The van Koeverden files

This is the first of a regular blog that Canadian Olympic champion kayaker Adam van Koeverden will provide for Sportsnet.ca from now until the Beijing Olympics in August.

The 26-year-old from Oakville is the reigning Olympic (Athens 2004) and world champion (Duisberg, Germany 2007) in the K1 500 metres and also won the bronze medal in the K1 1000 in Athens. In 2004 he won the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s top athlete. You can learn more about Adam at www.vankayak.com.

Thursday, February 14th, 2008:

Melbourne, Florida – Every February the Canadian canoe-kayak team migrates to this town on Florida’s East Coast like geese in search of a warmer climate and paddling-friendly weather. It’s been almost two weeks since we arrived en masse at our second home and training is already going full tilt.

I’ve come down here every winter and for a few weeks in the fall since 1997 when I was 15, so quite honestly Melbourne feels like home. In an Olympic year I’ll spend more time here than at home in Oakville.

I share a small two bedroom apartment with three of my teammates: Mark Oldershaw, Andrew Russell and Gabriel Beauchesne-Sevigny. Mark races C1, singles canoe, while Gab and Andrew concentrate on C2, doubles canoe. As a kayak paddler (K1), I never race against my canoe-colleagues, despite how much affable trash talk we enjoy tossing back and forth. Our three-month training camp down here will culminate with our national team trials on the first weekend of May in Gainesville, Georgia, site of the 1996 Olympic canoe-kayak and rowing regattas. That race represents the next step in qualifying for this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing, China. So our training for the next 11 or 12 weeks is focused on preparing for those trials, a little less than 90 days from now. Those trials also represent a midpoint for us, halfway between our first weeks back in the boat and the Olympic Games, which are a little less than 180 days from now … not that I’m counting days.

Getting back on the water after a few months of dryland off-season training is a process which requires a bit of patience, not my most glaring virtue. Reflecting back on the ease and finesse with which I pilot my small craft following a few thousand kilometres of preparation by mid-summer race season provides little consolation, as my blistered hands and sore back (read: ass) infantilize my “World Class Athlete” ego. As the kilometres pass under my boat, however, blisters mature to callouses and paddling my kayak feels increasingly natural, stringing strokes together like footsteps.

Humans did not evolve in kayaks; our bodies were not designed to paddle these skinny boats around for hours a day. It is for this reason that I am most thankful for the human body’s ability to adapt when stressed with hard work. Bill Bowerman coached the University of Oregon Track and Field Team for the majority of the 20th century, including well-known middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine. He described this training process succinctly with four words; stress, rest, adapt, improve. It is the fourth word with which I am most fascinated.

The more I use my paddle to pull my boat forward, the tougher my hands will get, the stronger my back will become. The more my lungs extract oxygen from the air, the more my heart pumps blood around my body; the more the enzymes in my muscles turn carbs into energy, the better my body is prepared to race my kayak for Canada this summer. It’s a demanding process, and one that I’m (thankfully) lovingly addicted to. We train for months and years and race for minutes and seconds, so enjoying and embracing the process is of prime importance.

So it’s on like Donkey Kong. It’s time to go, T-minus six months ’till the big show in China this summer and I couldn’t be more stoked. I’m craving the burn from all the training ahead, even more I’m craving the payoff it will provide. It’s not going to be easy though, which to me, is what makes this all worthwhile.

I’m excited to be blogging for Sportsnet. I hope I can offer a glimpse into the day-to-day process of preparing for the Olympic Games, as well as just comment on whatever from an amateur athlete’s point of view, an ever quiet voice amongst a professional sports immersed readership.

That said, Go Raps Go!

Photo: Adam van Koeverden races to a gold medal in the K1 500 metres at the 2007 World Championships in Duisberg, Germany. (Courtesy: Joe van Koeverden)