My name is Elmore Holmes, and this is the first in a series of columns I will be writing to appear in this space on a monthly basis. The subject? Paddling. Paddling in general, and paddling in Memphis in particular.

My first paddling experience was similar to that of many folks: an aluminum canoe on a sleepy, pastoral river. Friends of my parents owned a cabin up at Hardy, Arkansas, and when I was small our families would go up in the summertime to float, swim, and soak up the sun on the Spring River. Mostly I just sat in the middle of the canoe while the grownups did the paddling.

I did my first real paddling at summer camp in the North Carolina mountains at age 13. I attended a camp with an aggressive river-running program, and by the end of the first summer terms like "ferry" and "eddy turn" and "peel out" were permanent fixtures in my vocabulary.

All campers started out on the lake in tandem open canoes. Those who demonstrated competence in basic skills such as the forward stroke, the draw, and the pry were invited on the first river trip--usually a Class II stream such as the Tuckasegee or the Green River below the Narrows. Those who displayed an aptitude for more advanced whitewater maneuvers moved on to the Class III Nantahala River. The summer ended with a "prize trip" for the highest achievers--either Section III of the Chattooga River on the Georgia-South Carolina border, or the French Broad River from Barnard to Hot Springs, north of Asheville. I made sure I was on that prize trip. I was hooked for life.

I pursued paddling excellence in the summertime for the next few years. But back here in Memphis during the rest of the year, other activities occupied my attention. I was a serious competitor on the cross country and track teams at my high school, and that sated my thirst for physical exertion for the time being. I did, however, get my first boat (a Dancer kayak) around my senior year, and eventually got pretty good at the Eskimo roll.

My commitment to running continued into college. It was during this time that I really started to like competing and testing myself against top athletes. Though I didn't have what it took to be an NCAA champion, I trained hard and developed into a solid performer on the conference level. I enjoyed setting personal goals and laying out a plan to achieve those goals.

But my body didn't take kindly to the stress I was putting on it, and by my junior year I was saddled with a host of nagging injuries, unable to get back to the level I needed to compete in Division I. As I struggled to get my running injuries to heal, I began to turn my attention toward paddling again. I returned to the summer camp and served as head of its canoeing program for two summers. I also learned more about some of the competitive opportunities in paddling--particularly whitewater slalom, which held its world championships on the Savage River in Maryland during one of the summers that I was working at camp. Slalom returned to the Olympic program several years later, in 1992, and I was glued to my TV set as the athletes deftly maneuvered their boats through the rapids at La Seu D'Urgell, Spain.

After college I moved to New York City to attend graduate school, and again my paddling took a backseat: I had neither a place to keep my boat in NYC nor a car to get me to the river. But I did make a couple of train trips up to the Housatonic River in northwest Connecticut, where several of the country's best slalom racers were living and training. After watching their annual "Rattlesnake" race on a big rapid that included a six-foot vertical drop, I thought, "I've got to get back into this."

I landed back in Memphis and sought out the local whitewater element. I attended roll practice sessions at the Mason YMCA and developed a bomb-proof roll. I joined weekend trips to whitewater rivers in Alabama and east Tennessee and North Carolina. The following summer--1994--I accompanied several Memphians to Colorado and ran some big-time whitewater. Then I came back East and paddled storied runs like the Gauley in West Virginia and the Russell Fork in Kentucky. Suddenly, the French Broad and Section III of the Chattooga seemed tiny.

Also during this time, I bought an old, beat-up slalom C-1 and started entering some races. My confidence was soaring on the wings of my newfound whitewater experience--soaring a little too high, actually. Having made it down rivers like the upper Animas and the Gauley and the Russell Fork, I figured slalom races on dinky rivers like the Nantahala would be a snap, and I set the very naïve goal of qualifying for the 1996 Olympic Trials at the Ocoee River.

That's when I discovered a little problem: slalom was hard. I may have been pretty good at getting down big rapids, but I had barely scratched the surface of the myriad skills needed to be a good slalom racer. What's more, competition for those Olympic Trials spots was fierce. Leading the U.S. in C-1 were guys like Davey Hearn and Jon Lugbill, who had become household names (at least in paddling households) on the strength of their dominating world championship performances in the 1980s. Right behind them were a couple dozen very capable second-tier athletes. In all the Olympic Trials qualifying races I did that year, I finished dead last or darn close to it.

It was all very discouraging, yet I liked what I was doing too much to quit. I saw my humbling experiences simply as unfinished business rather than decisive defeats. I spent the next couple of years determined to develop at least a modicum of competence in this sport. I hung some gates on the Wolf River and practiced there each day after work. I studied the better racers' technique and picked their brains every chance I got. I continued going to Colorado in the summertime, and participated in a series of club races that takes place there each June.

