Notes From the North Country

Texting in the Boys Room

April 19, 2018 / alden110 / 1 Comment

Image result for kid on a cell phone in class

Cell phone use has become a major problem in American schools — and it’s not going away. (http://nordic.businessinsider.com)

***

“Excuse me, do you have your cell phone out?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, it’s not what you think,” the boy responded.

I was surprised because even though I fight this battle every day in my other classes, here in my advanced writing class, I had never seen a cell phone. As I thought about it, even after nearly a year of teaching these 15 juniors and seniors, I had no way of knowing if they even owned cell phones.

In any of my other classes, the ten minutes of directions I’d just given — form groups, choose a book to read together over the next month, then check local libraries or bookstores for copies — would’ve sent at least two or three kids reaching for the welcome distraction of their phones.

“Not what I think? Sure it’s not,” I said to boy, cracking a smile.

“No, no! I just texted my mom. She works at the bookstore. She’s already ordered four copies of the book. We’ll have them in class Monday.”

“Well . . .” I stammered. “That’s . . . impressive problem solving. And — smart use of your . . . cell phone.”

His phone was already put away.

How the Other Half Lives

Skip ahead to my next class. Unlike the advanced writers, these students leave no doubt that they all own cell phones.

“Please take a moment to put away your phones,” I cheerfully remind them at the start of class. I think of myself like the announcement you hear in movie theaters right before the film begins.

“And take your headphones out, too!”

With their discrete wires emerging from sweatshirts and snaking into their ears, my students remind me sometimes of Secret Service agents. Many of them attempt to conduct their entire lives with one headphone playing music at all times. How can they concentrate?

“Remember,” I tell them, “to think about those studies we looked at.”

“Those studies” are my first lesson plan of the year — a series of articles about the dangers of distraction: how multitasking is a myth, and how a cell phone sitting on a desk can make us less cognitively astute, and appear less empathetic. It’s my attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to educate students, and to stop cell phone distraction before it starts.

It usually works for about two weeks. Then phones creep back onto desks, into laps, and into restless hands. I spot them during lectures, during writing time, even during group project work. Some kids are cagey — backpacks or books propped on desks are a telltale sign of illicit phone use. So are illuminated faces in an otherwise dark room. So is a strange interest in one’s groin area. Other kids are more brazen. Some, despite my friendly tone, are downright belligerent. Their rebellious tones belie the straight-up lameness of their excuses.

“What’s your problem? My mom’s texting me!”

But here’s the irony: most of these heavy in-class tech users are completely unable to use technology to help them learn.

Even though they spend — by their own admission — upwards of eight hours a day using media, few of them understand how to follow their progress by checking our school’s online gradebook.

Even fewer of them bother to check their school email, ensuring that they miss their teachers’ email updates about missing assignments and homework changes.

Even more alarming, they struggle to use technology for basic educational tasks: knowing where to find information, how to identify good and bad sources, even understanding what to type into a basic Google search to yield relevant results. The reasons are not hard to detect. These students lack problem-solving skills, literacy skills, and simple perseverance — ironically all of which are exacerbated by their heavy use of technology. It’s a depressing cycle.

Family Drama

And here’s another problem. Cell phones also allow family problems to creep into the classroom. There’s a sad juxtaposition between the young man whose mother ordered books for him and the young man whose mother was texting him with drama-filled invective. One was helping her son learn. The other was, as some of our students would say, “bringing the drama” — the same sort of familial turmoil that has kept learning a stated priority but in reality a low one in this boy’s life.

The irony of the student whose mother is frantically texting him, “You should be paying attention in class right now!” is all-too clear.

Meanwhile, the students in my advanced class are downright savvy tech users. They receive automatic updates from the online gradebook, check and respond promptly to their teachers’ emails, and frequently show me new ways of using media for our studies. Last week, as we discussed Cambridge Analytica in class, one young man removed a cell phone I’d never seen before and demonstrated how I myself could find the covert marketing profile Facebook had compiled on me.

(Apparently I am — like this young man — “Very Liberal.”)

What We’re Up Against

What’s troubling for me is that technology is sold to schools as a way to provide educational equality. By using online learning, blended learning, and now, “personalized” learning, tech companies promise us that we’ll be able to tailor our teaching directly to individual students in order to close the achievement gap. But as I’ve described, too often technology only seems to increase the divide between those who’ve been taught to use it wisely and those who haven’t.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re trying. Like France, which has banned cell phones in schools for students under 15, the school where I work has banned phones for middle schoolers. And in the high school classrooms, we try to teach not only research skills, but subtler ones too: the dangers of online data sharing, and the dangers of distraction, both in class and in the car. To some extent, we’re all media literacy teachers. We try.

But we’re up against a lot. The same tech companies that claim they’re on our side when they’re peddling products to school superintendents are every second fighting for our kids’ attention — and they have a lot sexier products to sell than we educators do.

We’re also up against the first generation of parents who’re on phones. A few years ago during my annual Open House presentation, I started seeing parents on cell phones. Here I was, telling a roomful of adults how I’d be educating their children, and they were on their cell phones! I wanted to quit right there.

Sometimes teachers are no better. Look around at the next faculty meeting sometime and watch the thumbs working. We’re just as bad as anyone else at practicing what we preach.

It’s hard because as forward-thinking educators, we want to encourage responsible use of technology. We know it’s going to be part of our students’ future. And yet, it often feels as if we’re introducing another impediment to learning, especially for our neediest students. It’s so hard to keep them on task. Too often during a research project, I’ll catch students visiting websites they shouldn’t be on. College professors face this dilemma everyday — to keep kids from taking notes on computers during lectures feels ridiculous in 2018, but then the professor stops talking and everyone’s still typing because they’re actually doing email or posting on social media. Technology isn’t an educational panacea — it’s a pickle that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Believe me, I’m not trying to pin all the blame on technology. Lord knows that kids never needed technology to distract them in class. We passed notes, we stared at the beautiful girl in front of us, we sketched the rapids on the New Haven Ledges in our notebook (that was me . . . ), or we just zoned out. The writer and teacher Garret Keizer said that whereas the problem used to be smoking in the boys room, now it’s texting in the boys room. I suppose that’s a good trade. But they weren’t smoking in class. Technology makes it harder to pay attention — especially for the kids who most need to pay attention.

The Panacea?

This message is urgent right now, because of the belief that technology can fix our educational problems by differentiating instruction, or — here is the new buzzword in education — by personalizing it. The allure of hooking our weakest students up to a computer program and letting them work their way through it at their own pace is something that’s becoming more and more seductive.

But it’s naive to think that digital learning can ever replace the true personalization of an experienced teacher. What if all of our students were savvy about the dangers of the internet?

What if all of our students knew how to leverage the remarkable research and learning tools we didn’t even have just five years ago?

What if all of our students understood the dangers of digital addiction?

What if I didn’t know if any of my students owned cell phones? That’s the dream.

I don’t know how that happens, but I do know this: It won’t be computers teaching them that.

A Year Off From Teaching

April 6, 2018 / alden110 / 2 Comments

A few months ago, I did something crazy. Even though it’s what I want, and even though I’ve had time to get used to it, I still find myself wondering, “What the hell am I doing?”

Or, “Who am I to try this? I’m just a teacher.”

Let me explain.

In my world, I’m realizing, things don’t change much. Public schools are remarkably consistent. Sure, kids don’t pass notes anymore — they text. Homework isn’t on the board — it’s online. And nowadays we practice active shooter drills and even talk about arming teachers. Imagine!

But look closely and you’ll find the core of American high school has stayed strikingly similar for 75 years. Every morning since who-knows-when, a bell has rung and sleepy-eyed teenagers have wandered off to the same basic classes, on the same basic schedule, for the same 180 days, to earn the same As, Bs, or Cs. It’s ritual: the droning teachers, the hand-raising, the homework, the lockers, even the detention. High school is comfortably familiar, its traditions etched into our collective conscious. It’s a rite of passage.

