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GLORY DAYS

(Recently discovered alternate lyrics for Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 song “Glory Days”)

Wooo!  Huh! 

Knew a guy who was a big bad C1;

He was just really cool!

He could motor that boat past you, boy

So fast you’d just wanna drool!

Saw Bob the other day, talking from afar.

Saw Kent and Ron, too, coming in and going out.

Then we all went in, sat down, had a few drinks

And all we kept talking aboooout …was…

Glory days!  We’ll never let them die!

Glory days in the wink of Jon and Davey’s eye!

Glory days!  Glory daaaaays!

Alright! 

Well, there’s a gal who lived up the block.

On the Feeder she could clean all the gates.

Sometimes I’d stop by to shoot the breeze 

Maybe while she lifted some weights.

The medals are all there just gathering the dust. 

Twenty years since she had her greatest clout.
But when she starts thinking and taking a break,

She starts laughing and joking and talking aboooout…

Glory days!  They’ve never ever gone by!

Glory days in the wink of Cathy and Dana’s eyes!

Glory days! Glory daaaaays!

O yeah! [Musical interlude] Yoo!

We had K1s who could really clean your clock!

The fastest boats on the course. 

Chris, and Norm and Rich ––my god

How they could generate some force!

One of them phoned me the other day with

stories concerning some old Kraut. 

Then we settled down to really reminisce 

And we started talking …..aboouut…

Glory days!  Yeah, we’ll never let them die!

Glory days in the wink of a young EJ’s eye!

Glory days! Glory daaaaays!

I’m going down to the river tonight
When everything’s really still.
And I hope when I get old I can still hear that sound
That gave me such a thrill. 

Just hearing the sound of all them C2s
As Steve, Mike, Jef and Paul, Fritz and Lecky shout,
It leaves me with the greatest memories… and
the stories we have to talk abooout…

Glory days!  Don’t ever let them die!

Glory days in the wink of Scott and Joe’s eye!

Glory days! Glory daaaaays!

Oh yeah! Come on now!  Wooo!

Glory days!

Don’t let them pass you by!
Glory days in the wink of a die-hard’s eye!
Glory days! Glory daaaays!

Ooo yeah!  Alright! Come on now.  Wooo! Keep it rockin’ now! 

Alright!  Alright! 

RIDE OF A LIFETIME

-Bill Endicott

As I look back on it, I realize the experiences that we of  “the old guard” had with canoeing and kayaking in the period 1969 – 2004 were so special and intense that they deserve to be captured as a part of the history of our club.  So this essay covers the period when the club was called the Canoe Cruisers’ Association Slalom Division, and then the Bethesda Center of Excellence, before it became known as the Potomac Whitewater Racing Club.

Don’t forget us too soon

So, come with me now as we “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear” in the words of the intro to “the Lone Ranger” that I watched on TV in the 1950s!

To that end, I am hoping to start a process whereby I enunciate what I perceive to be “general principles” of what made this time so special, add an essay about my own personal take on it, and then invite all of the rest of the club from that period to do the same. 

It’ll be open-ended so that new people can add their own stories onto mine.  

Thanks

Before I begin with my story, I want to thank Chapman Haller, wife of C2 Slalom World Cup Champion, World Champion, and Olympian, Lecky Haller, for suggesting something like this.  Up to now, I had regarded these experiences as sort of private memories, only to be rehashed (and embellished!) when two or more of us got together.  But she made me realize they had a larger significance than that and they deserved to be written down because they were indeed “the ride of a lifetime!” (Another ride of a lifetime for me was working in the White House, but even then, I thought about canoeing for at least a few seconds each day – and I still do now.)

Introduction

As each of us finds our way on this voyage through space-time that we call life, my personal view is that a “great life” consists of doing some things for others, but also doing some things for yourself and it’s the latter category I want to address here.  

In that category, although I didn’t articulate it consciously as a youth, I think in retrospect you’re looking for opportunities for self-expression, personal growth, new perspectives on life, improving physical well-being, comradeship, adventure – and above all, opportunities for just plain fun!  

There are many ways to do this and ideally each person finds the way that is best suited to him or her.  Unfortunately, though, I don’t think most people do find it.  So, right off the bat, those who do are lucky. 

 But there is no one “right way,” as long as on the whole, you’re much better off because of the experience.  And of course, now we get into very subjective judgments.

So, from my point of view, you can certainly have adventure, new perspectives and intense comradeship by, say, fighting in a war.  But I think, the price you pay for this is too big, for you risk emerging physically and psychologically damaged, among other things.  This is not to diminish the debt we have for our soldiers willing to put life and limb on the line to defend us, it’s just that I don’t think it’s the ideal way to have an adventure.

