Ya gotta get wet to stay dry

I'm heading up to Body Boat Blade in a few days for, among other things, my 3 star assessment. This is actually my second go at this. I'm still fairly bitter about the last time I did this so I won't talk about it too much but, to be clear, I'm not bitter because I failed (I sort of expected to). Rather because how the assessment was run. Anyway...

I think my bracing is my weakest skill. Like I suspect most people I don't get out on the water enough or as much as I'd like. Work, family, etc all conspire to provide me ample opportunity to stay off the water. And then when I get out one of the last things I want to spend my few hours on the water doing is practicing, say, bracing. I want to go see stuff, enjoy being outside,  all of that. Which I think is a somewhat long way of saying I don't have enough discipline.

So today I went out to the nearbyish lake to do some bracing. It's about 20 minutes away and, this being California with a budget crisis, it costs $8 bucks to touch boat to water. I could drive 40 minutes or so to get to free water but that's too much time out of a work day so $8 a throw it is.

For some reason I always get nervous when I'm going to get wet. But then, when I am wet, I'm fine. Weird. Today I was going through a pretty simple exercise. Lean, low brace, fail, high brace, up. Or that was the plan. I've done this thing a fair bunch of times so no big deal. But today it was lean, low brace, fail, high brace, fail, surprise, roll up. Tried it again. Same thing. It's supposed to be lean, fail, up. I was getting lean, fail, fail, up. That's an extra fail.

In learning to do this high brace stuff my normal coach (normal as in regular or routine. Any other presumed meaning is potentially specious) gave me a great progression to work through. What's nice about it is that I had the tools at hand to sort of start from scratch and figure out what was causing the extra fail. Thankfully, after about 10 minutes, I was back to normal (normal as in regular or routine. Any other presumed meaning is potentially specious). Well, not entirely. I decided today to stick entirely to might right side. I know this is wrong, I should work on both sides, but I pretty well flipped out that I'd lost my high brace and wanted the entire rest of the day to be successful. Tomorrow I'm going back and I'll work on either my left side exclusively or both. Depends. I still have quite a way to go with my braces. I use the paddle too much, I don't have the control to do it as slowly as I've seen it done and like that. But I go all the way over until my back hit's the water and reliably come up. I think (hope) that's good enough for what's coming up. And it's certainly something I can work with.

But all of this is sort of beside the point. I've come to believe that getting wet in controlled conditions is the single best way of staying dry in real world conditions. Believing you can brace up, roll up, cowboy back in, re-enter and roll, etc gives you the confidence that keeps you relaxed and loose in the real world. And being relaxed and loose is pretty important if you want to stay upright in jobbly water. What I need to do is get out more and practice. Pretty much like most people I'd guess.