The many faces of canoeing   by Elmore Holmes June, 2004      I lead sort of a double life.      My whitewater friends know me as a canoeist.  For the last twelve years or so, I have paddled a decked canoe (C-1) almost exclusively on whitewater.  Back in summer camp, where I first learned the sport, we ran whitewater rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains in tandem open canoes, and even though I dabbled around in kayaks a little, by the early 1990s I had decided that the canoe was the boat for me.  I started out in an old Gyramax C-1, and started racing slalom C-1s soon after that.      But the whitewater canoeing fraternity would be shocked--shocked!--to see me on the Mississippi River and other open bodies of water.  Here, I paddle a kayak these days.  The main reasons are that my training partners here in Memphis are kayakers and that our annual race, the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race on the Mississippi, features first-rate kayak competition in which I enjoy testing myself.      The Outdoors, Inc., race also has a pretty strong canoe field each year, led by marathon racers who come over from the Arkansas-Missouri region.  With my canoeing background, I logically should have entered the canoe class from the word go.  But I never did.  Why?  Well… it's complicated.

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

     I grew older and became a counselor at the camp myself, and like those counselors before me, I threatened dire consequences for any camper who did not kneel in his canoe.  And actually, I had good reason for this advice, for at this camp we were training for whitewater, and "on his knees" is how a canoeist wants to be in whitewater.  From a kneeling position, the paddler has a lower center of gravity for stability in rapids, and he can reach farther from the boat on his strokes than he can from a sitting position.
     But now here was this marathon racer who sat in his canoe, and he had turned my comfy little world upside down.  I spent the next little while pondering the meaning.  Why did marathoners choose to sit rather than kneel, when kneeling works so well in whitewater?
     But pondering proved too hard, and so I simply dismissed the marathoners as a bunch of hayseeds who hadn't been privy to the sort of elite-level methods I had.  I soon forgot this cosmic dilemma and paddled my merry way down one whitewater river after another.
     Some years later, I got a chance to try out a flatwater sprint C-1.  I knew that sprinters weren't hayseeds--they were in the Olympics.  And although sprint canoeists also assumed a different position in their boats--they use the "high kneel," with one knee down and one knee up--I had accepted this method long ago.  Flatwater racers have less need for a low center of gravity than whitewater paddlers, and the high kneel affords one the maximum reach with his blade.
     There's just one problem: sprint canoes are unbelievably tippy.  Trying to do a high kneel--or anything else--in one of those boats is like trying to balance atop a narrow floating log.  When I gave the sprint C-1 a try, no amount of whitewater canoeing experience could help me.  After four or five strokes, I was in the water.  I walked away from that experience thinking of something Groucho Marx once said about not wanting to join a club that would have him as a member.  In other words, sprint canoeing must be okay if I can't do it.
 

Sprint canoeists demonstrate the "high kneel" while warming up for the 2004 Olympic Trials in Oakland, California.  Photo courtesy of USA Canoe/Kayak.

A fleet of marathon canoes is a sight to behold.  Note the sitting position of the paddlers.  Photo courtesy of We-no-nah Canoe.