That doesn’t mean it makes sense. It doesn’t. For instance, if I were checking kids’ incisors or tonsils, I’d get to examine one kid at a time. Instead I’m teaching them to read and to show empathy and to participate in a democracy. I get them twenty-two at a time.

For American schools, this too is tradition: We know what works. We just can’t afford it.

Or can we?

Two years ago, a creative principal decided to do something about his students’ writing. So he lightened an English teacher’s class load from five to four — and made each class a bit bigger (but not too much) to compensate. Understand, teaching five classes is just as much a fixed reality for American teachers as the 180-day calendar. It’s tradition.

But not this time. Now the principal told the teacher to use that extra time — that fifth teaching period — to conference individually with kids outside of class. This, he thought, would improve their writing.

Improve they did.

The results were immediate. One month in, the teacher was pinching himself. Suddenly he could really dig into kids’ writing and show them what his red pen comments never could. But it was more than that. Suddenly he could know his students as individual learners, as individual human beings, more than he ever had before. This, he told himself, is what I’ve been trying for my whole career.

That teacher was me.

That experience of being freed up to work one-on-one with kids on their writing — to diagnose the individual patient rather than the group — changed my outlook on what was possible in education.

We know what works. This works. Maybe this time we can afford it?

***

A year later — this winter — I received a Rowland Fellowship — a year-long, paid sabbatical awarded to Vermont teachers — with the purpose of investigating whether this new conferencing approach to teaching is a) as good as I think it is, and b) feasible for anyone else. What does this mean? For a whole year, I won’t teach. I’ll visit other high schools and maybe even colleges to see if anyone else is doing this crazy conferencing idea. I’ll read journal articles to try to figure out if any schools way, way back in time have tried this (hint: they have). I’ll attend conferences. I’ll interview kids and teachers to see what they think of the writing conference model. I’ll research. I’ll support my coworkers, who are brave enough to try out this new plan. It’s the sort of chance you don’t often get in your professional life — the chance to step back from the day-to-day to really try to get it right.

And it’s not only generous of the Rowland family, but far-sighted. In a time when we’re used to educational policy being driven by those farthest from the classroom — professors, politicians, even billionaires — the Rowland Foundation is built on the refreshing and frankly savvy idea that, given time and thought-space, it’s teachers themselves who have some of the worthiest ideas about improving education.

After all, schools are busy. Teachers are busy. We jam twelve months of work into a 10-month school year. We rarely get to pause and reflect. Too often, we flit from shiny new initiative to band aid reform, without giving anything a chance to work before we move on. It doesn’t help that our policies are often subject to the whims of short-tenured administrators and to impatient legislators.

Paradoxically, it’s this constant blur of reforms that ensures none of it ever really sticks. Add in a lack of money, the comfort of familiarity, and the sheer scope of the job of educating the masses, and all of it helps explain why today’s basic school structure looks remarkably similar that of 50 years ago. There is an “immovable mountain” — as Rowland Executive Director Chuck Scranton calls it — in our way. No change comes to schools without a lot of time, thought, and hard work.

And yet, change does happen. The school where I work is remarkably forward-thinking and humane. Even in my eight years as a teacher, I’ve seen a number of positive changes worked into the immovable system by diligent and committed educators. I’ve seen it work — and I want to be a part of it.

As trite as it sounds, I took this fellowship because I wanted to make a difference. And I’m incredibly excited to get to work. But this does feel out of character for me. I don’t usually think of myself as a leader. The goal of the fellowship is not just classroom but school-wide reform. The question is — can I “scale up” my idea to promote change beyond my own classroom or department. That’s scary because that’s not how I usually think of myself. I’m just a teacher. When I look down the list of past Rowland recipients, I see leaders in the Vermont educational community: future principals, curriculum coordinators, even a future mayor. I don’t see myself that way. Motivating grumpy teenagers to pass in their Paper Towns essays is one thing. Trying to nudge grizzled veterans with pedagogical war stories from the year I was born to fall in line with my wacky ideas is quite another. Who am I to try to make change?

What if no one’s interested?

Then there’s the fact that what I’m selling may be impossible to spread beyond my classroom. There are a hundred reasons why it’s too hard to teach only four classes and to conference individually with kids: Teachers have always taught five classes. Teaching four will make classes too big. One-on-one meetings take up too much time. It’s impossible to conference with all of your students every semester. Better to just do what we’ve always done: chat quickly with kids during a stolen minute or two in class here and there, or even 30 seconds when everyone else is working well. Keep your classes small and try to make it work without the individual face-to-face time. Play the long game. Things are the way they are for a reason.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with these doubts.

The last time I remember feeling this way was back in 2003, when I first decided to write the book that would eventually become Let It Rain, the kayaking guidebook that was the passion project of my pre-teaching days. The questions, the self-doubt, was all the same:

Who am I to do this?

What if no one likes it?

What happens if this doesn’t go well?

But there are always a million reasons why you shouldn’t do something. Just like back in 2003, I have no idea how the next year will turn out. I cannot know if my desire to change schools to establish more flexible teacher schedules and more individual instruction will be repelled by the immovable mountain. I cannot know if the changes I’m hoping to make are at all realistic, or helpful to anyone besides me. But I do know that sixteen years ago I did not regret taking the risk that I did.

I have the sense that these feelings of doubt are again the ones that precede something important. And something tells me that even if I fail, even if in five years there’s no trace of my reform left, I won’t actually have failed.

I am a big believer in the idea that every now and then — maybe once or twice in your career — you stumble onto something amid the myriad of temporary reforms that really works. And if you don’t throw your hat into the ring, if you don’t fight for that cause to get its hearing, then you’re not playing the game for real.

Starting next fall, I’m in.

On Guns and Teachers

February 26, 2018 / alden110 / Leave a comment

Image result for school metal detectors

***

As a public school teacher, I could not have agreed more with President Trump last week, when he said, “We have to harden our schools, not soften them” in response to school shootings.

Trump’s directive was echoed by other conservatives. Instead of fewer guns, they said, we need more guns in schools — especially in the hands of teachers. We also need more metal detectors, more alarm systems, more cameras, and more security guards. Again, I couldn’t agree more.

The problem is, Trump isn’t taking things far enough. After all, schools aren’t the only places that mass shootings occur. Children aren’t the only ones who need protecting. I think it’s high time we started “hardening” a few other places too.

Let’s start with one place that’s notoriously atrocious at security: our churches. Just a few years ago some psycho opened fire during Sunday mass in South Carolina, killing nine worshippers. Any good conservative knows these atrocities are easily prevented if our churches would beef up the perimeter.

Let’s be realistic: it’s not like everyone gets into Heaven, right? So why should just anyone be able to walk into a church? Not only do churches open their doors to all comers on Sunday (where’s the armed guard?), but many of them leave their doors open all week long so people can wander in and pray. Can you say, “soft”?

Forget open hearts and open arms. It’s time for metal detectors. We’ll set up shop in the vestibule. Want to take communion? Better get patted down first. Shooters would think twice if they knew Father Jack was packing heat under his robe. The choir better be on key — and locked and loaded too.

***

But let’s not stop with our churches. There’s another place that mass shootings have occurred — in fact, in 2015 in San Bernardino, 17 people were shot at one of these. Frankly, they’ve always been soft. It’s time to bring them in line with the modern crime environment.

I’m talking about Christmas parties. This year, instead of bringing a bottle of wine and a gift for secret Santa, bring your Glock, too. No one’s crashing the Hadlock Insurance Group’s holiday get-together if they think Joyce from Accounting’s got a 9 millimeter tucked under that ugly Christmas sweater. Bad guys take notice: you’re not just standing under the mistletoe, you’re standing in the crosshairs.

