OutdoorsIncJul03

Just around the corner: The Great Race

by Elmore Holmes
April, 2004

Putting on a canoe and kayak race is a monumental undertaking. It's not like putting on a road race, where you just get the runners to sign the waiver, put them on the line, and fire the gun. Canoe and kayak races are labor-intensive. You have to have safety personnel in place. You have to organize the racers into appropriate boat classes, which is not easy considering the bizarre craft that some people show up with. If the finish line is some distance away, you have to set up communication with the timers down there. If it's a slalom race, you have to get the gates put up, and then sweet-talk a group of people into sitting on the bank all day to judge. And then, when the race is over, you get to put up with a bunch of whining from somebody who thinks he got a bogus penalty or who claims the timers transposed a couple of digits in his score.
Sometimes the local community will embrace the event and give it its full support. Sometimes it won't. Salida, Colorado, comes to mind as a town that loves its river, celebrating the venerable Arkansas with a week-long festival of paddling and merrymaking each June. But some other cities and towns would rather spend their time and money wooing professional teams, PGA Tour events, and NASCAR races, and just can't be bothered with some silly boat race that boring everyday citizens can enter.

Elmore's columns appear monthly at the
Outdoors, Inc.,website:
www.outdoorsinc.com

     Small wonder that there aren't too many canoe and kayak races around that are more than a couple of decades old. Even the most dedicated, gung-ho race organizers tend to burn out after a while, and you can't really blame them.
     That's why I feel very fortunate to live in a city whose canoe and kayak race will start for the twenty-third time this May.
     Joe Royer, the co-owner of Outdoors, Inc., was winding up his slalom and wildwater racing career back in the early 1980s. He loved to paddle and race as much as ever, but the long weekends on the road were starting to wear on him. He thought, why not start a race here in Memphis? The Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race was born in May, 1982.
     The course, approximately three miles long, started at the mouth of the Wolf River, north of downtown. Racers paddled out of the Wolf onto the Mississippi, and continued downriver to the mouth of Memphis Harbor. The last half-mile or so took place on the flatwater of the harbor, with the finish line at the foot of Jefferson Davis Park. Minor adjustments to the course have been made over the years--the finish line had to move in about a hundred meters after the Tennessee I-40 Visitors' Center was built--but otherwise the course remains the same to this day.
     Joe recollects that about 80 paddlers entered the first race. Joe himself was one of those entrants, and he made the mistake of winning his boat class and recording the fastest time of the race. This drew the ire of those who believe that things can't be on the up and up when the race director wins his own race ("You organized this race and then you… you…… trained for it! That's cheating!"). So Joe stopped entering the race after that.
     But the race was a hit. It immediately became a fixture on the calendars of paddlers all over the Mid South. They were young and old, male and female. Some, like a group of marathon canoe enthusiasts from the Arkansas-Missouri region, took their racing seriously, while others just liked to spend the morning cruising down the river and have a picnic afterward. But the entrants all shared at least one thing: a passion for the sport, the river, and the outdoors. Now, our middle-America city of Memphis was "on the map" in the paddling world for at least one day a year.
     The event was firmly established by the time I began entering it in 1994. Although the start of my love affair with paddling predated the race's inception in '82, I had never entered before because I'd been busy with high school track meets at that time of year, and then I'd been off in college and graduate school for seven years. But when I moved back to Memphis in the summer of 1993, canoe and kayak racing had captured my imagination, and I sure wasn't going to miss an event right in my hometown.
     Back then most of my racing attention was on whitewater slalom, and I didn't even own any sort of downriver, marathon, or open-water boat. So I entered the kayak cruising class, paddling either an old fiberglass Microslipper or a Stohlquist "Colorado River Machine," borrowed from friends in the local canoe club.
     I raced in the cruising class for five years. Since I was always the only one in the class who'd been doing any significant training with a paddle, I won the class every time, but the lack of competition didn't dampen the excitement of the race. The starting line was always a spectacle--hundreds of boats jostling for position on the line, racers in aluminum canoes beating their paddles on their gunwales in unison, participants in goofy costumes adjusting their icechest balast. Then the gun went off, and getting off the line before being tangled in the rifraff of boats and paddles was a challenge. Out on the river, I raced anybody I could, whether they were in my boat class or not. The finish also could be a logjam, as packs of boats spilled across the line in the narrow chute between the bank and a trolling yacht.
     Then we would all catch our breath, congratulate one another, and lug our boats up into Jefferson Davis Park, where a post-race party with beer and a bluegrass band awaited. For many years, Bluff City Canoe Club member Phil Allen brought along his big barbecuin' grill, and we would eat some good food and soak up the sunshine on the banks of the mighty river. After the awards, many of us would walk downriver to continue the party at the annual Beale Street Music Festival. Life was good indeed.

