Put the Hammer Down!
2004 Thanksgiving Slalom Training Camp
By Alden Bird
I journeyed a relentless two blocks this Thanksgiving to attend the recent whitewater slalom training camp here in my adopted town of Bethesda Maryland. Allow me to recall some scenes.
Here is Brett Heyl, the head coach, sitting on shore with a stop watch. After the first run of the first workout, I paddle over to him. Brett is a recent Olympic kayaker and I am a canoeist. With a smile, Brett shrugs, “Yeah . . . Joe (Jacobi) is going to be able to help you a lot more.”
Here is a pack of kids roving around together – Chad Lewis, Ben Fraker and Nick Lomas. They are 15, perhaps 16 years old. This gang of ill-fitting clothes and latest trends would normally be seen loitering outside movie theaters, perhaps an awkward distance from a similar group of females, or in base lodges or at the halfpipe. They seem strangely absent from paddling. They would have no place alongside the rioting 35-year old men chugging pale ale at Gauleyfest. But they are found here, in slalom, where fathers drive them to the river. Now they are breaking sticks and throwing them into a barrel and trying to start a fire. Now they are at the dinner table flicking a jug of juice to create bubbles, egging each other on. Suddenly Ben breaks into the chorus of a song (apparently listened to in the car on the drive up from Atlanta), “This is what you get . . .” and the rest of them join in with an a-tonality that perhaps approaches coolness, “. . . when you mess with us!”
There is Joe Jacobi on shore, with the lilt and perhaps practiced phrases of a motivational speaker, telling me, “Alden, today we are putting checks in your wallet!” I can recall seeing Jacobi on TV after racing in the recent Olympics, and I recall how polished and personable he was. You can see what a confident, mature man he has grown into when you compare this to his camera appearance in 1992 – when he was stilted and less with the right words before the bright lights. Maybe it was simply the shock of winning a gold medal.
There is David Hearn, on shore, with a stopwatch and clipboard, saying almost to himself as a racer approaches the crux, “Bring the heat!”
There is Erik Amason on shore, with a recently bad shoulder, saying that he doesn’t want to get surgery “until after 2008” and thus reminding me of classmates who were already downloading Harvard applications in the ninth grade – and making sure to tell you about it.
Here is Scott Parsons and David Hearn and all the other coaches dressed warmly on a cold day in comfortable USA Canoe and Kayak team clothes. They dress the dress of men who have strove before many times on cold days, once with our same wet clothes and red hands. I think of the phrase, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Maybe it is so, but you forget this when you are in the water in your boat and the older men on shore seem to be your link to an unprecedented breakthrough that will leap-frog you over many other competitors on this very day.
Here is John Mullen and Adam Van Grack – men who are reporters and lawyers and have already picked their way through a bit of life – and yet they have only recently started slalom racing. These are men with large muscles who could run over a whole pack of teenage boys in a tackling drill. And yet even as they tower over the junior paddlers, they are drawn back irresistibly to them – watching kids half their size to figure out how they race so quickly. I think the boys do not know their names. But you can see such grown men with powerful arms that yet move in uncoordinated ways and give one the impression of a thick layer of tarnish that needs to be scraped off with practice – of hands and elbows that do not yet trace good paths through the air.
I believe that I look like this too.
What I noticed with so many coaches at this camp is that nobody has the exact answers. It is as though the coaches are also searching for the best way to do things – and this pursuit excites them, for it is the same one that animated them as athletes. And I, in turn, am inspired by their fascination. In such settings you get a glimpse of where the fierce look in these faces came from, of the words in their heads as they laced up the cold clothes and slipped into a boat, with sore muscles, on a dark afternoon to start a long workout.
Now as at all times I can see before me the purity of an objective sport measured by the clock, of the life in my warm, soft muscles even on a cold day, of the thrill of that one special time on the weekend – that parceled race day bliss that you cannot get in a recreational sport – or in any other activity that you can simply do after work or before school every day.
And yet of this training camp I recall most vividly the many scenes that filled up the days and gave life in the hours that pass between those blissful race runs – and particularly those moments when the difficult and sometimes dispiriting daily training routine became a fascinating pursuit of its own.
Now I am in my boat on the Potomac after the training camp has been dismantled. Davey Hearn is on shore with a stopwatch and a clipboard, wearing warm USA Canoe and Kayak clothes. After every run I paddle back up, panting and recovering. Now he is telling me, “Try this course . . .” Now he is joking after a revealing technical move, “It’s interesting to see how we can get you looking awkward!”
Now I am sprinting down through the gates, on this bare river in November – at a time far from any race day bibs with sponsors’ names, or excited announcers on the loudspeaker, or cheering throngs – and I am heading towards the crux of the practice course. I am pursuing during the workday a sport that seems to many people as indefensible as idling for a man of 23 who cannot claim even to match in competition mere boys half his size.
But as I approach the crux of the course with this dispiriting thought, and start to slow, suddenly there is Davey on shore yelling, “Put the hammer down!”