     Back on the subject of marathon canoeing, my mind began to open a bit once I started doing some marathon kayak racing around the turn of the century.  Doing so meant spending more time around marathon canoeists, and it turned out that they weren't hayseeds at all.  They were fit athletes and masters of technique in their own right.  Among their ranks were people like Mike Herbert and Greg Barton, who had crossed over to kayaking to win medals in world and Olympic competition.  And there were some guys even better than they, such as Nebraskan Calvin Hassell, the sport's closest thing to a superstar in this country.  Last summer, Hassell came down for a race in southern Missouri and, in his solo canoe, beat a couple of pretty strong Memphis kayakers, Wim Nouwen and Joe Royer.
     I finally bothered to try to understand the marathoners' methods.  The canoeists sat, I realized, because sitting was much more comfortable over long distances.  And some marathon canoe races are extremely long: the Ausable Marathon in Michigan and the General Clinton Regatta in upstate New York are among the best-known marathon canoe races, and they're both well over 50 miles.  (Personally, I think a person has to be insane to want to race such a long distance--I'm sorry, but I just can't get past that one--but at least it began to make more sense to me why these guys sit in their boats.)  To make up for the lack of reach from a sitting position, they used bent-shaft paddles that put their blades at a more favorable angle for optimum propulsion.
     All that was left was for me to enter a marathon canoe race, and I got that chance just this past month.
     On May 8, I drove over to the greater Yellville, Arkansas, area, home of the Buffalo River and an annual two-races-in-one-day event.  In the morning, the canoeists raced solo, and Mike Herbert and I raced in the kayak class.  Yes, Mike spanked me, but you already knew that.
     For the afternoon race, Mike planned to race with his daughter in the tandem canoe class, so rather than be the only kayaker on the river, I asked around for a canoe partner.  I found one in Clifton Rickey, a canoein' muscleman from Pocahontas who had competed in our Memphis race many times.
     The Ozark canoeists like to do their tandem racing in stock aluminum boats.  They figure that this way everybody is equal, and nobody has to shell out megabucks for a race boat just to enter their races.  Sounded good to me.  I settled my hind end into the bow seat, and after about two minutes of warmup, Clifton and I were charging off the line along with six or eight other canoes, down a course of 11 or 12 fun-filled miles.
     The first thing I learned was that the paddle stroke was more similar to that of a whitewater canoeist than I had realized.  Using the bent-shaft paddle from a sitting position, the paddler must "spear" the blade into the water for the catch and push down with his top hand throughout the stroke, just like slalom coaches used to yell at me to do.
     The second thing I learned is that I still need to try out a marathon race boat, because those aluminum canoes are an absolute bear to race in.  They have a maximum speed, and once that speed is reached they won't budge any faster, no matter how much harder you paddle.
     Clifton and I spent most of the race in fifth place and paddling furiously to catch the fourth-place boat, which lumbered along tantalizingly in front of us.  We had more or less maxed out our speed, and all we could do was try to keep our boat in the fast water and hope for a break.  Every now and then we would hit an unavoidable patch of shallow water, and the bottom-drag made it feel like someone had tossed a cubic yard of bricks in our boat.  By the end of an hour my muscles were burning and my mouth tasted like fluffed cotton.  I gazed longingly at the wake behind the fourth-place boat, which hung there just beyond our reach.  It seemed that every time we cut their lead in half, they regained the distance in a heartbeat.
     We finally caught our break with about two miles to go.  I'm not even sure what it was, but suddenly we were on our competitors' wake.  We hung out there for about a minute--I'd have been happy to sit there all the way to the finish, but Clifton started throwing down some monster strokes to push us ahead.  A couple of surges moved us into fourth place, and there we remained until the race was over.  We had finished one spot shy of a medal in a small club race, but I felt like we'd just won the championship of the universe.  Every muscle in my body ached, and every brain cell begged to go someplace cool and dark and silent.  In agony, I helped Clifton carry the canoe to his trailer, and then I was off for a nap that would last forever for all I cared.

     A recent issue of Paddler magazine reports that sales of all types of canoes have hit an all-time low in recent years.  I suspect that the esoteric nature of competitive canoeing is partly to blame for this trend: over the decades, boat designs have diverged to meet the demands of the various racing disciplines.  The types of competitive canoes that are most likely to be televised--those in the two Olympic disciplines, slalom and sprint--look nothing like what most people think of as canoes.  Marathon canoes, actually, most closely resemble the layperson's conception of a canoe.
     But I believe canoeing will never die out entirely.  When it comes to floating, fishing, picnicking, and hopping out for a swim on a lake or lazy river, the canoe is unsurpassed.  Racers like me can do their part by making fun the top priority in their endeavors.