***

But forget churches and Christmas parties. There’s another place that’s seen almost as many mass shootings as schools, and is just as badly in need of hardening. Back in 2009, 13 people were killed in a shooting at one of these places. Four years later, another shooting happened at the exact same one. How weak is that? If you believe that Trump’s got it right — and I do whole-heartedly — clearly these places need to work on getting tough. Trump tells us that tighter security, more armed guards, better drills, and more employees carrying weapons will deter shooters. So clearly these particular places need to step it up with all of those.

So what are these soft, soft targets?

Military bases.

Come on, U.S. military! If Trump is right about guns being the answer, you all must be doing a terrible job. It’s high time the U.S. military started working on getting more of their employees armed. Because as we know, that’s what really works in preventing mass shootings. I have no doubt that’ll improve their odds of deterring violence on military bases, just like it’ll work perfectly with American public schools.

It’ll all be pretty seamless, after all. Even though most teachers have never shot a weapon, I’m sure they’ll have no trouble adapting to their new role as physical protector of their students. After all, plenty of people sign up to put themselves in harm’s way — police, fire fighters, soldiers. I’m sure that this new role won’t cause any of our teaching candidates to feel squeamish and choose another career.

After all, just because you love kids doesn’t mean you can’t love the idea of shooting guns at people. I’m sure that even though we’ve got a perennial teaching shortage in the United States, and even though 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years due to poor working conditions, nobody’s going to be further deterred simply because they have to be prepared to, say, shoot an attacker in the face. I can’t imagine that in addition to the hurdles faced by teachers — lack of time, money, and resources — they’ll be much bothered by the ever-present reminder that they might be attacked by an active shooter. They’ll probably just forget about it, walking through metal detectors, practicing drills, and keeping a gun in their desk. I’m sure that won’t dominate their thoughts.

And I’m quite sure that in addition to all of the roles teachers are expected to play — therapist, disciplinarian, role-model, snack-opener, writing coach, lunch monitor, bullying-preventer, and self-esteem-raiser, they’ll be just fine adding the role of security guard.

I’m sure that the serious implications that come with keeping a loaded gun in the classroom — “I would engage in a gunfight for your children,” and “I would kill another human for your children,” and finally, “I would take a bullet for your children” will all be easy for teachers to wrap their minds around. I’m sure they won’t want to switch professions, especially if you don’t pay them any more, which, let’s face it, you won’t.

It’ll all work perfectly. What could go wrong?

Want To Make Change? Join the N.R.A.

February 20, 2018 / alden110 / Leave a comment

(Fortune.com)

***

A lot of people have been speculating about the best thing we can do to prevent further school shootings. Some people say, “Vote Democrat.” Others say, “Study the problem scientifically.” But I’ve got the real answer.

Join the NRA.

I remember during the 2016 election some pollster — I think it was Nate Silver — joked that the best thing Democrats could do for Hillary Clinton was not to get out the vote, but simply to get out: move away from the urban, Democratic areas to red states where their votes would matter more. Another 400,000 blue votes means nothing in San Francisco or Park Slope. But in the Rust Belt? That’s an election. Go West, young hipsters! But not too far west. Stop somewhere around Des Moines.

Here’s my point: right now the NRA casts a long shadow. But its membership is only about 5 million. That’s just 6-7% of all gun owners. On the other hand, there are a lot of us. Out of 323 million Americans, I’ve got to believe at least 100 million of us are interested in sensible gun control. Yes, they’ve got the guns, but we’ve definitely got the numbers.

So here’s the plan: We’ll all join the NRA. We’ll show up at board meetings. We’ll pack the house, demand to be heard. We’ll take control. We’ll vote in new officers. Remember when people were joking that if Hillary Clinton got elected, she should nominate Barack Obama as her Supreme Court nominee, just to stick it to Mitch McConnell? We’ll do stuff like that. George Clooney for NRA President. Howard Dean as Treasurer. Maybe Lebron could be Secretary, or maybe Steph Curry, or — I’ve got it! — Draymond Green.

Future NRA leadership material.

What’s so strange about this? The NRA, like any organization, responds to its members. Plus, it’s happened before. Back in the mid-70s, the NRA was still largely run for sportsmen. But a hard line faction within the membership staged a coup and ousted the old guard, installing a new brand of “from my cold, dead hands”-style Second Amendment fanatics far more recognizable to today’s NRA fans.

So why not stage our own takeover? If you can’t beat ‘em, dilute ‘em. If you and I joined up, yeah, we’d be giving them our money, but we’d damn well be expecting something in return. We’d clog up their meetings with our talk about reasonable restrictions on magazines, bump stocks, and all that other stuff.

We’d say, “We love hunting. We love target practice. We love the responsible gun ownership — like the student of mine in Vermont who a few months back admitted to skipping school to go turkey hunting. We like those gun owners. We like those guns — you know, the non-Rambo kind. And we want that kid off shooting in the woods with his father — not getting shot up in his classroom.”

We’d say, “We’re scared of our government, too — but that doesn’t make us want to stockpile ammo. Besides, we don’t like our chances against the U.S. Army. Let’s say they turn on us. Would it matter if we have AR-15s, or just regular rifles? They’ll have the helicopters, the tanks, the warheads, the cool jackets, and we’ll have . . . our cherished assault rifles? I’ve got news for you: just because these weapons work against a roomful of fourth period trigonometry students doesn’t mean they could’ve beaten back Crooked Hillary’s Calvary, which I know you were worried about. Don’t be those Confederate boys at the start of ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘One AR-15 could lick six Yankees!’ As Rhett Butler pointed out to you gentlemen, ‘Wake the fuck up.’”

Plus, we like to smack our government around the old fashioned way: at the ballot box. Look at the last election. You won! You didn’t Lock Her Up, but you sure as shit got your man elected, the tangerine Idi Amin. You don’t need to stockpile weapons. You stockpiled votes (with a little help from Vlad and his bots). Democracy works, my NRA brethren. You don’t need to wave an automatic weapon in anyone’s face.

So, fellow Reasonable People, I say: Just stop. Stop having pointless Facebook debates. It’ll only entrench us all further. Some of us are just freedom-loving people, dammit — the kind who’re just fine forcing kids and teachers to walk through metal detectors and do survival drills and basically live under martial law. There’s no need to raise a stink on social media. That’s not where the money’s carved up. Let’s walk back into that cigar-filled room and light up our own stogies like we own the joint. Let’s be part of the solution — from inside. Let’s keep our enemies real nice and close.

There’s only one surefire way to beat back the NRA.

Let’s join it.

What’s Wrong With Coaches?

February 16, 2018 / alden110 / Leave a comment

***

The other night, watching 17 year-old Red Gerard win a gold medal, man-hug the same two teammates at least 25 times each, then drop an F-bomb on live TV, it got me thinking: I am old. After all, this kid is only 17. I’ve got skis older than Red Gerard.

Teenage medalists are hardly unique, but it did get me thinking about what a strange experience this must be. I wonder, for many of these young athletes especially, how much of their Olympic pursuit is managed by parents or especially coaches.

There’s nothing wrong with coaches. I’ve had lots of great ones. I wish I’d had more. But it struck me that my own Olympic pursuit, as a canoe racer, was largely a coachless one. And that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.

Why? It’s simple. I discovered the joy of learning everything on your own. If you are training because a coach tells you to train — if you work on a certain skill because a coach tells you to work on it — if your last thought after a bad run is, “Coach is not going to be happy” — you’re missing the greatest part of being a training athlete in pursuit of a goal: taking responsibility for yourself.

