A whitewater kayaker finds mental solace in an urban waterway

In the first few months of his arrival as an unpaid Paddler magazine intern, Joe never turned down an assignment. No matter what you asked him to do, he’d never allow his face to betray any emotion that didn't resemble something related to pure delight. It became a sort of running prank amongst the staff members; to find a breaking point in poor Joe, when he’d finally turn down a chore. Or, at least, frown upon acceptance.

Do the Buyers Guide, Joe.
Happy to do it.
Joe, I need you to clean out that back storage room.
Maybe I should clean your office too?
Joe. Could you send every advertiser a copy of Paddler magazine.
No problem.
Now I should tell you that I wasn’t the one handing out these chores, since technically, I wasn’t his boss. But since I was his superior (I am paid for my work), I did feel entitled to assign Joe to one task: flatwater workouts.

Since I started kayaking in 1995, I never had to worry about exercising for the sake of fitness. My own whitewater pursuits took care of that. Hiking out of a 300-foot canyon with a 40-pound boat on my shoulder is roughly equal to a three-mile run. And paddling upstream to grab a life-saving eddy is somewhat similar in exertion to a few sets of pull-ups.
Within six months of that first kayaking trip, I began to notice small lumps of muscle growing out of my shoulders. Veins appeared along my biceps and remained, in subdued form, even when I was relaxed. And in the right light, with just the right flex, my abdominal muscles, bore a slight resemblance to the Men’s Fitness magazine covers.
I moved to Eugene in 2001 to train for freestyle competitions, and, after several months of daily training sessions, and without any intention, my upper body tightened even more. Not like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not even close. Not even like Matthew Mcconaughey. More like Chris Kattan. 

I courted my wife when I was in this physical condition and, looking back on it, that must be what compensated for the fact that lived out of my Subaru, and referred to paddling as my career.
Eventually, I did get a job, and my new 60-hour a week schedule conspired with a floodless winter to weaken every muscle kayaking had helped me strengthen. I noticed it with my first paddle strokes of the spring. My rhythm was way off. But worse: My strokes were weaker than I'd ever felt them. Those abs actually hurt when I paddled through a hole.  
For the next five years, I’d rebuild my strength in the spring and summer and do just enough pull-ups throughout the winter to retain a semblance of it.

Three years ago, we moved to Cashmere, Washington. We bought a house four blocks from the take-out of the Northwest's best springtime play run, the Wenatchee River. I imagined that I’d be surfing every single day.
But I had a wife now. A 1-year-old daughter,  and an 88-year-old house that came with a mortgage, and a very long list of things to fix up. I had a demanding boss and a work schedule that mixed and matched 8 a.m. shift starts with 3 a.m. shift ends.
So, yes, I paddled. But not much. I hiked up mountain trails, but only a few times. I rode my mountain bike once.

And then one winter morning, I noticed something unpleasant: after months of non-use, my abdominal muscles had, at some point, decided to hibernate underneath a fresh layer of fat. 
I flexed my stomach but couldn't see even the subtlest suggestion of a bump that would indicate muscle. I turned into sharper light, flexed. But still couldn't see anything. This time, I stretched the layer of fat down, and flexed. And there, I could see two sets of mounds and two sets of valleys, like the rolling hills of the Palouse.  
I weighed myself: 178 pounds. Three pounds heavier than normal. And try as I might, I just couldn’t convince myself that muscle had anything to do with the extra weight. The reason, was that new, very foreign layer of fat on my belly. 
I obsessed over that layer of blubber. I'd go for a run, do sit-ups, and some curls. Then I'd pull my shirt up to see if it was still there. And it always was. I asked wife about it, internally pleading for her to deny she ever detected it.
She never failed to practice the best virtue.  

A few months later I accepted a position at Paddler magazine that maroon me to the west side of the Cascades, to a place that was further from whitewater than I’d ever lived in the 12 years since I first became a kayaker.
But I decided to adapt to my new habitat by becoming a bike commuter. I bought an old Cannondale road bike off Craigslist and began riding my bike every day—six miles to work and six miles back. Getting to work was easy. It was mostly downhill, with the exception of one long but gentle hill. My guess is heading back home, was my penance for everything I had ever done wrong in the period from seventh grade through high school graduation, including throwing that water balloon at Mrs. Hiatt, my physics teacher and stealing from Mrs. Emerson's desk the answers to my senior English final. (There, I admit it. I did it).
Six months of this had improved my wind, my cardio and it had seared that fat right off my stomach.

