes, presentations, business pitches, now, whatever scares me: Listen to it. Talk with fear. Use it strip away the irrelevant and focus. Time to dance with it again.

Fear is not the enemy. It’s a focusing lens that allows me to see myself and my situation. Or blinds me to the same. It’s the same lens, but I see through it differently depending on who I am that day.

No one “overcomes” fear. At best we can temporarily ignore it. That is not a victory, it’s a delayed defeat. It’s the crux battle pushed into the future, and it just gets bigger and harder to kill.

Hello fear, let’s dance. It's never the same dance, we're gonna make a new one up together today. Anyone else dancing?

My dance with fear has been a form of exposure therapy. Capsize, roll – or not – repeat, over and over. Each time, I get more comfortable, I take a bit longer to set up, I focus on floating the paddle over the water, I relax, sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but the important part is to set up and try again. Start in small surf, build up to bigger surf. Eventually, if I can keep the habit streak going, I will be a kayaker who rolls in the surf.

R, in the meantime, has finally let go of the kayak, which loaded with water now, hurtles to the beach on a series of slamming waves. Doug and I weave about, ready to catch the boat, but not get hit in the process. R, with a hand free now, swims into shore, scrambles up onto the beach, her own dance with fear over.

Slot Hunting

This year the kayak squad Christmas party was at Bittangabee Bay. Three of us arrived early with the idea of paddling somewhere. That somewhere turned into paddling north towards Saltwater Bay. Initially, we thought we would go as far as Saltwater Bay and practice some surf landings but once we had paddled out of Bittangabee Bay we found a very low swell and the game of slot hunting was on.

There is rarely a slot, cave or gauntlet that Nick won't paddle into, particularly when in a plastic boat in low swell conditions so we made our way up the coast, backing into slots and caves, sometimes paddling in bow first and turning around in calm pools behind rock walls. Once we found that the slot we thought was a straight in gauntlet was actually a small rock island and we were able to paddle in one side, turn and paddle out the other.

While Nick and I were slot hunting, Doug was walking along the cliff top doing some cave hunting and managed to scramble down small ledges to a big cave with a gauntlet in front. When we all met back at Bittangabee Bay, and heard about the cave, Nick and I, started to worry that we had missed on of the gauntlets. Nick was so concerned, that next morning he dashed along the cliffs to make sure we had indeed paddled into the pool behind the gauntlet. Phew, we did, a fact that became clear looking at Doug's pictures after the event.

On Sunday, we had a “social” paddle with 16 kayakers out on the water. Somehow, Nick and I missed the entire group because again, the swell was low and the allure of all those caves and slots was just too much so we slowly paddled south to Green Cape, poking into everything we could. A few kilometres from Green Cape we caught up with Doug who had been left behind by the social group as he too was slot scouting.

Finally, there was no more cliff line and we were in the protected water just to the north of Green Cape. The sea off-shore was lumpy and we could see a line of white caps marching across the horizon. No trip to Green Cape is complete without sticking your bow out around the point into the almost always rough water. With a solid southwesterly wind blowing, the sea off Green Cape was churned up into a steeply peaking sea. Within a few minutes we were all wet through from the boats bashing into the seas and the wind blowing spray off our paddles into our faces.

We turned tail, paddled back catching the occasional wave and were back on the beach as the social paddlers were swimming. After lunch, Doug went off to Green Cape Lighthouse and walked back along the Light to Light track while I took my bouldering pad and shoes down on to the rock platforms south of Bittangabee Bay. There is THE best bouldering down there and I had a happy few hours until I felt a wee bit too tired being so high above my one bouldering pad with no spotter and it was time to go back to camp.

All Photos: DB

December Challenge: One Roll Per Side For The Day Of The Month

I am obsessed with two things right now, getting my Sea Skills and rock climbing. We have had so much rain that I actually have not climbed outside for a couple of weeks – except for sessions on my home wall. Hopefully that will change. I tidied up a couple of new bouldering areas on Monday and so I am looking forward to spending a few hours there. The hot weather is coming, however, and it will be time to pick cool, cloudy days for climbing. Sweating buckets and greasing off holds in high humidity with the sun beating down is not conducive to “sending the proj.”