The best part of the Olympic quest isn’t the victories. It’s the journey. It is the — to borrow a line from a former kayak coach — “fascination with the process.” And if you’re just along for the ride on the journey — if the process is being run by someone else — you’re missing the best part.

When I started racing kayaks seriously at 19, I knew I wasn’t good enough — and there weren’t coaches enough — for me to merit much of their time. Instead, I learned many of their skills for myself: setting a yearly training plan, setting my own weekly goals, seeking out my own training partners, and evaluating my own performance with an eye toward constant improvement.

On Sunday mornings in the mid-2000s, I’d drive out to the Dickerson whitewater course in Maryland and walk up and down the shore with my training partner, Steve Graybill, planning exactly what we wanted to work on and adjusting the slalom gates to suit our ends. We didn’t have a coach to set the gates for us, but that made us that much more astute critics of ourselves, and that much more invested in the workouts — because we’d set the goals ourselves, not a coach.

I never knew those things as a high school athlete, playing soccer and lacrosse. A coach scripted our pre-season training, a coach monitored our fitness, tailored our drills, responded to sloppy game play with targeted interventions, scripted our playbook, and configured the playing field, filling out the roster with each of us at whichever position he liked. We went to practice and did what we were told. The athletic fields were an extension of the classroom. We were students and the coaches were the teachers.

The idea of not being in charge of your training is so foreign to me now — not just as a former coachless athlete, but as a teacher whose job is directing the learning process of others. I can’t imagine being on the other end now. It’s almost hard for me to imagine playing a coached sport again.

Some athletes are lucky enough to have a coach who becomes a partner in this quest — more like a peer, a helper, rather than an authority. These can be incredibly meaningful relationships, but they can only happen for athletes mature enough and invested enough that they’d be training at 5 am even without a coach. If you need a coach to get you up early, that’s not an equal relationship, and you’re missing out.

My favorite dynamic from back when I was racing was the group of coachless competitors. When you had two or three guys, all very close in performance, all serious about improving, who came together to train, the dynamic was fantastic, because you’d be pushing yourselves to do things no reasonable coach could’ve ever asked you to. In some ways, it’s purer than a coached workout: athletes thinking things through for themselves, and bringing out the best in each other without intermediaries. Internal motivation — true motivation — is always the most rewarding.

Let every Olympic athlete, no matter how young, feel the joy for at least one season of taking responsibility of his own training, of targeting his own weaknesses, of developing his own strength and skills, of dragging himself out to the river on a cold morning at 5 am.

After all, ask any Olympic athlete and they’ll tell you: it’s not about the medals. It’s about the pursuit of excellence.

But a medal would be nice.

Less Than Zero

December 31, 2017 / alden110 / Leave a comment

(Mount Washington Observatory)

***

After spending most of November and December’s usable daylight (sum total: 4 hours) indoors, my Christmas vacation plans always carry a hint of desperation:

I’ll get up early and snowboard. Then I’ll cross country ski. Maybe after that I’ll hike a 4,000 foot peak. Then I’ll put my snowshoes on and walk around the house a bunch of times. I’ll use muscles I have forgotten about since October, such as those in my legs and arms. I’ll be outside! It won’t be dark out!

Then we get to Christmas and I remember that I live in New England — where the best laid plans of mice and men are always foiled by the Gods of Crappy Weather.

Christmas Break 2017 was no different. First, an East Coast-sized rainstorm conveniently appeared in time for my wife and me to drive to my in-laws’ for Christmas. We made the four hour drive in just over seven, dodging wrecked cars while negotiating roads that looked like NHL ice rinks after the zamboni has been across.

By the time we arrived in Maine, an inch-thick skin of ice coated the car. I peeled off pieces to bring inside to show my in-laws: a replica side-view mirror made of ice, a two-foot chunk that reproduced the contours of my car’s grill, Subaru logo and all. It was like one of those molds they make of your teeth at the dentist.

Two days later, our presents opened, my father-in-law and I rode out of the garage in formation behind two snowblowers. Clearing those 12 inches of new snow from the driveway turned out to be Christmas break’s only outdoor fun.

Because by the time we got home, the week’s temperatures were already looking like Donald Trump’s poll numbers: -5, 2, 8, -2, -3. And those were the highs. Meanwhile on the drive home we saw a classic Big Truck Guy being winched out of the ditch, one whole side of his rig — the passenger side, fortunately — dented in like it was paper mache.

It’s almost always Big Truck Guys who you see off the road. They think that just because they have tires the size of RVs, they’re not beholden to physics. In my experience, most Big Truck Guys are insecure. That’s why they drive such big trucks. Actually, Big Truck Guys aren’t even the worst winter drivers. That honor belongs to Crappy Car Girls. Big Truck Guys are overconfident, but Crappy Car Girls are oblivious, which is worse. You’ve got to watch out for Crappy Car Girls.

Last spring I watched one pass me in a snowstorm at double the speed limit, flip her car into the ditch, and land upside down and backwards. “She’s dead!” I thought. I put one foot up against the steaming wreck, wrenched open one of the horribly deformed doors, and watched a quivering hand emerge, then a face. As the ambulance took her away, the state trooper and I shook our heads, muttering to ourselves how lucky she was to live. Modern cars — even late 90’s Dodge Stratuses with bald tires — are so safe that we can get away with being oblivious.

(mediad.publicbroadcasting.net)

But more than the questionable roads, it’s the frigid temps that have quashed my Christmas plans. Bright sun and deep snow are cruel jokes to a skier when the temperature is -20 at 10 am this morning. And I’ve kayaked class V rivers in single digit temps. I wear t-shirts even when I can see my breath. But this week I haven’t left the house in three days except to break an icicle the size of a motorcycle off my roof. I haven’t even gotten the mail.

New England is known for its picturesque winter beauty — the snow-covered fields, the plumes of smoke wafting from snug, warm houses — but the fact is, New England winters are harsh. During my February vacation week in two successive years, first in Switzerland and then in Montana, I basked in sunny, 25-degree days, calm winds, and fresh powder under my skis. During the same week the next two years, I suffered through freezing rain, resort-closing winds, and 50 degree temperature swings back in New England. Today the high is -2 in New Hampshire, but in Aspen, Colorado they’re skiing in t-shirts: 50 degrees. Why, New England, why?

I should leave. My high school seniors ask about colleges and I’ll dreamily tell them to forget academic rankings. Look for beaches, palm trees. Go south, young man! Florida, or California — where you can leave your coat at home (in New England) and focus on higher thoughts than survival.

But as brutal as New England is, it’s our brutal. I just got the mail wearing only a sweatshirt and I’m still registering my extremities. That wasn’t terrible. Next week it’ll be fifteen above — balmy! — and I’ll ski in just a light coat. It’s like those runners who train at altitudes. You get tough in New England. You think, “I’ve got this.” You think, “It’s not that bad.” You don’t get to think that in Miami-Dade County, and that counts for something. There’s good in this ratcheting-down. It reminds you how resilient you can be. Hot temps make you lethargic. In New England, we’ve got our eyes on the Troll-in-Chief. We’re not taking a siesta. Winter keeps us sharp.

And adaptable, too. We don’t just endure, we roll with the punches. “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” A week from now it’ll probably be 45 and we’ll be on the porch in our t-shirts and then it’ll rain, and freeze, and pockmark the roads, and snow again, and cover our cars, and the wind will blow a tree down, and we New Englanders will just roll with it. We’ll wake up earlier, scrape the car off, leave earlier and drive slower and dodge Big Truck Guys and Crappy Car Girls. We’ll pack extra layers. We’ll go with it.

We’re good at that in New England.

And when it gets really nice this spring, we’ll have earned it, dammit.

Until then, I’ll be on the treadmill.