Another way is engaging in really high risk sports like base jumping or wing suit flying that have a high death rate even among the most accomplished of practitioners.  But again, that’s too extreme.  Now someone might put whitewater kayaking in that category –– the “calculated risk.”  And as we will see in this essay, there were deaths in our sport.  But I would only point out that they didn’t occur among slalom paddlers training in gates. They occurred in more extreme forms of whitewater running.   But I agree, it’s a fine line.

Other people look to drugs, alcohol, or other mind-altering substances as the way. But not only are they risking their physical and mental health, they’re engaging in illusions.  Much better to engage in the real thing!

Other people, like academics, have “mental adventures” by engaging in and maybe even making contributions to intellectually stimulating work.  But it’s not physical.  Better, but again, it’s not enough. 

Against this framework, then, let each of us see how our experiences in canoeing and kayaking measure up.

Big picture themes

As I think back on what canoeing and kayaking have meant to me, I would cite the following:

*  A very supportive wife.   I want to say at the outset that I could not have had anywhere near the great experiences I had with this sport had I not had one of the most supportive wives in the world,  Abbie!  When I was an athlete and a coach, she not only took care of household chores, she edited, oversaw the printing of, and the marketing and selling of my books. She came on the foreign trips and was my personal manager. She saved me from making many bad decisions.  She ran shuttles.  She was asked to be the American Canoe Federation’s volunteer representative on the ICF Promotion and Information Committee, which guaranteed the U.S. a voice at the international table in the sport.  She headed up an effort to get Slalom back into the Olympics.  She even wrote and recorded the official Anthem for the ICF World Championships flag raising ceremonies.  The list is endless.  We got married at age 19 back in 1965 and it was the best decision I’ve ever made. 

*  A new lease on athletic life!  I was an ex-rower who saw a lot of his classmates go to the 1968 Olympics and decided he wanted to go, too. Canoeing and kayaking got me there. But as I discuss below, it turned out that the journey was more important than actually being at the Olympics. 

For example, little did I know that because of canoeing and kayaking I’d get to visit 72 countries either because the sport took me directly there or because it put me in the neighborhood and I could easily nip over there.   

To this day because of the internet, I have correspondents in the normal places like Australia, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, but also in more exotic places like China, Iran, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, and Ukraine.  I rate this as one of the most important things I’ve gotten out of sports because it’s given me so many new perspectives on life.

*  A chance occurrence.  Maybe the moral of this particular vignette is that you need to have a dream, but you also need to be able psychologically to modify the dream in the face of reality and grasp chance opportunities that come your way!  After I was in flatwater kayaking for a year, in the fall of 1969, an Amherst College student, Brad Hager (now a professor at MIT) who had been in the 1969 C2 Whitewater World Championships, asked me to be his new partner.  Since whitewater seemed more exciting than flatwater, and it had recently been announced Slalom would be in the 1972 Olympics, plus the fact I now had an experienced partner to coach me, I jumped at the chance. 

*  Brad and I were in the 1971 and 1973 Worlds in both Slalom and Wildwater and were the Alternates for the 1972 Olympic team.  Again chance intervened in that the U.S. Olympic coach at the time, Jay Evans, asked me and Abbie to come with the team to help him with coaching duties.  As I look back on it now, these years were my “apprenticeship” in the sport where I learned the basics and what was going on even at the Olympic level.  I would learn much more in the years to come, both by teaching myself but also by having a number of other people teach me.  Whereas going to the Olympics was the original goal, now just getting to keep doing this beautiful sport in some form or other became the goal. 

Bill Endicott (left) and Brad Hager (right) in 1971 World Championships

*  In the 20 years in between Olympics I enjoyed Wildwater as much as Slalom and to this day I deeply regret that Wildwater is treated as a second-class event because it isn’t in the Olympics.  In my day, since the Slalom and Wildwater Worlds were always contested at the same location, a lot of people did both (and I always thought there should be a combined prize as there is in skiing).  But when they separated the locations and it became impossible to do both, it was the beginning of a great loss.  

*  For a great deal of my career Slalom was not in the Olympics.  And you know what?  In retrospect that was good.  Again, I had lucked out.  It meant that the people who were doing the sport were doing it because they loved it, not just because it was in the Olympics.  I have seen Slalom be in the Olympics (1972), then out of the Olympics (1973-1991), then in again (1992), then out again briefly (I was involved in getting it back in again for 1996), then out again (Richard Fox was involved in getting it back in again for 2000) and it’s stayed in ever since.  