It first occurred to me that my work was paying off at a race on the Nantahala in the spring of 1998. I went out and gave what had come to feel like a fairly typical Holmes performance--I finished somewhere in the lower 50 percent of the field, and didn't have any delusions about how great I was. But after the race Wayne Dickert, a '96 Olympian who was there coaching some local kids, came up and said "Hey man, you looked good out there!" Slalom racers are not known for making empty compliments, and my spirits skyrocketed in the two seconds it took Wayne to make this comment that he probably doesn't even remember.

I qualified to compete in the National Team Trials that year. I made it again in 1999, and in the Olympic year 2000. There remained a pretty big gulf between me and the National Team-caliber athletes; I finished in the bottom quarter of the field in each of these trials. But I was proud of what I had done. I had become a solid competitor in a sport that had seemed nearly impossible to me just a couple of years earlier. And I had done it while mostly training alone and coaching myself in a whitewater-poor part of the country.

Certainly, I probably would have fared better if I had moved someplace where I would have had access to whitewater and coaching all the time. But on the Mississippi here at Memphis, the paddling scene was picking up, and soon I was involved in a branch of the sport much better suited to my background as an endurance athlete.

Since 1982, the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race had taken place here on the Mississippi River each May. I became a regular participant after I moved back to Memphis in the mid-90s, usually competing in the "cruising" class in an old fiberglass whitewater boat. I didn't take the race too seriously; it was just a fun thing to do in my hometown once a year, and the cruising class was an easy win for me. But Joe Royer, the race director, had plans to ratchet up the level of competition. For several years he had encouraged Greg Barton, the great champion of the 1000-meter sprints in the 1988 Olympic Games, to attend the race, and Greg finally agreed in 1999. Joe sought out some of the stronger local guys, like me and former Dutch national teamer Wim Nouwen, to help beef up the race boat class.

Up to that point I had done a little bit of flatwater paddling and had read up a bit on the forward stroke with the wing paddle, but had never considered it more than a diversion, a method of cross-training for whitewater. But now I had a purpose. My times in the cruising class had always been around 22 or 23 minutes, but now sub-20 was the standard. When Greg arrived in town that May, I immediately sought his advice, just as I had done with the expert slalom racers. I became captivated by the components of the forward stroke and the challenge of making a narrow, tippy race boat go fast.

What's more, I realized that the Memphis area is one of the best places in the world to train for this type of paddling. The harbor is just like a lake, perfect for practicing strokes and balance without the distraction of swirling cross-currents. Out on the river, the paddler can solidify these skills in every conceivable water condition during the course of the year.

As I trained throughout the year in this new discipline, I began to develop a relationship with the river itself, gaining a feel for its many moods: high water and low water; choppy, wind-driven water and placid water; muddy water and clear water. I familiarized myself with the flora and fauna: oaks, willow, ducks, beaver, blue heron, turtles, hawks.

That's where I am today, and paddling is playing just the sort of role in my life that I want it to. It's an ideal fitness program--a whole lot more interesting to me than pounding out miles on a treadmill or sweating my rear end off in some stuffy gym. And my whitewater experience allows me to pursue whatever type of paddling I feel like, be it touring, creeking, racing, whatever.

The depth and breadth of my experience are what I hope to share with you in this column. To give you an idea of the nature of this column, I'll field a few FAQ:

Q: Will your column be aimed at serious racers only?

A: Absolutely not! Everybody, from the fit athlete to the sedentary middle-aged person who would like to improve his fitness, will find something useful here.
 
 

Q: What if I don't want to improve my fitness? What if I just want to paddle around and look at stuff?

A: No problem! Although some columns will offer tips on fitness and training and racing, others will cover touring, scenery, and the like. But I should warn you that if you go out paddling with any sort of regularity, you will get in better shape. Just so you know.
 
 

Q: Memphis is not really much of a place to paddle, is it? Don't you have to go to California or Florida or the mountains for real paddling?

A: Says who?! We've got the biggest river on the continent right here at our doorstep. And wherever there's a big river, there are a lot of small rivers flowing into it. And if whitewater is your thing, there's more around than you think: there are some swell whitewater rivers within four hours of here, and there's even a little bit of the frothy stuff right here in town, as I'll explain in a later column.

Travel is a wonderful thing, and of course every paddler should explore other parts of the world whenever he has a chance. But by paddling here at home on a regular basis, you will arm yourself with the skill to handle any other body of water on Earth. One of the things I enjoy most is traveling to a whitewater race or an ocean race and doing well, and then hearing someone say, "Wow! You guys from Memphis must do some serious paddling!"
 
 

So watch this space on a regular basis. I don't consider myself an expert; I'm just a guy who has been around the block a time or two in this sport. I'll share what I know, and if you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to ask.
 
 

When he's not on the river, Elmore builds handcrafted furniture in his Midtown studio. Visit his website, www.holmeswoodwork.com. Contact Elmore at elmore@holmeswoodwork.com.