(Mount Washington Observatory)

Goodbye to the Darkest Year of My Lifetime: 2017

December 27, 2017 / alden110 / Leave a comment

The other day, my wife asked me how I’d remember 2017. My answer:

It was a great year for me personally. Great. That’s not what this post is about though.
It was the darkest year for our country of my adult life.

Now I suppose that if you spent the last eight years stewing that a Kenyan terrorist was putting his feet up in the Oval Office, you probably regarded 2017 as a time when the light flooded back in, but I spent the first few months abjectly terrified. For weeks after Donald Trump’s swearing-in, I checked the news compulsively, half-expecting to see the White House groaning under a giant gold “Trump” sign, Supreme Court judges ousted like reality show contestants, troll armies spilling open my bank account information online for daring to raise a verb against Donald Trump. It was all in play.

But when the courts smacked him down, when the press kept hounding him, when even his own supporters questioned his tweeting — I finally exhaled. You had to marvel at the founders’ genius for checks and balances. It was a Trump that they’d planned for. Now we had one and the seams were still holding. The American vessel was still watertight. Democracy (sort of) survived.

But it was a dark year. Presidents influence the tone of the country. Most of them radiate some form of optimism. Ronald Reagan sold “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton sold jobs (“It’s the economy, stupid”), George Bush had Compassionate Conservatism, and Barack Obama assured the country, “Yes, we can.” Sure, they whipped up fury against the incumbent. They had to in order to win the election. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that America was capable of greater things under their leadership. They were optimists, all of them.

But for Donald Trump, whipping up fury is the whole point, I think. He is a pessimist. “Make America Great Again” is just a slogan. Trump doesn’t believe in us. In fact, he thinks human nature is dark. He won by invoking an America I couldn’t recognize: a third-world nation ravaged by drugs, crime, and economic hardship. All immigrants were dangerous criminals, not innovators, not seekers of the American Dream. Anyone holding power was corrupt — from Republican elites (“Lyin’ Ted”) to Democratic challengers (“Crooked Hillary”). Any institutions he didn’t like were corrupt: the free press (“fake news”), the courts (“a Mexican judge”), law enforcement (“in tatters”), and even in the democratic voting process itself (“a rigged system”).

He even went so far as to equate the United States with one of the world’s most notoriously corrupt dictatorships, stopping no less a conservative than Bill O’Reilly dead in his tracks:

O’Reilly: “But [Putin] is a killer.”

Trump: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

There it is. That’s 2017 in a nutshell. In Trump’s mind, it doesn’t matter that we cherish the free press and hold fair and free elections, while Vladimir Putin kills journalists and bars opponents from campaigning against him. In Trump’s mind, we’re all corrupt. The United States was being rebranded by a master con man as such a fallen, lawless place that only a strongman could clean it up. It was dark.

Not only did Trump sow distrust in 2017, he sowed division. 2017 was the year of the Troll-in-Chief. It’s easy to forget that most presidents, no matter how slim their electoral margins, see it as Line 1 in their job description to unite the country. But not Trump. In just the last few months he has trolled the NFL (“Any player who kneels should be fired!”), the British government (posting racist videos from their fringe right), and an unstable dictator with a runway full of nuclear weapons (“Rocket man”). We’ve seen him tacitly support Nazis in our streets, openly support a pedophile running for Senate, and suggest, apropos of nothing, that a female senator would trade sex for donations.

At one point in 2017 the President of the United States all but accused the head of a major American news show of murdering an intern . . . and no longer did we think this was strange. It was business as usual under the Troll-in-Chief.

Last year commentators called Donald Trump the Id of the Republican party. Now I think he might be the Id of our era — the crude, divisive, internet troll that lurks in all of us.

My, oh my, what a dark year 2017 was.

***

But strangely enough, I’m optimistic. Sometimes an era is defined less by a president’s tone than by the tone of our reaction. I strongly believe that 2017 taught us a lot about ourselves. It has taught us about our lowest impulses and about our most dangerous temptations. The simple fact that we elected a man like Trump — here, in our country — is making all of us take a good, long look in the mirror. And little by little, we’re dealing with what we see.

Didn’t the Trump era, with its apparent electoral embrace of sexual assault, lead to the largest outpouring of sexual assault stories in recent memory? You can’t prove the two were related, but I think they were. I think the women in our country could not believe we’d elected Trump, and it wasn’t long before a whole lot of powerful men, like Harvey Weinstein, who seemed untouchable, started to fall like dominoes. It wasn’t long before even the reddest-of-red states finally said enough.

Hasn’t the Trump era forced the whole ossified Republican party — the riders of the Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh populist tiger — to a crisis point over who they really are? Trump forced a decision. You could no longer look the other way when your base started talking crazy, while telling yourself it was worth it to pass tax cuts. The wolf was finally at the door. Trump started attacking his own party, crossing every line imaginable, and you started seeing principled red-state senators — Jeff Flake, John McCain, Bob Corker — publicly questioning a Republican president’s fitness for office and even basic sanity. Doesn’t a moment like this finally force the Republican party to reckon with what it has become? Is it overly hopeful, then, to expect the Republican party to emerge renewed — perhaps transformed — from this nadir?

And won’t the Trump administration — jowl-deep in scandal from the moment they deplaned in Washington — force Americans to reconsider whether they want a circus barker or an experienced public servant running the levers of government? Isn’t the outcome of this not more populist rage, but a collective coming-to-sense that what we want is an adult — not adult daycare — in the Oval Office?

And then there’s something deeper about ourselves that I think Trump is showing us. We free speech proponents always believe that it’s better to let the racists speak rather than to censor them. That way you can refute their arguments. Plus you know who the racists are in the room.

In 2017, we learned who the racists are.

I was never one of those Obama supporters who believed we lived in a “post-racial” society. The racism in our country wasn’t gone. In fact, it was probably as strong as ever, but it was less and less socially acceptable to express it — until Donald Trump came along and made it okay. Suddenly all the hatred that so much of the country felt at having an African American president, all the things they’d said in living rooms and bars and barbershops — it all flooded out. I know because I’d heard it. I’d heard it in a barbershop in western Maryland. I’d heard it in a bar in central Idaho. But it was never okay to say it in public during the Obama era. Yet you always knew it was boiling below the surface, just waiting to come out. Then along came Donald Trump and suddenly the crudest bigotry was out in the open: not just racism, but sexism, nativism, xenophobia, all the ugliness and intolerance of every kind that anyone who has ever been a teacher during a difficult conversation and heard tell of racist “uncles” and “aunts” knows lurks just beneath the surface even in the blue states. Suddenly it was pretty clear who the racists were in the room.

But I think that’s what we need. I’m not saying that the Trump era is a good thing. Like I said, I was terrified that democracy itself wouldn’t survive. But it has, and it will. And we know now for sure that simply electing a black president didn’t move us past our troubled racial history. Instead the Trump era has made us look more closely in the mirror, into our history, to reckon with who we are, warts and all.

I truly believe, as our former president did, that we are moving forward as a nation. I do not believe, as our current president does, that we are fundamentally corrupt. I do believe that progress often means one step backward for two steps forward. I believe that the Trump era is that backward step. It’s a temporary one, but a necessary one. Because Donald Trump, the oldest president we’ve ever elected to a first term, represents much about our past that we need to move beyond. He does not represent our future.

It won’t be easy. While 2017 was a dark year, I do not believe we have hit bottom yet. We will have to reckon with the fallout from Robert Mueller’s findings, which already suggest impeachment. We will have to watch Trump and his followers try to destroy our trust in Mueller by saying that the rule of law itself is biased and corrupt and should not apply to Trump. We may see violence in the streets. We may see our country torn apart as it has never been before. We will likely see America at its worst, even worse than in 2017.

But I have a feeling that even in the turmoil, even if we do hit rock bottom in 2018 as I believe we will, it won’t be as dark a year as 2017. Why? Because by then, the end will be in sight.

