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Tag: decision making

Running A Rapid: My Decision-Making Process

26 December 2017 / / 3 Comments

Quite a few of my paddling friends call me ballsy. Not the politically correct ones, of course. I don’t really see it because whenever I choose to run a rapid or feature, I’ve calculated the risk, and my decision seems perfectly logical to me.

I have only ever made the decision to portage a rapid once; the rest of the times I’ve portaged, that decision has been made for me by more experienced paddlers. The rapid I portaged by choice was Crack of Doom on the Middle Etive. I never thought I’d be able to say I’d portaged a runnable rapid and had no regrets over doing so, but I was wrong; I don’t regret portaging.

Crack of Doom on the Middle Etive; weighing it up!

Here are the three things I take into consideration when running a rapid.

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Attentional Focus In Complex Environments

8 October 2014 / / 0 Comments

We had a great time in Scotland recently on the OC1 Creeking Course and I was reviewing the pictures today with the intention of posting a Blog. It occurred to me that some of the pictures showed an aspect of paddling we often ignore the importance of; psychological skills. As skills they are learned and take time to develop, so require some deliberate practice.

Here I will give you an example using the concept of attentional focus. If we focus all of our attention on the target attainment we are paddling to, we should be able concentrate on the outcome and use autonomous skills to achieve it. In other words if we stare at the target we seem to get there automatically without being conscious of how we did it.

Here you see a sequence of pictures that show Jan using attentional focus in a skilled way to achieve an outcome. He is paddling from the eddy between the first and second drop on Triple Falls on the Etive.

Even before he leaves the eddy he is focussed on the lip of the next waterfall where he needs to perform the boof to make a successful descent:

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