Why is Paddling so Hard?

Ocean paddling is without a doubt one of the most complex and difficult sports around. Most paddlers go for years trying to improve technique or get better at downwind and in my opinion nobody ever truly masters it. This is probably why people don't really ever give it up. I know paddlers in their 60s who have been doing it all their lives, have won races and achieved all there is to achieve in the sport who are still excited by a good downwind day and the challenge of working with the ocean to get where you need to go.

But why is it so hard to "master"?

I think there is two main reasons. 1. The technique is complex and has no fixed points to work off and 2. The ocean is always different, day to day, hour to hour and even runner to runner.

But lets start by talking about technique and then move onto the fun stuff. Paddling technique is a complex movement that takes place on an unstable platform without any fixed points. It has basically no inherent "mechanical efficiency" built into the stroke. Mechanical efficiency is when you have solid/fixed mechanisms that transfer energy without losing any. The simplest example is to think about a bike. You push on the pedal, it doesn't bend, it can only go one way and it turns an unbending gear that turns an un-stretchable chain that makes sure all that energy from you pushing the pedal has made it to the wheel. So the wheel turns. Now imagine if the pedals were made of something soft and bendy. You could push the pedal but instead of making the gear turn the pedal would just bend. Energy lost - no mechanical efficiency.

So paddling technique is as much about making sure your pedals and gears don't bend as it is about putting things in the right place. We have to create mechanical efficiency so we can connect the energy from our hip rotation to the paddle. If something bends or warps along the way then the energy is lost. To keep these connections solid while still moving is more difficult and then you go and add the ocean moving the platform you are trying to do this on underneath you and you can see why most paddlers struggle to be efficient.

If that doesn't sound hard enough you have the perspective problem of thinking the ski isn't moving (its not relative to you) and that the paddle is. This makes people start to pull the blade in the water which would move it backwards (away from where you are going) instead of implementing the golden rule of paddling: that the paddle stays still and the boat moves past the paddle.

So its already biomechanically difficult, coupled with the fact that it's looks like something that it's not and then we go and try to do it in an uncontrolled environment with wind and waves because its fun.

Lots of people learn to paddle quite well in the flat but few people truly learn how to use the ocean really well. I like to describe the bumps and swell to people I'm coaching as just another language. If you have never heard/seen the language before you have absolutely no idea what is going on and it can be stressful or scary to be around.

Just like a language though there are different levels of fluency. There's the people that know a few of the big obvious phrases all the way through to those that would be considered fluent. But just like a different language there is always a difference between someone who is fluent and someone who has it as their native language.

The more time you have spent around a foreign language the more you learn, if you have someone help you learn the language you speed up the process but you still need to be talking to people to use your knowledge. But to take this metaphor 1 step further the language we need to learn for downwind is always changing slightly, it's the same language but with different accents or colloquialisms. The runners are all similar but at the same time they are always different. Until you've seen enough you won't see the similarities and know what they mean.

We are trying to navigate through a mess of similar but different lumps moving in generally the same direction but not quite, to a point many kilometres away that we may or may not be able to see. Most of the time we are trying to get there as quickly as possible

So yes paddling is really difficult but that's actually why it's fun. That's why you can do it for a whole life and not get bored of it.

And remember if it was easy I'd have to go and get a real job.