It already is.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Why GoPro is the Best and Worst Thing to Happen to Kayaking

November 16, 2017 / alden110 / Leave a comment

The Green Race

I know I’m about two weeks late posting about this, but I love Green Race kayaking footage.

In fact, just about the only thing in November I welcome is my Facebook feed filling with Green Race videos. The most famous kayak extreme race in the United States is held every November — something they can do in Asheville because it’s actually a reasonable temperature . . . unlike here in New Hampshire, where any geese who haven’t flown south yet basically freeze in place like lawn ornaments.

This year my favorite Green Race footage was a four-way split screen of the top four finishers’ GoPro footage. It’s Eric Deguil, Pat Keller, Dane Jackson, and Colin Hunt — four world-class athletes running the Green Narrows faster than it usually takes me to execute the portage at Gorilla.

There were also some spectacular crash videos. Bobby Miller posted video of him swimming out of the big Scream Machine hole and then down the next rapid, while Tad Dennis — a C-1 friend — earned my everlasting admiration by not only racing the Green in a kayak, but by posting a training video of him breaking a kayak paddle — and then running Gorilla anyway with half a blade!!

While it was fun to make about 45 armchair descents of the Narrows over the last few weeks, it did get me thinking: How the hell did we ever survive before GoPro footage?

And how — now that we have it — has GoPro footage changed kayaking?

***

Back when I started paddling, the boating videos we watched were heavily edited. Of course they were — they were commercially produced, made to sell. The only Green Race footage we had was three months after the race in some well-filmed but deeply edited LVM segment. They only had a few cameras in a few places, so you tended to get short clips of Tommy Hilleke and Jason Hale dropping off Gorilla, or quick cuts of ten straight guys getting “yeasted” at Go Left and Die. But nowadays, removed from the pressure of having to sell the footage, and with uploading an entire video being so easy, GoPro users tend to post longer, less-edited clips — often uninterrupted race runs (something unthinkably boring in the age before the internet). Some of them don’t even have music. On the whole, these GoPro videos are, for lack of a better term, more “honest.”

And here’s the thing: a lot of the GoPro you tend to see comes not from good runs but from bad. For every blazingly fast Eric Deguil run, there’s a Rush Sturges carnage clip. I’ve watched some of the most harrowing beatings, swims, and rescues during the GoPro era. It really has become this whole confessional genre — the proverbial black box footage from the cockpit: “Here’s what went wrong — and here’s how to avoid what I did.” Compared to the old method kayakers had of accident analysis — posting written narratives — GoPro footage is not only more informative, but I think somewhat less prone to spark online name calling and controversy, largely because it’s so matter-of-fact about what happened.

That’s what’s great about user-posted GoPro: compared to traditional, edited video, it’s incredibly honest. Sometimes you learn how to do Go Left in three strokes, and other times you learn what happens when you don’t get far enough left at Go Left.

(Photo: Erin Savage)

And here’s another benefit of GoPro footage: it’s a great way to learn new rivers. Say you’re going to the Raven Fork tomorrow morning. You can spend your whole evening sucking down a few IPAs and watching one of fifty-odd easily-findable Raven Fork GoPro videos on YouTube. Then you have a cockpit view as boaters of various competencies escort you down Mike Tyson’s and Headless Horseman. It’s like getting to do a trial run without the danger.

Back when I started boating, most of the best rivers weren’t even in the guidebook. If we wanted to know what a run was like, we sucked down a few beers, then called (not texted — called) someone who’d run it before and tried to play it off nonchalantly like we were “just curious” (read: terrified). Or — if we were lucky — we watched some grainy DVD or even VHS footage shot from shore featuring four second clips of guys in Corsicas running rapids that could have been anywhere on the river. Nowadays GoPro footage is so high-quality, you feel like you’ve already run the river by the time you actually pull into an eddy above the big drop. That’s got to be a good thing, right?

Lastly, we all know that one of the best parts about boating is reliving your runs. Back when I started, we did that through these things called “still pictures” or even “memory.” Or if we wanted to capture mediocre video, we actually had to lug around a camera in a drybag, get out on shore, make our buddies wait for us, then get back in our boats. It was cumbersome.

Today? Taking and posting GoPro is so easy that you practically get home and you can find footage from your run already up online. You can relive that run of the Upper Blackwater almost instantly. Plus, it’s not only going to live on in your own mind, or in the minds of one or two buddies who were there. Now it’s easier than ever for you to share with your wider social media audience just what a daring, awesome person you are, or what it’s truly like down in the Grand Canyon.

Between the beautiful footage and the ease of sharing, their slogan really couldn’t be truer: “GoPro — be a hero.”

***

And yet — there’s something lost in all that sharing.

For one thing, doesn’t GoPro kill the mystique? I know, I know — you’re thinking, “Come on! More paddling videos = always better.” But hear me out.

Let’s say you’re an aspiring class V paddler hoping to make a personal first descent down a benchmark local run, like the Middlebury Gorge in Vermont. Back in 2003, when I first ran it, there was zero video of it findable anywhere, and maybe a handful of still shots on the old American Whitewater page. You had a droll, ten-word description in Greg Hanlon’s guidebook, but really if you wanted info, you basically had to buttonhole a local paddler at the takeout. I used to do this a lot. I was like Lyndon Johnson about to corner some poor junior senator. It was either that or you just selected your most trusted guide and lasered in on his stern. Because you hadn’t seen any of the rapids before, once you got into the gorge, it was all pretty mind-blowing.

Of course you can still do that, but I honestly wonder how many people do? Don’t you think it would take a concerted effort NOT to look up a new run ahead of time on YouTube? Sure, lots of rivers aren’t up on YouTube, but lots of them are, right? Especially the good ones. When I first published my river guidebook in 2008, I used to worry that I was ruining the sense of adventure for everyone because I was writing short descriptions and publishing maps and photos. How quaint! Isn’t the power to watch everything ahead of time now a pretty fundamental shift from just 15 years ago?

Back then, if anything, your first run was actually enhanced by the forbidding stories you’d heard. And that brings up another thing I think is sort of lost in the GoPro era: the power of storytelling. Ours is a sport with a pretty healthy tradition of tall tales, war stories, exaggeration, and bar-room bragging. It’s great. It’s our oral tradition, a time-honored way that boaters have bonded and also passed along important information: “No shit there I was . . .” What’s more fun than sitting around at the take out with your buddies swapping tales of how brave you all were?

Here’s the thing about GoPro — it doesn’t kill off the oral tradition, but doesn’t it kind of negate its power? The more we film, the less reason we have to pass on these stories orally or in writing. Like I said before, GoPro is nothing if not honest. That boof you did years ago off that waterfall — the boof you’ve always been talking about? The one that got bigger and bigger over the years? How much do you want to bet that if you had GoPro footage of it, you’d discover it wasn’t nearly as big as you’re remembering it?

How many times have you seen someone post video of what they called an “epic” swim — only to see the GoPro and find out it was surprisingly short — maybe ten or twelve seconds?

And that really hard, really steep run you just ran at high flows? Doesn’t look so bad on GoPro. Looks sort of like class III!

It’s especially misleading if you sit up high in C-1 and have a long torso, so your GoPro is like eight feet out of the water. On me the Upper Blackwater looks like the Potomac in Georgetown. My point is that the same honesty that makes GoPro footage such a great teaching tool also drains some of the power from the usual lore and myth-making in our sport. Yeah, it’s great to have a clearer picture of what the Niagara Gorge looks like in a boat, but wasn’t it sort of better when you only heard second hand that the waves were so tall, in Chris Koll’s words, you couldn’t even tell the color of the sky? “Read my words well and don’t be a fool: the Alsek is unpaddleable!” wrote Walt Blackadar in his seminal 1971 Sports Illustrated article about running Turnback Canyon of the Alsek. Would this electrifying account have been dulled just a little bit if we’d had GoPro footage of Blackadar flailing his way down some muddy-looking waves in a 13-foot boat?