And I found when it was out, people did it because they loved it and all sorts of volunteers came out of the woodwork to help. The realization that “There’s nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer!” and getting to work with passionate volunteers has been one of the highlights of my life.  But when Slalom was in the Olympics people became much more obsessed with Olympic status and money and the volunteers tended to be forced out by paid professionals.  It was a big loss.

*  I have come to feel that the World Championships (and the World Cup) are for the people in sport, whereas the Olympics are for the general public.  The general public doesn’t follow your sport, it follows the Olympics.  So the atmosphere is quite different at the Olympics and in the build-up to the Olympics.  In a Worlds you’re dealing with folks you’ve known for years.  But in an Olympics, you’re dealing with all these new people who are there because of the prestige of being at the Olympics, but they don’t know much about your sport.  Also, the whole media focus is different, as I learned from working with NBC.  In a nutshell, the media is concerned with producing “human interest stories” and not hearing about technically what makes one athlete more successful than another, which is what I’m interested in.

Another problem, as I see it, is that artificial courses have become the standard because of the Olympics.  But I preferred natural rivers – even though they’re much harder to deal with logistically.  There was the whole camping out in the boondocks, setting a course of slalom gates out there, and racing there that made the sport special.  I don’t know; maybe it was more interesting simply because it was a more complicated puzzle to solve in those days, and if you solved it, the result was even more satisfying.

In sum, my view is that while it’s nice for a sport to be in the Olympics, there is a price to pay for it.  I count myself extremely lucky that I had the best of both worlds and did not have to pay that price.  My greatest recollections are about the “journey” of several decades and all the characters (more about them in a minute) I dealt with, mostly independent of the Olympics.  But as far as the general public goes, the main thing that gets said about me is that “he was a gold medal winning Olympic coach,” not that “he loved the journey!”

*  Athletes in general.  As one of my athletes, Carl Gutschick put it, “Everybody wants to be World Champion but not everybody is willing to put in the work to be World Champion!”  But I found out that when athletes actually think they can win, that’s when they start training hard enough to win.  And then as a coach you have to hold them back, not push them to do more, because unfortunately, often the only way many of them find out where the boundaries are between training too much and training too little is to exceed those boundaries on occasion.

*   Little countries, big ideas.  One of the lasting impressions I have from my sports involvement is that sometimes little countries are where the action is.  Not all the best ideas come from America or are even in the English language! I saw that in East Germany in terms of Slalom (and Sprint).  Because I could speak German, I interviewed many East Germans and learned a lot about their training methods, some of which we incorporated into ours (minus the steroids). Another little country that was great at Sprint in those days was New Zealand and I got to go there, see what they were doing, and learn from that. It helped a lot in coaching Norman Bellingham to win the Olympics in Sprint in 1988.  But it’s also true that I learned a lot from big countries like Britain, France and West Germany, as well.

*  “Man is not disturbed by events, but by his opinion of the events!”  Whenever something went wrong, I used to think of this quote by the Greek philosopher Epictetus.  It reminded me to focus on the positive, what to do about the situation, and not just to wallow in the negative.

Coaching philosophy

In essence, I saw my job as helping athletes any way I could, the way I would have wanted a coach to help me when I was an athlete.  But it was all within the context of winning or at least trying to win.  If not all athletes could win, they would at least all know they were in a group effort dedicated towards winning.  In a nutshell, this meant learning exactly what it would take to win and then just doing it.

This meant a few things.  First, I saw it as my job needing to devise hard but fun workouts that were as specific to Slalom racing as possible.  That boiled down to my timing and scoring (keeping track of penalties) a lot of workouts on whitewater gates, and writing down the scores in “The Book of Times” so we could track progress over the weeks and years.  I still have the multi-volume Book of Times. 

The second thing it meant was my aggressively researching how our foreign opponents were training and getting ideas from that.  We got a lot from the Germans, the French, the Czechs and the British.  I’d interview these people and write papers summarizing the findings, disseminate them to the athletes, and we’d meet in a group to discuss them.

I had been trained as an interrogator in the Marine Corps and knew that a fundamental tenet of questioning people is simply to get “the sources” to give you as precise a chronological account of what they had seen or experienced as possible.  

The source will want to skip around and just give you an interpretation of events, but you have to keep forcing the discussion back to the chronology.  That’s because the source often doesn’t realize the importance of how the chain of events are linked.  

