I love those words – they’ve been a part of all my best training sessions. I used them a lot yesterday in the final session of the day. Me and Nick had a swimming team for 2 hours and they’d specifically asked for a hard paddle. That’s why I was so excited about yesterday. It’s not often that we get a bunch that really want to go for it. I was all set to go out on a surf ski as I had visions of some 17-year-old superstars turning up. When they turned up I swapped the surf ski for a fast kayak instead – these kids were all around 15 and were all smiles and chatty. I gave them the intro to the boats and then gave them a quick talk about paddling technique – particularly using the core muscles. I showed them our destination – Raccoon Island – which looks way off in the distance (and it is) but didn’t get much of a reaction. We got them into the boats and set off at a reasonable pace as a warm up. Once we were out of The Cove I stepped it up a bit and we headed across the Arm to Jug Island. That’s where things went wrong. I had 2 or 3 boats with me who were the strong and committed kids; the rest were cruising and chatting. I could hear Nick at the back trying to get them to put some effort in but he was having a hard time, and because we had to keep waiting the kids at the front weren’t getting a consistent paddle.
Once everybody finally got to Jug we swapped a couple of kids around; boats that had 2 strong paddlers we took one out and put them with a not-as-strong paddler to even things out. As we set off towards Raccoon I got them into single file and told them the plan. The lead boat was the pace setter. There should never be more than half a boat length between any two boats. At any time I’ll shout “SPLIT LEFT” or “SPLIT RIGHT” and the lead boat has to peel off in that direction as hard as they can, paddle to the back of the line then join back on. It’s just a version of the chain gang that I used when cycling and running. The beauty of using it on these guys was that it stopped all the chat and made them concentrate on keeping the pace going. And it worked – we absolutely motored over to Raccoon. We had a brief rest at Raccoon then turned the boats to face the Cove. I changed the order around and we chainganged it all the way back. That’s a long way to paddle at that intensity but these guys absolutely nailed it – with a bit of encouragement! They even had enough energy left for a race at the end. It was a great session, wish I could have more like that.
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