We've all done it. You get to the end of a downwinder and start to compare Garmin readouts. Maybe you weren't the first one to the finish but look at that top speed! Unfortunately in the world of Downwind paddling, that big top speed number usually means you have made a mistake. Scroll a tiny bit along that speed graph and there's a good chance your highest speed is very quickly followed by one of your lowest. Usually accompanied by a ski full of water and a whole lot of time trying to get back up and going again. So what's happened?
The short answer is you went too fast for the runners (bumps). The wind is blowing them along at a relatively uniform pace, one following the other and very rarely catching up to the runner in front. For the sake of writing this article lets just say that they are all moving at 15kmph in roughly the same direction meaning it is taking each runner 4minutes to move 1 kilometre downwind which is a pretty common barrier for downwind paddler to get under.
So if you are sitting on a runner and not paddling, you should be moving at 15kmph and be perfectly on track for your 4minute kilometre split. Which sounds easy but in my experience coaching this is where it all starts to go wrong and the reason is most paddlers want more. They want to paddle down the runner they are on and go quicker, but as soon as they are going faster than 15kmph they are moving faster than the runners and catch up to the back of the runner in front of them. Which is of course an uphill and down goes their speed. They've "crashed" into the bump in front of them.
Until you are an elite paddler. That runner in front of you may as well be a brick wall. It's an uphill that you can't climb over and all it's going to do is lift your nose up, slow you down and maybe even flood the cockpit if you fly into it too quickly. It is however a brick wall moving away from you at 15kmph and you get to choose whether you spend the next 4minutes continually crashing into it even though it won't move any quicker, or following it at a "safe" distance where you move at the same speed as it without all the wasted energy.
Hopefully this seems obvious. Downwinding is about going downhill, not uphill so why would people try paddling up runners? For me the hardest part of downwinding to coach is the feeling of when you are nailing it. Because in a lot of cases it feels like nothing much is happening. When you are sitting on a runner at 15kmph and the runner in front of you is also moving at 15kmph if feels like you aren't moving at all. Everything that you are gauging your speed of is actually moving along with you and relative to all the runners you aren't moving. You're at the same speed as the ocean and when you're truly doing that it feels like everything slows down. There is lots of time to make choices and steer because the runner in front of you isn't getting closer or further away. Imagine you are in a plane moving 800kmph but so is the seat in front of you so it feels like you're not moving at all.
Obviously this has been simplified to make it easy to explain but the principles are the same in every downwind you do. Your goal is to move at the speed of the ocean which is the highest average speed you can have. Going faster just means crashing and having to get started all over again.
So top speed = bad/irrelevant
Average speed = good
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