But I had almost completely neglected my upper body.
So when Joe arrived that October, the one assignment I handed to him was this: Two times a week, we do flatwater workouts. 
Joe would be the perfect workout partner, I had figured. A week earlier, I told myself, he'd moved from his parents' four bedroom, four bath southern California house and rejected a cushy job from his father to pursue a career in writing. A career in writing about, of all things, kayaking. To pay the $900 rent for his 300 square-foot studio on Capitol Hill, he moonlighted as a manny, as a janitor (for a day) and then as a manny again. This is a guy, I thought, that understood what it was like to work for something he wanted.   

The weather over Lake Washington was blustery during that first October workout. The kind of wind that blows right through your gear and ices down your bones. Joe had no shorts. So to protect the innocent bystanders from glimpses of his Joeishness, he pulled his sprayskirt down until he clamored inside his WaveSport Y.
A middle-aged woman who was walking around the boardwalk, approached him as he was preparing to stretch his sprayskirt over the kayak’s cockpit.
“Do you need some help?” she asked him, as she bent down to lend a hand.
Joe, was near-panic.
“No,” he said, “I’ve got it.”
And at that point, the middle-aged woman must have seen something because she jumped back, and rather abruptly, said: “Oh. Okay. I’m sorry.”

The workout itself was grueling. After five minutes of paddling, my shoulders burned unnaturally. The joint in my right shoulder felt like it was grinding on bone.
But I kept paddling and wishing I could quit and kept paddling and wishing I could just quit.
Once in a while, I caught a glimpse of Joe, who was red-faced, head-down and straying further and further behind.
Lake Washington did have its purpose: it was less than a half-mile from our office and the bay provided a triangular-shaped route that we could use to establish a time to beat. But it was a massive lake with a shore so far away, it seemed no matter how hard you paddled, you just weren’t moving anywhere. It was like running wild in an open field—liberating for the first few minutes, but once you realize you actually had to go somewhere, the vastness would swallow you up. 

Mike joined us for our second workout that week and then for our two workouts the following week. We did establish some times to beat, which made the workout only slightly more interesting.
After several weeks of this, Mike suggested a variation of the standard workout. The Slough, he said.
A year earlier, he had driven his Dagger RPM to a spot on the Sammamish Slough where he had ridden his K2 roadbike many times before. For all but two short sections, the Slough, as you might imagine, is completely flat, with only a suggestion of moving current. It wanders from a lake in Microsoftville, through an urban wildlife refuge, a 40-acre chunk of farmland and grassland, industrial buildings, an interstate, a trailer park, and a golf course. But on this one bend in particular, was a Class I riffle separated by a pair of eddies. Mike had wondered then, if he could paddle from the lower eddy into the upper eddy; if he could, as slalom paddlers do, make the attainment.

Mike is a cardio-freak. He runs up 4,167-foot Mount Si in an hour and five minutes. Twice a week in the summer, he’ll ride the 21 miles from his West Seattle home to Paddler’s Kirkland office. And his favorite form of exercise is trail-running.  
He was never able to attain that eddy on the Slough.
Now, after a dozen workouts on the lake, he wondered if any of us could.
The first time the three of us headed out there, we wanted to get at least a 30-minute workout—so, we figured, paddle 10 minutes downstream and 20 minutes back upstream.

The Slough has a dozen spots where the eddies were subtle, but significant; spots that could erase a lead in a matter of seconds.
The culmination of the entire workout, however, was the eddy-attainment, which, on that first try lured me to the brink of unconsciousness. My vision went blurry and my thought became cloudy.
To gauge my progress, I looked over at a stick, and after another 30 seconds of hard paddling, I noticed I had moved only inches.
I figured I had another five seconds of paddle strokes left in me but I kept on paddling and kept on paddling and kept on paddling. And finally, I started moving.
I could hear Mike and Joe yelling for me, keep going Christian! You got it Christian!  All the while, I was crawling closer and closer to the eddy.

And then it was their turns.
Mike and Joe tried several times on that first day.
Mike would battle the current for minutes, without a change in his stroke rate, or his facial expression, before surrendering and trying again.
Joe would expel all of his strength and energy in the first 30 seconds of his attempt, grimacing, then seething, then shaking off the disappointment of failing, then trying again.
They worked on it for the next five or six workout days, trying over and over and over again, before hiking their kayaks up the short path and onto the paved bicycle trail and walking back to the car.
On workout No. 7, Joe made it.
On workout No. 8, Mike did too.

And that’s when our races began.
I had the technique. Mike had the fitness. Joe, as he likes to say, had the heart. 
Regardless, the races weren’t really close. At first anyway.
But gradually, both Mike and Joe began gaining on me. I cut the secret 10-second head-start I had been giving them in half. Then I cut a few seconds off that. Then one day, Joe beat me.
I had to coerce myself into being happy for him. And now, I couldn’t wait for another Slough workout. No more secret head-starts.

