How good is good enough? by Elmore Holmes November, 2004      I got a call recently from a guy in North Little Rock, Arkansas, who wants to come up to Memphis and paddle with me.      He's in his early 50s, has started paddling a touring boat on the Arkansas River within the last couple of years, and has become skilled and fit enough to win some age-group medals in regional open-water races. Now, he's eager to get even better, and he wants to join in some of my training sessions.      Naturally, I told him he was welcome. I'm always happy to encourage anybody who wishes to become a better paddler, and I'm flattered and honored that he thinks he can get there by paddling in my company.      But I'm a little worried. I can't help asking, Where will this end?      I felt like I was really making strides with my paddling when I could consistently hit my roll on the big bad Ocoee. But soon, I realized that lots of people had good rolls, and that you weren't really somebody on the river unless you could make all kinds of nifty moves in the rapids. So I worked on those and got pretty decent after a while, but had little time to enjoy my success because other people were tearing up more formidable rivers like the Upper Yough and the Gauley and the Upper Animas and numerous steep creeks. So I started running some of those, but once there I realized that the best paddlers on those rivers were whitewater slalom racers. So I started racing, and worked my way up from terrible to mediocre by national-level standards.

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

     The desire to achieve a certain level of competence is understandable. Nobody wants to be a beginner at something forever, after all.
     But athletic pursuits are essentially narcissistic, self-centered endeavors. Who do we think we are, devoting hours a day to such a silly thing as making our boats go a little bit faster?
     To say that I have a definitive answer to this question would be to tell a lie. But I do have a couple of thoughts on the topic.
     I believe that a rich life is one spent in the service of others. At the same time, however, I think complete self-denial is unhealthy. One should have a nice balance between the things he does for others and the things he does for himself, and one of the greatest gifts a person can give himself is physical health and fitness. There are many ways to achieve it, but people like me, who have been bitten by the paddling bug, know no better way than paddling their boats.
     What's more, I think that once a person does achieve advanced paddling skills, he is better able to serve others, and I don't just mean by getting an ACA instructor's certificate and charging $50 an hour to give lessons. A skilled paddler is a safe paddler, the kind of person beginners want to be on the water with as they get the basics under their belt. He's an encyclopedia of information and a guru on the do's and don'ts of our sport.
     Finally, most highly-skilled paddlers I know truly enjoy the process of getting better, and are shining examples of the notion that there is more to life than winning at all costs and beating down the rest of the world on the way to the top. A folk musician I know and respect has this advice for amateur musicians: don't worry that you're not as good as Earl Scruggs or Norman Blake or Jerry Douglas or Sam Bush; just be happy with the music you make and share that joy with your family and friends. I think a similar message applies to paddlers, and I offer it to people like my Arkansan friend, and to myself, for that matter: most paddlers are not as good as Greg Barton or Eric Jackson or Michal Martikan or Dean Gardiner, but that does not diminish the contribution they can make to the sport and to the common good.

     So, how good is good enough? As good as you are personally capable of, that's how good. As world champion whitewater racer Cathy Hearn once said, "If you're the best that you can be, then you're the best."