Plus, can’t I just ask — don’t we go to nature to get away from an increasingly invasive world of cameras and surveillance? Isn’t it sort of weird to think about everything you do being recorded because some guy in your group is running his GoPro? Believe me, I’ve been that guy, but isn’t that sort of an invasion of privacy when you think about it?

Sure it’s fun to relive your kayaking videos, but isn’t it somehow more special if you have to relive it in memory — if the only people who really know about it were the people who were there? Doesn’t that create a more memorable bond?

There’s a lot that’s been written in the last few years about how our experiences are becoming less about nourishing our souls than about becoming a show for others. Nature becomes “content” rather than something to be enjoyed. We live for the future moment (when we’ll post on social media) rather than for the present.

Isn’t there something lost when our crashes and our victories are all recorded, plainly, and posted the next day on social media — rather than lionized in tall tales and epic stories told for years around the campfires? Surely to some extent you can have both, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Instead of “No shit, there I was,” now it’s, “Yeah, it’s on my Facebook page.”

The Best Kayaking Book Ever Written

October 26, 2017 / alden110 / 1 Comment

Years ago, when I was first kayaking, I learned about a life philosophy that I immediately adopted. One of the most accomplished men I ever met, an ex-kayaker, wrote that what separated the truly successful people he’d known — at Harvard, in the Marines, in the Olympics, and in the White House — was a specific mindset. He called it “fascination with the process.”

To be fascinated with the process means you’re doing things for the right reason. It’s not about the results, it’s about the pursuit. Ironically, you tend to get stellar results; you work harder, think deeper, and achieve more — not because you lust after fame and fortune — but because you truly love the work itself. You revel in the details. You enjoy the behind-the-scenes. You do the digging. You’re passionate not about racing in the Olympics, but about training for the Olympics.

Back in 2001, I was a young racer passionate about training for the Olympics, but living in the slalom backwater of Vermont, I had no idea how to go about it. So I was ecstatic when Scott Shipley, the winningest American kayak racer of his generation, published a how-to guidebook specifically devoted to winning whitewater slalom races. Finally — a book that would show me the secrets of the yearly training plan, of how hard I had to work, how often to train, and a thousand other details I couldn’t wait to dig into. My expectations could not have been higher.

But you know what? That book that I bought and hauled back to my dorm room to dissect, Every Crushing Stroke, turned out to be even better than I expected. It wasn’t just a training manual — it was a revelation. Sixteen years later it remains my favorite book about whitewater kayaking. Many boaters have never heard of it, and that’s a shame. Why? Because Every Crushing Stroke is that rare sports book that not only teaches you how to win, but how to live.

It’s is a book about “fascination with the process.”

***

Let’s start with the writing.

Normally jocks’ books — the ones who write their own books — are disappointing. They fall back on cliches and warmed-over game summaries and usually end up revealing very little of anything. So I was surprised at what an engaging writer Shipley, a jock and an engineer by training, turned out to be. Yet every page is alive with fresh, original writing, and burns with infectious passion, as Shipley sketches out his boyhood dreams:

“Not once in all that time did I crave the riches of a pro athlete or the recognition of an Olympian. I wanted to be like my heroes. I wanted to drive to Jonquiere in my green Cathy Hearn-style Pinto and I wanted to launch myself out of the starting gate like Austrian Norbert Sattler. I wanted to be the fastest kayaker in the world.”

Soon enough, he does — and Every Crushing Stroke is a coming of age story both for Shipley and for the sport of whitewater kayaking itself. Shipley is a paddling zeitgeist; he pops up everywhere in the last 30 years of boating history. He learns the sport in homemade gear from his father, a 60s-era US Team member who “believed in roughing it and learning the old way,” then enjoys a riverside seat for the 1980s innovations in slalom boat design and paddling technique — stern squirts and pivot turns — led by the new crop of dominating American racers like Cathy and David Hearn and Jon Lugbill. Later, Shipley’s there for two of American slalom’s high water marks: the 1989 World Championships and slalom’s dramatic reinclusion into the 1992 Olympics. A year later, he’s back again for the 1993 Freestyle World Championships — now considered a watershed moment in freestyle boating — where he finishes second, despite not having learned any new freestyle moves until just weeks beforehand. His career retrospective stops there, but many of the training workouts depicted in the book were refined during the middle and later 1990s, at a time when Shipley was again on the forefront of the Olympic-driven movement in slalom toward still greater professionalization in training. And of course after the book was published, Shipley has again been on the cutting edge — this time as designer of many of the world’s best artificial whitewater courses.

Scott Shipley

But back in the 1980s, Scott Shipley was not a normal kid. He was fascinated — obsessed — with the process. Most kids enjoy racing, but not the hard work of training (at least, not without a coach or parent around). But Shipley — largely coachless — *loved* to train. He begins hanging a single slalom gate on the sound near his house in Washington State, practicing unsexy technique drills over and over. His workouts become more regimented, more serious, and more and more honed in on turning weaknesses into strengths. “Every race was a test I invariably failed,” he writes.

What kind of teenager is that focused? One who is incredibly competitive, and yet totally immersed in the pursuit of excellence. Again, Shipley’s passion comes through in the writing itself, as he remembers his childhood training partners, a hodgepodge collection of Seattle-area boaters who stoke his competitive fire, yet nurture him at the same time:

“I grew up with an overwhelming desire to compete, to be faster, to beat people. Every workout and every race I was focused on attack, attack, attack. If I was slower than my target, I would dig deeper to paddle better and faster on my next effort. The great lesson I took from these early years was the respect we all shared despite how competitive these workouts were. At the tick of a watch we were desperately racing to beat our training partners, yet moments later, when the watch was off, we would help each other. We were teammates in the truest sense.”

Soon Shipley is the best junior in the country, then in the world. After winning the Junior Worlds — the first American kayaker ever to do so — he’s 18 years old and lasering in on the top few grown men in the United States — one truly great one in particular — and that’s where this book gets really good.

Sometime around 1990, Shipley moves to the small town of Chilliwack, British Columbia with the goal of winning the 1992 Olympics. Chilliwack is the kind of place where young men have gone to transform themselves for hundreds of years. For some men, it’s an army barracks. For Shipley, it’s a dead-end town with a big river, a rough-and-tumble environment that Shipley can’t help contrasting with many of the modern facilities his European competitors enjoyed:

“This was our gymnasium, nothing less and nothing more. We lacked any sort of conventional clubhouse or training center. We changed our clothes in the dirt beside our cars, and we trained in the stadium that God gave us. What a stadium it was, though . . .”

But it’s not about the amenities — it’s about a man named Richard Weiss. In Chilliwack, Shipley serendipitously falls in with the kind of training group we all dream about: a bunch of up-and-coming Canadian and American racers who just happen to move there at the same time, all of whom want nothing more than to put aside everything in their lives to dedicate themselves to winning a berth in the Olympics. They live the way broke boaters have always lived: they sleep in treehouses with no running water or lights, cook outdoors, and brave the Canadian winters in leaky drytops and shorts — all for the chance to train on Chilliwack’s world-class whitewater and nip at each other’s heels in the increasingly sadistic workouts they put themselves through. The dynamic among the boaters quickly becomes a once-in-a-career mixture of fire-breathing competition yet mutual support, a spawning grounds for innovation, with all of the boaters bringing different things to the table, and bringing out the best in each other. U.S. Team member Brian Brown is there. So are Canadians Larry Norman, Patrice Gagnon, and David Ford, the man who’d go on to become a World Champion and a many-time Olympian.

