On The Water

  “Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?” Robert Luis Stevenson - British author Sports and modern society have made us believe that winning promises to give more than it can actually deliver. And this is because we are probably focusing on the wrong aspect of winning. We view winning as an end-result but fail to take a deeper look at the process. Does winning medals alone bring success, recognition, admiration, fame, money, and personal happiness?  How do we feel when an Olympic athlete fails to make the finals? And how does it even compare when one loses a gold medal by a few hundreds of a second?  Does falling short by a lot or by a tiny bit make some athletes losers and less worthy of our admiration?  I am not trying to take away the crowns from Olympic gold medal glory or from achieving a challenging goal. And because I believe that "winning is everything", I will never be at ease with giving away participation medals to everyone completing a...

The human body has unlimited potential. We are lucky enough to live in an era where sports physiology has been studied and applied for a long time and has demonstrated with scientific rigor how exercise duration, intensity and frequency can affect muscle composition, capacity, efficiency, energetics and ultimately, human performance. Kayaking shares many aspects with swimming because they are both highly technical sports and require a vast cardiovascular capacity and engagement across all types of muscle fiber no matter the distance or duration of the event. In terms of performance, there is always a fine balance between technique , muscle development (and proper engagement) and cardiovascular ability . The holy triad of any sport as I call it, gives us the opportunity to continue to grow as athletes in any and all of those three aspects continuously. All three are tightly interconnected and while during specific training periods we may focus more on one or another, they all deserve at...