At the dinner table, I’d describe the day’s workout with the detail of a glory-day high school basketball game story. My wife would roll her eyes and remind me that the last workout story had begun and ended in roughly the same way.
For most of the winter and early spring, we raced on the Slough twice a week. Sure, some weeks included intense deadline days so we wouldn’t go. Or sick days. So we wouldn’t go. Or holidays. So we wouldn’t go. But, for the most part, we stuck to the schedule.

The workouts weren’t always so enjoyable. We went out in the rain and the sleet and the snow. In the winter, the Canadian Geese had squatted on our put-in, leaving a minefield of their poop to dodge. In the summer, the water levels on the Slough had dropped and the water had stagnated, sparking an algae bloom that consumed much of the waterway. Long, slimy leaves grew from the river bottom and reached up to grab our paddle blades, which would transport them to our backs. A tree that hung over the crux attainment sprouted branches into the main flow, forcing us to alter the way we attained the eddy.
By August, the Slough began to smell. We spent the a few minutes before the stop watch started trying to figure out exactly what it smelled like—a little dead animal, a tad of sewage and decomposing vegetation?
Joe forgot his sprayskirt many times. So he'd paddle without it. And at other times, we had to drag him away from the work to which we had assigned him.

To make the workouts more enjoyable, we recruited our friends to work out with us. Only once did our efforts actually garner us a new partner—Nick Hinds, the ad sales guy from our competing magazine Canoe and Kayak. He was training for U.S. Olympic trials at the time by running gates on Lake Washington. So we figured a group workout would be a good change for him and for us.
Halfway down the river, he was chanting: “Boring! Boring! Boring!”
Eventually one of us said we should organize a race on the Slough. And the idea, like all good ideas, remained in that intangible form for months, freeing our imaginations to produce the most intricate kayak race without the burden of turning those visions into competitor lists, city permits or prizes.

We talked about it most every time we worked out on the Slough and eventually; I began talking about it when I wasn’t paddling the Slough. I’d talk about it after running Class V Top Tye or Robe Canyon.
And usually, the response was underwhelming. These whitewater kayakers, apparently, weren’t competitors. They were soul-boaters.
But then, in late October, the rain began to fall. The Skykomish flooded at 50,000 cfs. The Snoqualmie was over 10,000. Every creek in the state of Washington had plenty, if not too much water in it. And for the next few weeks, I chased it down like a gold rush.
And when it was gone, I returned to the Slough—3.3 miles from my house. I realized then, that the urban waterway would have enough water in it for another few weeks before the cold, dry spell of pre-winter would close it down again.
So, I figured, if we’re going to do a race, we should do it next week—a week before the annual Deception Pass Dash and while the whitewater runs are still low.

I sent out a feeler to every local paddling forum I knew of—to the League of Northwest Whitewater Racers, to the Seattle sea kayakers and the Professor paddlers. My recipients included whitewater, sea, slalom and downriver paddlers.
And the first response I received wasn’t encouraging.
“Not me,” wrote WA-Boater on the Professorpaddle.com site. “Is this guy joking? Sounds kind of lame. There might be some flatwater forum or sea kayaker forum where you might get some takers. Best of luck.”

I was ready to give it up then. But, to make sure, I checked the forum again, a few hours later.
 “I actually thought this sounded pretty cool,” began the next response. “There was something similar on the Potomac feeder canal and during the PoFest, that was always a good time.  ESPECIALLY if nothing else was running.  I'd rather stay in shape paddling flatwater in my creekboat than going to the gym.”
“A good on-water workout relatively close to home?” began another. “I'm in!”
I scheduled the race for Saturday, November 29. I was hoping for 15, maybe 20 competitors. And to ensure at least some turnout, I guilted each of my best friends into participating.

Mike and Joe were no-brainers, since they were as responsible for the race idea as I was. But I also needed my good buddy Rob McKibbin, who is friends with everybody and had, just a month earlier, repeated Al Faussett’s 1926 descent of 275-foot Sunset Falls. And Tao Berman, who’s pure celebrity would bring a sense of legitimacy to the race. I wanted Paul Gamache and Ben Hawthorne there. They had been in Seattle for only a year, but in that time, both had developed reputations as the area’s most passionate and skilled hairboaters. Hawthorne had run Class V+ Robe Canyon more than 30 times in his first year here. He had won the Icicle Creek race and the Robe Canyon Race. And Gamache, who had, a few years earlier, run all 112 miles of Cataract Canyon in a single day, had pulled another doosy: two weeks before the race, he kayaked over a 108-foot waterfall near Vancouver, British Columbia.

