Swims and beatdowns are a nearly unavoidable part of whitewater kayaking. Knowing how and when to push ahead or step back can help you manage the risk.
“We are all between swims.” Almost every whitewater enthusiast has heard this paddling cliché – usually offered up as salve for egos bruised and battered from recent out-of-boat adventures. A corollary adage states, “if you’re not swimming, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.” Both are reminders that swimming is a necessary and inevitable part of our sport, and reassurances that we’re not going through it alone. There is a fine line, however, between taking your learning lumps and risking your life; so where do you draw that line? Do you draw it based on the class of rapids you’re swimming? On the number of wet-exits in a day, a month, or a year? Or on how much gear you lose or break? Do you draw it based on how much shit your friends give you and how many bootie beers you have to chug? Or perhaps on how hard a time you give yourself in the pressure cooker of your own mind? No matter how you decide where your personal threshold for acceptable carnage lies, finding and learning to deal with that boundary is one of the fundamental challenges of paddling whitewater.
Most of us do a good amount of swimming early in our paddling careers; and the steeper the slope of our learning curve, the more swims we’re likely to take. Our early swims are usually on easier whitewater, and these inconvenient–but generally benign–immersions are easily accepted as just part of the game. We’re following that second guideline – swimming in order to progress. When the stakes get higher, more complicated questions arise: Is it ok to swim here? Am I swimming too much? Why am I swimming so much?!? Should I back off, or is this still just part of the game? Here are a few points to ponder and benchmarks to use as you try to find balance between the necessary learning process and unacceptable carnage
Are you recovering your own gear? Your ability to retrieve at least some of your own stuff when you swim is a great indicator of how well equipped you are for handling your misadventures. If you frequently find yourself floundering and gasping to shore while others clean up your yard sale, it’s probably time to dial it back a notch. If you’re looking to step it up and know you might take a swim somewhere that you won’t be able to get your own gear, ask your paddling partners ahead of time to set safety. They will let you know when enough is enough, and they’ll be much more tolerant if you give them a chance to opt out of excessive rescues. Good paddling partners will stick with you to rescue you and your gear time and again when you’re having a bad day. The best way you can say thanks (aside from cold beer), is to lighten their load by trying to make better decisions that limit the number of rescues they have to perform.
Are you losing and breaking gear? How about getting injured? This can apply to beatdowns where you stay in your boat just as well as it does to swims. Are your decisions to run rapids costing you money and/or river time? Aside from getting really expensive, regularly busting boats, paddles, and/or helmets is probably a sign that the next thing to break might be you. You can always buy more gear; but time is fleeting, and you only have one body. How much time will you spend working to replace your gear or missing paddling days (and other activities, even work) because you’re healing up from pushing things a bit too far on the river? There are inherent risks in paddling, and accidents will inevitably happen. However, if you find yourself constantly replacing broken gear or missing time while you heal your latest lumps, it’s probably a sign that you’re not making the best possible decisions.
A more subtle question is: are your swims and/or beatdowns holding you back? Are they leading to more swims? This is one of the most insidious problems in progressing your whitewater skills: when does pushing yourself switch from moving your skills and confidence forward to causing you to regress? Are the potential confidence benefits of sticking the line on a challenging rapid worth the future self-doubt that crashing might bring? To some degree, you must have a very short memory in order to excel at this sport. You can’t properly focus on hitting a challenging line if you’re still ruminating on the beating you took two or three rapids back. If you swim too much, however, your mind will inevitably shift from concentrating on successfully sticking your line to lingering on the imminent possibility of a swim or a beating. When that happens, it’s probably time to dial it back and spend some time building confidence by running clean lines on easier rapids.
On the water, skills are measured not only by how hard a line we can hit when everything goes right; they’re equally measured by how well we handle the situation when things go wrong. Swimming can be an indication that we need improvement in some area – whether it be hitting our line better, keeping our cool when things don’t go as planned, or nailing our roll. However, it’s important to remember that there are many other measures of whitewater skill. The difficulty of the rapids we paddle and how well we run them are only two components of a far larger and more complex equation. More important than telling what skills we need to work on, swims and beatings tell us where we stand in the mental balancing act – our location on the spectrum between expanding our horizons by becoming better at the activity we love and remaining safe and happy so that we can continue to enjoy it. It’s often easier to know when to push ahead than it is when to take a step back; but learning how and when to do each is the key to safely enjoying the challenges and rewards of riding moving water for a long time to come.
