C-Forum

The 2012 Open Canoe Nationals were held at Nantahala Outdoor Centre in October, this was such a cool event that I decided to create a short video about the event and what open canoe slalom looks like.
Interesting to note that many of the paddlers that I would consider to be excellent at creeking, freestyle and instructing also excel at slalom. i think it is the precision and repetition of precision that slalom paddling encourages, that makes all of our paddling improve.

Find the link to the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQuR-3Iv ... e=youtu.be" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Paul

Great Video! It was really a pleasure to get to meet You, Willa, The Westwoods, and so many others that week. As you say in the video, I definitely got a ton of encouragement and advice from the more experienced paddlers. I guess Jeremy was confused about that "more experienced paddler in the stern" thing though.

Thanks,
Paul "Shep" Shepherd

Great video.

I'll add to the list, great paddlers are also thinking about paddling, not just paddling.

thanks for comments. my apologies for making it a starring canadians video.
We didn't seem to have much of anyone else.
thanks to carole and andrew for shooting the video.

Jordidomen (who was really fast at 2012 OC slalom) has put up a go pro video that shows why he is the fastest OC slalom paddler. There is much we can learn from his video.
http://youtu.be/vwXu2H25lmo" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
time to school off him.
paul

Wow, the side switch at 1:24 happened so smoothly that it took me several rewinds/replays to actually spot it.

I never did get to see any of Jordi's runs. Thanks for the link! I agree plenty to learn from. The first thing I noticed it how aware he is when he has passed the pole on the upstream gates and immediately changes pace from pulling hard to a relaxed peel out.

An excellent video.
Paddle hard in eddies.

Technique/hull design question from that second video:

In the flatwater gates up top, the paddler repeatedly is able to redirect an offside carve with a SINGLE cross forward stroke. Only once does he need two cross forwards to stay on course. I play with this style of acceleration in my Outrage a lot, and there's no way I'd be able to stop an offside carve with a single cross stroke like that. How much of that is a function of what I assume is a hard chined race boat design vs my soft chined rec boat, and how much of that comes from the paddler in the video just being several orders of magnitude better than me?

Based on what I saw at the race, everyone is keeping very straight through those gates. I believe his onside-forward strokes are very forward and short, minimizing the rotation of the boat, so that when Jordi switches sides, he only has a small correction to make. I did notice that some of his offside strokes actually come back further than his onside forward strokes, adding a little extra turning power at the end. So, in short, I don't think he is really setting up a carve high up in the course.

Hope this helps,
Shep

Many of Jordi's offside strokes were combination power-and-draw, especially the longest ones.

He does have a good cross sweep. That's a hard one to train for in an open boat. Instead, I use my C1 for those specific routines, since I can keep the shaft more horizontal without having to deal with gunwale slivers in my knuckles.

Got a nice forward stroke too.

Hard to tell from the video, but to me it looks like he's using kind of a pitch-stroke, something you can see C1 slalom racers do quite often as well.
It's a brilliant stroke, but requires quite some training to use it at the intensity and finesse shown.

Just to make things clear, I'm far from that level .

jakke wrote:Hard to tell from the video, but to me it looks like he's using kind of a pitch-stroke, something you can see C1 slalom racers do quite often as well...

What's a "pitch-stroke"?

You can best compare it with a shortened J-stroke. It's an almost complete J-stroke, but everything is done from the plant till about the hips, so no stern correction stroke.

I think the second Kent Ford video has a bit of info about the that stroke.

You loose a bit propulsion because you're twisting the wrist during the propulsion phase. But on the other hand there is not stern correction phase and thus stroke rate can be higher.

I tend to use the pitch stroke in combination with carving, to build up speed and have better control over the carve.

It's not the easiest to master, but for speed, it's really nice. Look at C1 slalom paddlers, they often do something very similar as well.

I've been watching (and racing with) C1 slalom paddlers for almost 30 years (and trained with the US team many years ago). But I've never heard the term. For me, every stroke has subtle differences, depending on the conditions. It's all muscle memory driven by paddling instinct. If I have to think about it, it's too late.