But it is Shipley’s relationship with his one-time mentor Richard Weiss, the American champion, that really gives the story poignance. Shipley is training to be great. Weiss already is, having garnered second place at the recent Worlds. Up close, Shipley is even more awed by his commitment, his humility, and his super-human strength. Keeping up with Rich Weiss in a kayak was not easy, even for Shipley, the most gifted young paddler of his generation. The first time they train together, Shipley is stunned: he becomes so exhausted fending off Weiss from passing him that he has to climb out on shore to rest. “That was when Rich offered to design the next course. I kid you not, Rich was only half done with the workout.”

These two men, training to beat each other, end up bringing out the best in each other — and they are both thoroughly fascinated with the process. Shielded from what Shipley hints is the groupthink of many other top American racers, Chilliwack becomes the laboratory where this young group questions everything they know about paddling, takes it all apart — from forward strokes to draw strokes to race day procedures — scrutinize it as a group, test hypothesis, and they put it all back together again. Meanwhile they’re indifferent to the harsh winters, seemingly immune to exhaustion, and — this is meaningful — largely coachless. This is significant, writes Shipley, because it requires they assume responsibility for their own training — and soon enough they’re asking of themselves sacrifices that no coach would ever reasonably expect. They become, as Shipley calls it, “the purest form of fanatics.” Sure, they’re chasing Olympic gold, but it’s about more than that. They’ve stumbled onto something even better than winning: a perfect group for pursuing excellence together. It’s something that few of us get to enjoy in our lives (and which Shipley freely admits he spends the rest of his career trying to recapture). It’s a vision, an ideal. I know it’s stayed with me ever since I first read about it here, and I’ve tried to find it for myself in both my slalom training and in my professional pursuits ever since, but I’ve never gotten quite as lucky as Shipley and Weiss.

As I mentioned, this is a poignant book. Shipley doesn’t just relate his fascination with the process — he also evokes the dramatic highs and lows of an Olympic pursuit. For example, he writes of the “coldest, most inhumane and most definitively final event in sports” — the 1992 Olympic Trials, with the “kill or be killed” mentality that sees Shipley win his Olympic berth, but several of his hard-working teammates miss the Games. Later he describes the exuberance of making the Team, the orgy of fancy dinners, plane flights, free clothing, and Hilton stays courtesy of Team USA, followed by the utter agony of missing a gate on an otherwise flawless run at the 1992 Olympics — then having a host family he’s staying with shortly afterward question his dedication when he (for once) decides to sleep in. It’s hard to read, knowing how much the guy put in.

Then there is the fate of Shipley’s great friend and rival, Rich Weiss. After the 1992 Olympics, their training group disbands, and Shipley writes of how the stress of constantly competing against each other subtly pushed the two men apart without their realizing it. Before they can truly reunite, and not long after finishing sixth in the 1996 Olympics, Rich Weiss drowns while practicing for an extreme race. “I hope his legacy shines from the pages of this book,” writes Shipley. As a reader who’d never have known any of these memorable Rich Weiss anecdotes except for this book, I’d have to say Shipley’s goal was successful.

I remember getting chills over and over again while reading this book for the first time. I still do. Great books leave you with lasting visions, and some of Shipley’s have stayed with me for my whole racing career and beyond. I think of the great British champion Richard Fox “charging through the pack with little or no resistance” during crowded Savage River training sessions, the crowds of paddlers “seemed to part like the Red Sea in order to allow the champion through,” or Shipley, Brown, and Weiss swapping sides in their slalom boats on the giant Skookumchuck wave, “soul surfing” in the evening light, or perhaps my very favorite passage in all of whitewater literature: the moment at the 1989 World Championships when the unbeatable American C-1 team suddenly emerges into view on the Savage River in front of thousands of American fans:

“The mist was especially heavy on the Savage that day and the entire race had been plagued by a thick fog low to the river. The fog was so thick that at first we saw nothing. This was a two hundred second long course, and all we could sense were the cheers of the crowd as the gang drew steadily nearer. Those cheers became a roar around us, even was we squinted into the fog for any sign.

“The first thing to break the low-lying fog was Jon (Lugbill)’s fist. It was his top hand protruding above the mist and it hammered angrily into and out of the fog with each pounding stroke . . . Finally the three of them surged out of the fog on a full speed sprint, deftly wove through the three or four gates within view, then disappeared into the fog on their way down the course.”

That description still gives me chills. There it is: the exact moment when American slalom hit its absolute apex. Lugbill lays down the Ultimate Run, then the Americans take a victory lap and come out of the fog like the superheros they’ve become.

And then, just like that, it’s over:

“With their passing, so too passed the peak of their era. They belonged to another time, they were champions of the old school. With the finish of that day’s race began a new era. No longer were we concerned with World Championship medals; all eyes focused now on Barcelona and its Olympic Games.”

The book is all the more poignant knowing how it ends for Shipley. Although he basically leaves off his own story after the heartbreaking 27th place at the 1992 Olympics, I bought the book in 2001, maybe six months after I’d watched Shipley again “lose” at the Sydney Olympics and then give one of the saddest, most downtrodden interviews I have ever watched on television. I remember thinking, “The guy finished fifth in the world. What’s so bad about that?” But a year later in Every Crushing Stroke, Shipley meditates on what the stakes really are at the Games:

“Perhaps in the eyes of . . . those who truly matter in your life — you have accomplished something. To the rest of America, any result outside of the medals is a defeat.”

It’s quite remarkable for me to go back and watch his runs from Sydney, or even his runs from the Atlanta Olympics, where he was the favorite, but finished outside the top ten. Scott Shipley was really freaking good, and I always felt bad for him that he was never able to win the Olympics or the Worlds — given the way he devoted his life to it.

But after reading the book, you get the sense that he’s trying to teach you that, even though it still hurts, somewhere deep down it doesn’t really matter. Although he writes beautifully of the agony of Olympic defeat, it’s pretty clear from the rest of the book that the value he derived from his years chasing pure excellence alongside his friends went far, far beyond gold, silver, or bronze to some deeper place that not even defeat could touch:

“Like the D-C C-1s, my time has come and gone . . . In the sum of my career I was never an Olympic Champion as were none of those paddlers I idolized so early on in my paddling . . . Like them I take pride neither in the results themselves nor the medals I’ve brought home, but in the efforts that preceded them. I hang my hat not on that final destination but on every crushing stroke it took to reach it.”

This is where you realize that this book is not just about kayaking. Scott Shipley was fascinated with the process, and after reading this book, so was I. To be in a constant pursuit of excellence is a lesson that I took with me first to the race course, then to writing, and later to a career in education. I think of the daily lesson plans, the conferring with colleagues, the early mornings and the late nights grading essays as just another extension of the passion to succeed that Shipley, Brian Brown, and Rich Weiss first showed me from their days in Chilliwack. This is a wonderful coming of age story and an illuminating how-to guide. I think that all paddlers, not just slalom racers, should read it. Because it’s not just about the best way to race — it’s about the best way to live.

It’s a great read.

Who Really Raises Our Kids?

October 19, 2017 / alden110 / Leave a comment

Image result for children watching ads

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Being a parent must be hard nowadays.

In addition to having to worry about online predators, cell phone addictions, and an Oval Office resident who is basically a 70 year-old poster boy for every behavior we hope children shed by the time they’re seven, you’ve also got to worry about American corporations trying to drive you insane.

This past week I showed a fascinating, scarring documentary called “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood” to my Media Literacy class. Although it was made back in 2008 and although I’ve seen it before, it has somehow become more revelatory for me with time. Here’s the basic premise: babies are born innocent and pure . . . until the ad industry gets hold of them. Then they try their damnedest to turn beautiful children into hysterical consumers lusting after an increasingly expensive parade of mindless games, toys, and junk food.