Nothing can stop Mike Herbert as he motors across Memphis Harbor on his way to victory in 2001.

In 1999, Joe persuaded Greg Barton to come to the race. Greg had won a pair of gold medals in 1000-meter kayak events at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. He'd also won a pair of Olympic bronzes and four world championships during his career. Upon retirement from international competition after the '92 Games, Greg began to enter more events on open water, and he proved that not being in the Olympics anymore didn't mean that he was no longer an elite competitor. By getting Greg to come to Memphis, Joe hoped to raise the profile of the Outdoors, Inc., race on the national level. Joe also started entering the race himself again, figuring surely he wouldn't have the fastest time now.

     By this time, I had gotten my hands on an old "Apple Turnover," sort of a hybrid wildwater/marathon K-1. After years of getting whipped in slalom races by the top athletes in the U.S., I figured entering the race-boat class with Greg here at Memphis couldn't be any worse. So I did, and finished a whopping three minutes behind Greg. I also got beat by several paddlers whom I felt I could have competed with. I realized there was a lot I didn't know about the finer points of open water/marathon racing.
     Just like everybody else, Greg had a blast in his first Memphis race, and signed on to return in 2000. Mike Herbert, a three-time Olympian from northwest Arkansas, also entered the race at Greg's behest. The two of them dominated the field. I raced better in 2000, but at that time I was still focusing primarily on slalom, preparing to race in the Olympic Trials. At the end of the 2000 season, I decided to back off from slalom and see what I was capable of doing in our Memphis race.
     The effect of having Greg here really began to show in '01, as strong racers from the Midwest and Canada joined us in the mouth of the Wolf. This time, I was ready. I had drawn up a training regimen specifically for this race and had spent the winter and early spring training with Joe and another local racer, Wim Nouwen. We had built up our mileage base during the bleak, frigid months of December, January, and February. We had done long intervals at sub-maximum intensity to develop our lactic energy systems. We had practiced our starts, and trained to withstand the initial burst off the line that we would have to give to be competitive. On my own, I had tailored my weightlifting regimen to address the challenges my body faced on the Mississippi. In the last week before the race, we had tapered our volume and worked on pure speed, with a lot of rest incorporated to leave us fresh and fast when Saturday morning arrived.
     The 2001 race revealed that Greg was beatable, as Mike surged away from him in the harbor and won the race. As for me, the preparation paid off as I beat out several strong paddlers to finish third behind the Olympians. Even though it was a pretty distant third, I was thrilled. I've competed in a lot of races at a fairly high level, but getting to walk up front and receive a medal alongside Mike and Greg--and do it in front of my family and friends here in Memphis--was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done as an athlete.

Of course, when one great moment has passed, one must decide what to do next. I spent the next year working to improve my stroke and maintain my fitness. I also shelled out some bucks for a "serious" race boat--a Speedster surf ski designed by Mr. Greg Barton. The 2002 race saw high water (25.6 feet on the Memphis gauge) and perfect racing conditions: smooth water and a light north wind. I repeated my third-place finish, and recorded a personal-record time at 17 minutes, 32 seconds. Mike and Greg were fast, too, with Greg pulling away to take back his title with a course-record 15:39. Mike also ducked under 16 minutes (15:59). Joe and Wim both broke 19 minutes for the first time. Arkansan pair Clifton and John Rickey became the first canoeists to break 20 minutes. We were all feeling pretty delirious at the post-race party.
Now I had the same urge that someone who has just won at the blackjack table for the first time has: I wanted more. I wanted to start closing the gap between myself and the Olympians. I wanted to get my time down into the low 17s, if not faster.

The author (right) pretends he's in the same league as Olympians Greg Barton and Mike Herbert after the 2002 OICKR. Photo by Mom.

