Things I’ve Learned; Compouding mistakes

18/01/2023

Today I learned about compounding mistakes. Whilst compounding mistakes is not something particularly new to me, I often have moments where my judgement lapses during a training session and a series of compounding errors can creep up on me without even realising it. This morning was one of those days. I had a simple enough upstream gate on the river left, the level of difficulty for this particular gate arose with the tight entry. The line between the upstream gate and the downstream gate before it was obstructed enough by a wall of obstacles that it required a slight wiggle of the boat from left to right to avoid any collision. On this particular run I failed to execute my wiggle and ended up going over the corner of one of these obstacles, jumping my boat and shoving it just slightly in the opposite direction to where I was aiming. As a result of this unfortunate collision with the plastic antagonist, the entry to my upstream gate was low and I had to paddle a long line. The mistake that I have learned from was after this however, as my exit of the upstream was chaotic which caused me to not surf across the wave properly and almost miss the next downstream, then from there not pulling for enough space on the next downstream almost causing me to miss that one too.
This series of mistakes all compounded from the one low entry into the first upstream gate, but the learning starts when realising that the following 3 or 4 mistakes was only a lack of focus. The first mistake of hitting the obstacles and coming low into the upstream, if anything it should allow me more time run the boat and put it in the perfect position for the exit, as now I have more time to adjust and really pick my line. Instead I rushed to make up the lost ground, panicked when I arrived at the gate and was out of position then just threw my boat around trying to get it back online.
The lesson I draw from this specific example is that first mistake should have no relation to the following gate sequences, if I arrived low into this upstream I still should have exited in the ideal spot to get the following gate sequences with ease. Its all of course easier said than done but that’s why all of this is a work in progress. We are forever learning and trying to get better, in in this case just keep trying to remember the things that we are working on in the moment when it matters.