The other obsession is Sea Skills which is why I am out paddling in bad weather and spending a lot of time surfing the kayak. And rolling, lots of rolling and surfing, my two weak areas. Today, in between catching waves, I probably did about 30 rolls, so I started thinking why not have a December challenge. Every day I have to roll once on each side for the day of the month. That is, two rolls (one each side) on the first, right through to 31 rolls on each side on December 31. Doug is not into it, but he said he would eat two blackberries (our brambles are loaded with fruit) for each day of the month. Doug's challenge sounds significantly less character building than mine.

A Time For Thinking, A Time For Doing

 “A destination and route provided to your RP (responsible person). Stick with it.” This is the advice provided on Backcountry Skiing Canada. I thought that advice was stupid when I read it over a decade a go (an acquaintance of mine runs the site) and my thought has not changed to this day. I certainly agree with Benjamin Franklin that “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail,” but, in uncontrolled outdoor environments conditions are not necessarily what you anticipated when forging your plan from the comfort of your home. Snow and avalanche conditions may be wildly different than anticipated and even the other members of your group, who looked strong and fit on paper, may not turn out to be quite as you expected. So plans should always be amenable to change.

Knowing when to change plans can be difficult. Seth Godin has written an entire book about this. When I first started climbing, I changed plans a lot. I backed off leads and mountains, generally because I was scared. Being a bit scared is normal, and keeps us alive in potentially dangerous situations, but there are times, much more often than we think, when the plan ahead of us is challenging but we are equal to it. That is when we should stick to the plan.

The other time we should stick to plan is when training. Like anyone who wants to succeed, I have a training plan which I lay out a week in advance (I am currently experimenting with a ten day training plan). Anyone who trains hard or mixes training with performance (almost all performance based athletes like rock climbers) knows that there are days when you get up and feel stiff, sore and a bit weary. It can be tempting, particularly before the first black coffee of the morning, to think about changing your training plan. Resist the urge. If you have a reasonable level of experience and knowledge writing training plans, you should have confidence that over-reaching is an essential part of improving performance; some days you will train with a bit – or even a lot - of residual fatigue.

PC: NBlacklock

Sunday was another blustery, grey day on the coast; but, I had planned a surf training session with the same group who paddled on the day before. It's fair to say we were all a bit weary, gear was still wet from the previous day, and a few showers were rolling over. Off we went, however, and, once we got warmed up, it was a great day out on the water. We hit three different surf locations and ended up catching some good waves and getting some solid training done.

PC. NBlacklock

Monday (yesterday) my training was a bit different, tidy up one of the local trails, and clean up a couple of bouldering areas. Does not sound like much, but by the time I carried a heavy pack of gear in, and worked away for six hours straight hauling heavy things around, that too felt like a solid session. And, as a rock climber, every day is core day, so there is always that.

Like most other things in life, succeeding in training (which translates directly to performance) is separating the thinking from the doing. Put a decent amount of thought into planning your training and then stop thinking, just do.

The youth in my life fall into the trap of always rethinking things. When it comes time to train, they start waffling and making excuses. The easy way to stop this is exactly what I have outlined above. Plan your training and train your plan. Rethinking the plan as you put on your shoes to head out the door because you feel tired or there is a good show on Netflix is a colossal waste of energy. There IS a time for everything, and if you have a solid training plan, put your head down, stop thinking and get on with it.

Fun In A Strange Kind Of Way: Guerilla Bay to Sunshine Bay in Interesting Conditions

Yesterday when I was training (ah, the irreplaceable beauty of a home gym and climbing wall) I had the new Salomon movie “Long Shorts” playing in the background. Long Shorts is about Courtenay Dauwalter and François D'Haene 2021 racing season where they both ran the European UTMB and Hardock in the USA. Dauwalter drops out of Hardwater part way as she is vomiting and unable to keep food down. Spoiler alert, Dauwalter goes on to win UTMB for the second consecutive year.

But, back to the point of the story, the shit “food” that ultrarunners stuff in during these long endurance events is really shocking. Chips, and lollies, pizza's and pastries. In all honesty, I feel kind of nauseated just thinking about chowing down on what the runners eat and I am currently sitting in an office chair inside a dry and warm house not hucking a lung out on a mountain top in the middle of the night. I really am curious if there are any ultra-runners who have run long races eating actual food – nuts, fruit, potatoes, cheese, etc. Surely to Dog the stomach issues could not be any worse then they are when eating handfuls of junk food every few hours or sucking back sugary gels every 15 minutes. Not to mention that most of those “foods” are highly irritating to the gut and must exacerbate the shits that so many runners get.