The whitewater crowd would want to know about his descent and if they came to the event, they could ask him in person. 
I posted reminders on all of the forums three days before the race and just hoped the turnout wouldn't be too embarrassing, assuring myself that, heck, if just Rob, Joe and Mike showed up, I’d still have fun.
On the morning of the race, I anchored a Washington Mutual-labled beach ball at the turn-around point.
I also looted the Paddler office of a pair of Smith sunglasses, a Petzyl headlamp and some sort of inflatable pillow. I found some canoe-specific beer cozies hanging off a cardboard box, I could give as a consolation prize and a Paddler-labled cam strap.
And then, I drove to the park.

When I turned into the parking lot, I saw trucks and cars and vans loaded with sea kayaks, wildwater boats and creekers. Paddlers were already dressed in drysuits, drytops and workout gear. Thirty minutes before the competitors were supposed to meet, kayakers were running from the vehicle they had parked in the lot to the kayak they had parked in the lawn, looking for a missing skirt, missing PFD or something else. Pods of four or five had accumulated here and there. 
The park had the same excitement, the same anxiety present at any of the other races and rodeos I had participated in.
I was anxious too.

More than winning the race, what I really wanted was for all boat categories to converge near the crux attainment at the end. I wanted an eight-foot creekboat to have the same chance of winning as a 17-foot sea kayak.
To accomplish this, I had staggered the start times for each boat category, based on my times in those kayaks on the course.
Whitewater creekboats, I learned, needed a six-minute head start to stay competitive, followed by whitewater long boats, such as the Green Boat or Dagger’s Response. Sea kayaks could still catch and pass a creekboat, even if they started 9 minutes later, I discovered.
But the one type of kayak I couldn’t test for was a Wildwater boat. And 20 minutes prior to the race, I made a guess of a decision to allow them to start a minute earlier than the sea kayaks.
A few hundred yards after passing the turnaround ball, Tom Wier, the first wildwater boater passed me in my whitewater long boat.
Then halfway back up the course, the second wildwater kayak passed. Then another.
And then another.
I figured I had really screwed the staggered starts up.

When I finally reached the crux attainment, I saw Mike, Joe and Rob struggling to acquire the eddy. I looked behind me and saw the last wildwater kayak, the remaining whitewater long boats, followed closely by a half-dozen sea kayaks.
It seemed we were all converging right there, at the crux attainment.
In the end, the wildwater kayaks took four out of the top five spots. I took sixth overall in my Dagger Green Boat and Berman took fourth in his sea kayak.
Behind me, however, was a proportionate mix of creekboats, sea kayaks and whitewater long boats.
And in the pool beyond the finish line, a few minutes later, were 26 racers, all exhausted, but with plenty of energy to describe in perfect detail, what their race was like. 

When I first arrived at Paddler magazine, Mike and I were talking about the challenge of finding stories that interested each type of paddler to whom we were trying to appeal. How can you write a story that appeals to a canoeist and a whitewater creekboater?
“If a whitewater kayaker, a canoeist and a sea kayaker were all in the same bar at the same time, would they,” I asked Mike, “gravitate towards each other by the end of the evening?”
Back then, my answer was no.
But after watching the various kinds of paddlers mingle on that Saturday, I might put some more thought into my answer.
And it all started with a guy who wondered if he could paddle from one eddy to another one.

Results:
1. Tom Wier, C1 Wildwater: 28:59
2. Rich Romer, K1 Wildwater: 30:03
3. Jennie Goldberg, K1 Wildwater: 31:19
4. Tao Berman, sea kayak (Eddyline Falcon): 31:33
5. Rufus Knapp, K1 Wildwater: 33:20
6. Christian Knight, Long boat, Green Boat: 33:35
7. Greg Barden, sea kayak (wood): 34:17
8. Darren Albright, Long boat (Response): 34:40
9. JP, sea kayak (Tempest 170), 34:50 *corrected
10. Rob McKibbin, 9 and under (Nomad) 35:08
11. Philip Sparr, sea kayak (Vokhv): 35:57
12. Joe Jackson, 9 and under (Remix): 36:05
13. Josh Knight, sea kayak (Necky Looksha): 36:22
14. Dave Hablewitz, longboat (Hydra): 36:32
15. Mike Kord, 9 and under (Dagger RPM): 36:36
16. Ben Hawthorne, long boat (Crossfire): 37:54
17. Chris Rogers, sea kayak (Wilderness Systems 170): 38:26
18. Joel Martin, long boat (slalom): 44:43 (swam)
19. Bernie Swanson, sea kayak (Nordkapp): 46:33
20. Scott Waidelich, 9 and under (Jackson): 46:39 (late for race)
21. Cathy Haggerty, sea kayak (Valley): 46:41
22. Bill Porter, sea kayak (Romney): 46:50
23. Henry Romer, sea kayak (Acadia?): 48:08
24. Steve Murphy, sea kayak (NA): 50:51
25. Mark Baron, sea kayak (P&H Quest): 52:40
26. Bill Walker, sea kayak (P&H Capella): 53:19