When you are in the stern of a canoe, you need to master one important stroke, the J-stroke. No matter how good the paddler in the bow of the canoe, the boat will drift towards the side that person is paddling on, and away from the side the stern is paddling on. Paddling at the back of a boat steers the boat the other way. The J-stroke is what you do at the end of the stroke to push water away from the side of the boat and steer it straight, rather than letting it drift.
The J-Stroke (Click image for instructions on openboater.wordpress.com)
When you first learn this stroke, it has 2 distinctly noticeable parts. First there is the power part of the stroke that pushes the the boat forward. Then your ‘J’ pushes water away from the boat to steer it. As a beginner, these two parts are quite separate and so the boat lunges forward, then is steered, lunges forward, then is steered… It should go without saying, but if you are spending time on steering, you are not spending time helping the boat go forward.
As you get better, you start to realize that you can put these two parts together and eventually the boat ‘feels more like’ it is heading in one direction, rather than bouncing between going forwards and being course-corrected. I say feels more like’ it’s heading in one direction because no matter how good you are in the stern, you are always doing some course correcting, unless you and your partner in the bow are perfectly in sync every stroke. It’s just that when you are good at it, this course correcting becomes a smooth part of moving the boat forward.
However, moving from two distinct parts to one continuous stroke is not easy. What makes it harder is that when you try, and it doesn’t work, you end up feeling like you have to steer even more to make up for not being able to pull it off. So many new paddlers will stick with the lunge forward then steer process, and avoid getting better.
You’ve heard it a thousand times before: “The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Paddling stern in a canoe can be one of those things, because if you don’t intentionally try to put the two parts of the stroke together, you will always be stuck in the lunge forward then steer parts of the J-stroke. Coaching can help, but intentionally trying to put these parts together, and failing and having to compensate, is far better than thousands of strokes just repeating the two parts separately. It will not go smoothly for quite a while, then eventually you’ll realize that things are smoother and you don’t have to think as much about steering with every stroke you take.
Where else in our lives can we take this lesson? Where do we break things up when we should be building them together? How can we use this idea to build up good habits or eliminate bad ones? What daily rituals do we have problems with, that we can integrate with things that we already do well? How can we steer ourselves in the right direction, without even realizing that we are steering?