If I was an ultra-runner that is the experiment I would do. I imagine that even if an athlete eating real food won every race it would not be enough to convince the other runners to stop eating toxic sludge.

But anyway, this morning, in pouring rain, three of us convened at Guerilla Bay to paddle north to Sunshine Bay. The average wave height on the Batemans Bay wave buoy (off North Head) was just over three metres with a maximum wave height of between six and seven metres. Off-shore there was a 30 knot southerly wind blowing (near gale), but inshore, the wind was only about 13 knots with a westerly component. The seas were messy, big waves rearing up and two opposing swells colliding. I was hoping two things, one, we would make it to Sunshine Bay without any incidents, and two – much more immediate – that we could get off the beach before some well meaning but panicky citizen arrived to call the authorities.

Usually, I try to avoid doing things that will cause rescue parties to say “What the puck were you doing?” but the only way to get comfortable paddling in bad conditions is to paddle in bad conditions so sometimes you have to head out to sea even when you are not completely sure of the outcome.

I immediately took three or four breaking waves on the chin leaving the beach and thought: “Good to get that out of the way early!” Heading out of Guerilla Bay even Nick looked a bit confronted and admitted that conditions were bigger than he expected. Nevertheless, after confirming that we were all good to go, turning around is usually (but not always) an option, we started heading out to sea. With big conditions and lots of reefs and bommies along the coast to the north, we knew we had to keep well off-shore to avoid getting cleaned up in the bigger waves.

Photo credit: Nick B.

The Pace was feeling pretty tippy starting out but I was determined not to be the fearful one that held the whole trip up so with my climbing mantra “You can do this” running through my head I followed along behind Nick, focusing on putting in good paddle strokes and bracing when appropriate.

I've been on trips like this before. You are kind of on edge, fairly confident you can do the thing (whatever it is) but not 100% sure. But, a person cannot stay in a haze of adrenaline for a long time as it is too exhausting and makes you feel too unwell. Despite the people who say nonsensical things like “I am relying on the adrenaline to get me through.” Coincidentally, something Dauwalter said in Long Shorts, adrenaline as anyone who has had a flush of it knows, is a pretty unpleasant neurotransmitter to operate under. Adrenaline makes you shaky and jittery, your heart pounds and rational thought evaporates. Rock climbers know the flush of adrenaline when an indispensable piece of gear rattles out of the crack below them as they approach the crux. Adrenaline is the harbinger of Elvis Legs which marks a precipitous decline in performance.

So, we all settled into paddling north. The big issue we had getting to Sunshine Bay was the mess of reefs and bommies between Black Rock and Mosquito Bay. A couple of years ago, four of us had come through that section to the west of Black Rock but while we had a big swell, the weather had been clear with little wind and a much cleaner break. Today, we had a northerly swell hitting a southerly swell, heavy rain obscuring visibility and lumpy waves all around with some big buggers coming through periodically. No-one felt confident navigating through a mess of breaking reefs so instead we paddled east around Black Rock. The east side of Black Rock is messy on a calm day so it was big today with waves of four metres to five metres rearing up and threatening to break.

Once we passed Black Rock and could paddle closer in to shore, the rest of the paddle felt easy. It's funny how a two metre swell and one metre sea can feel pretty manageable after you've paddled through much bigger conditions. Nick was even catching waves, but the waves were all moving quite fast and you had to paddle hard to get on them. Coming into Sunshine Bay Nick caught a bigger wave than he was expecting but managed to turn and pivot off the back of it before he pitch poled into a reef in front.

We landed at Sunshine Bay, it was still raining, but we were feeling good. My friend, Les, who lives right on the beach had seen us coming in and got dressed up in his rain gear to walk over and say “What the heck were you doing out there? Wasn't it really rough?” “It was pretty punchy,” I replied, “But fun, in a strange kind of way.”

Postscript: I thought I had recorded a bunch of video with our action cam mounted on my head, but... the SD card was buggered and I got nothing.