No Yoga, No Drown with Helen Wilson.

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to take a short class with Helen Wilson. Helen does Greenland stuff which I really don't care about. I'm not sure why exactly. I think it has to do with the "paddles". They don't look sufficiently engineery or something. Give me some good old fashioned carbon fibre splits with fat blades and a recessed button. Black ones. But(!) Helen can do a static brace, something I really, really can't do and I figured I might as well try to get some expert help before I gave up completely. Yoga, you see, is out of the question until the yoga gets a new image.

Here's a picture of Helen doing her thing:

The class was run through Cal Kayak one of our local shops here and they offered a discount to everyone who was in the local kayak clubs. I'm not particularly cheap but this was a bargain that was hard to turn down and, I think I mentioned this before, I want to support any effort to get foreign coaches into the area. If I didn't well then now you know.

There were 6 folks in the class. I think there were 2 of us who had rolls already and we all were there for slightly different reasons. The other roller was a real Greenland geek (geek is a term of respect). He had one of those skin-but-it's-really-nylon-or-something on frame boats and his own too thin wood paddle that the Greenlanders seem so attracted to. And he could do all sorts of rolls and he wanted to learn a couple more or get better at the ones he was doing or something. I wanted to avoid yoga classes and everyone else wanted to work on their regular old roll.

I remain convinced being a good instructor/coach is damned hard and requires some real effort to learn, so half the reason I take any class these days is to watch the instructor teach. Helen had a helluva task I think. It looked like everyone in the class was at a different place in terms of skills and/or desires so Helen had to individualize the class to 6 people. I had to do that for 2 people when I was taking my Level 1 and that was hard. For 6 people I would have thought it near impossible. Helen seemed to pull it off pretty well though. Everyone spent some time sitting doing nothing but generally it seemed like everyone had enough to do and that's the point.

For me the class probably could have ended after about 10 minutes on the water. Helen had us all do some stuff without our boats first. Then we all got into our boats and put paddle floats on the ends of our paddles. She move from person to person doing this and that and then she got to me. I got into my static brace position with my paddle floats on and she said good or something that indicated my position was not terrible (that was encouraging since good position meant no yoga). So then she wanted to see this without paddle floats. Off come the floats and I mentally prepare myself for a several moments of glub-glub-glub. I go over and Helen, bless her, grabs me before glub-glub-glub and tells me "relax your arm", meaning the one holding the paddle. So I focus on my arm and tell it to relax and, being entirely sober, I'm able to accomplish it. Helen let's go and I'm static bracing. I slide onto the back of the boat and come up. I do it again. It took her less than 2 minutes to fix my static brace problem. "Relax your arm". Sonofabitch.

I played with that for a while. I did a couple of butterfly rolls or something, I forget what she called them. But really I was done as soon as my static brace started happening. So, all in all, a great couple of hours with Helen. No yoga. No drown. Yes static brace.