     That next winter, I logged hundreds of miles in the boat, and hit the weights hard. By New Year's I had sat down and carefully planned all my workouts for the spring. Every move I made was designed to produce a peak performance on the first Saturday in May. By late April I had been over the race in my mind hundreds of times.
     As race day approached, I learned that the competition would be the strongest ever, bolstered by a group of paddlers from the flatwater sprint training center at Lake Lanier in Georgia. Rumor had it they were bringing along a guy from Spain who could challenge Mike and Greg. But I was confident in my training--cocky, even. I thought, "Okay, boys, bring it on--this ain't Lake Lanier!"
     The long-anticipated race day finally arrived, and I finished… tenth. It was the worst I'd ever finished in any boat class. The Lake Lanier guys all beat me soundly, and I even lost to a pair of their girls paddling a sprint K-2… ugh! In short, after all that calculated training, I fell flat on my face.
     Okay, that's a little harsh. I didn't actually race poorly. The guys I'd raced against were good. Those girls were good, too; they were both up-and-coming national team hopefuls.
     But I hadn't produced the kind of performance I felt I was trained up to produce. And so, I had to tell myself the same thing I used to tell students of mine who had studied really hard for a test only to end up with a C: hard work increases the probability of success, but it doesn't guarantee it.
     Greg had some success in this race, though. In fact, he lay down one of the most impressive performances ever, and added a whole new chapter to his legend.
     It turned out that the Spanish guy was for real. His name was Ekaitz Sayes, and he was one of the hot young sprint racers in Europe. When the gun went off, he exploded off the line with a start that made even the speedy Mike Herbert look like a snail. Mike covered the move and managed to get on Sayes's wake after a quarter-mile or so, but Greg had an even worse start than I did and found himself some 20 seconds off the lead in the early going. I remember looking to my right and seeing Greg as we came out of the Wolf, and thinking, "What are you doing back here??!" Most people consider such a deficit to be insurmountable in a three-mile race.
     But Greg isn't most people. With one picture-perfect stroke after another, Greg began to reel in the two leaders, and as they passed beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, he pulled into their pack. As the threesome rounded the tip of Mud Island and headed into the harbor, Mike fell off the pace, his body taxed from his earlier effort to catch Sayes. But Greg began to attack. The Spaniard's speed was impressive, but Greg's stamina and efficiency were awe-inspiring.
     I, of course, was a couple minutes back in the pack while all this unfolded, but people who saw the finish from the bank say it was as incredible a scene as any athletic event they had ever witnessed. The spectators in the park, antsy from 15 minutes of milling about waiting for their friends and relatives to get to the finish, began to cheer as they sensed the

Photo finish! Ekaitz Sayes (foreground) can't quite hold on as Greg Barton caps a furious come-from-behind effort to win the 2003 OICKR. Photo courtesy of Outdoors, Inc.

magic radiating from these two elite athletes who dueled across the harbor with every ounce of energy they had. Sayes still led, but with each stroke Greg, paddling what's supposed to be a slower boat (a Speedster surf ski, as opposed to Sayes's sprint K-1) whittled the lead from a half-boatlength to a quarter- boatlength to a meter to a foot. The pair reached the line and both men pulled for all they were worth on their final strokes. The finish was so close that neither paddler was sure who had won.
It was up to finish judge Robert Taylor to make the call: Greg's boat had surged inches ahead of the Spaniard's at the last possible second.
Greg was his usual unassuming self afterward. If you're looking for a trash-talking, Oakley-wearing prima donna, you won't find it in Greg. But I could sense a certain satisfaction in him when I saw him at a party in Joe's backyard later that day. He'd definitely earned it. There's no point trying to compare this victory to one of his Olympic medal-winning performances, but let's just say that Greg had done a Herculean day's work, and he deserved to be feeling good. What more reward does a guy need?

     The 2004 race is coming up on May 1, and I don't know if it can top the drama of 2003. I haven't had that much time to think about it, really. I've had too much else going on in the last few months. I've bought a house and I'm fixing it up. I'm working in my workshop. I'm helping a dozen or so kids with their math homework on a regular basis. I'm getting my paddling in, but it's not quite the dominant thing in my life that it was a year ago.
     And maybe that's a good thing. A person just can't dedicate himself to one thing above all others forever. Even though I didn't race like I wanted to last year, I learned a lot from the work I had done, and I hope I can get something out of it this season. How am I gonna do on May 1? I'm not sure. But that's my problem.
     There are a couple of things I do know. Greg will be back at the race this year. Mike will be back. World surf ski champion Oscar Chalupsky and his brother Herman have announced they're flying in from South Africa. I expect strong canoe racers like Rocky Caldwell and Dale Burris will come down from the Ozark foothills in search of more gold medals to toss on top of their pile.
     And--even more important than any national, world, or Olympic champions--lots of everyday people will come out for a fun day on the river. Families. Boy Scouts. Canoe clubs. These are the people who really make the Outdoors, Inc., race special. This race is not just a half-dozen serious racer-heads duking it out. This race is all-inclusive.
     And it should include YOU. Download a race application on the Outdoors, Inc., website, and send it in. Find yourself a kayak or canoe, and join us at the mouth of the Wolf on May 1. [If you're reading this after May 1, 2004, the next OICKR will occur on the first Saturday of next May.] There's no better way to celebrate spring.

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