Once you get the chronology down in great detail you can then discuss interpretation with the source and you will be in a good position to ask questions about why the source did such and such when the chronology would have logically indicated doing something different.

My third coaching principle was to work myself out of a job, that is, teach athletes enough so that some day they didn’t need me anymore and could be their own best coach. 

I didn’t see myself as trying to dominate athletes by simply ordering them around as I see some coaches, even successful ones, do.  My method was more of a Socratic dialogue, where I would ask the athletes questions and they would give me their input. “What does it take to win?  Are you doing it now?  Do you want to do it?  How can I help you do it?” 

Overall, I was wary of people trying to take advantage of athletes, such as administrators trying to do it for nationalistic propaganda or just convenience, sponsors trying to do it for money, the media trying to do it to create controversies, or just individuals trying to do it for whatever personal reason.  I figured as the coach I should intercede and fend off such individuals. 

Characters

There are a million things I could say about the characters I met through our sport, but a) it’s probably diplomatic not to say some of it in writing, and b) it’s probably better to let the characters say the rest of it themselves!  But here are a few pages of vignettes.   

The first of the legends

You could say that the Glory Days for the CCA began with Jamie McEwen (1952-2014) who raced for it. I knew Jamie for 44 years.  I knew him before he became a legend, I knew him while he became a legend, and I knew him after he became a legend.

  It started back in 1970 when I met him and his brother Tom at races that spring and then later at summer races in Europe.  Wherever I went, the McEwans were the first ones on the water and the last ones off it.  

But what they did during that time was different.  Jamie would practice slalom moves — moving in and out of the eddies, and running slalom gates if there were any on the course.  But Tom would go find the biggest hole on the course and just sit in it and do enders all day long.   For two years, Jamie McEwan was just another member of the U.S. teams that I was on.  But then came 1972 and the U.S. Olympic team. 

I was an Alternate, or spare, for that team and I ended up helping the U.S. coach, Jay Evans, run practice sessions on the Augsburg Eiskanal, the world’s first artificial slalom course.   I was in charge of taking times and Jamie started having times that were so fast they kept checking my watch to make sure I had timed him right.

Later, after he won the Olympic bronze medal, I was standing right next to him as he was about to go out to the awards podium to accept his medal. I asked him, “Jamie, what are you feeling right now?”  He looked at me as if in a trance, and said “I thought I was going to win.”

That was a transformational moment for me and later became key in my coaching career.   I saw that before you could get anybody to believe in you, you had to believe in yourself.  And to believe in yourself, you had to feel that you had done all the work to be prepared.  I resolved henceforth to do all the work to be prepared.  

In the evening of the day Jamie won the bronze medal, he was whisked off to Munich for TV interviews.  Abbie, and I were able to arrange for his mother, Mae, to be seated in front of a TV in the Eiskanal restaurant so she could see her son becoming a legend.    I had a big 5-ring Olympic pin that I treasured, but I realized at that moment that I should give it to Mae, the mother of the legend-in-the-making, so I did.

And so not only for me, but for the next generation of U.S. slalom racers, Jamie McEwan became a legend.  Subsequently, I encountered many U.S. legends in the sport, but he, being the first, was always special.  He was the first to show us it was possible for an American to do great things in this sport.  He showed us the light, he showed us the path, and we resolved to follow it.

Twenty years later at the 1992 Olympics, when I was coaching the U.S. team, Jamie was still an athlete on the team — legendary stuff in its own right!

In between he had switched from C1 to C2.  He was hesitant to do it, bugged by the ancient Olympic thesis that “glory cannot be shared with partners.”   But I said to him, “where does it stop?  If you win in C1, they’ll say, ah but you didn’t do it in K1.  Then, if you win in K1 they’ll say, ah but you didn’t do it in the 100 meter dash.  And if you win that, they’ll say, ah, but you didn’t win the heavyweight boxing championship of the world.  So, where it stops is where you have the best chance to win right now.  Just embrace that and go for it!”

Bill Endicott (left) yelling times on the Feeder Canal with Jamie McEwan (right)

He then teamed with Leck Haller and had his highest finishes ever, winning a silver medal in the 1987 World Championships and winning the 1988 World Cup outright.  They also got 4th in the 1992 Olympics, only one place lower than Jamie got 20 years before! 

Jamie McEwan was an Olympic athlete of the “old school,” that is, someone who did the sport just for its own sake and not with the expectation of money or fame.  But he did it with astounding dedication over a lifetime, a lot longer than most athletes do.

Part of this was his modesty and always being a gentleman, making it appear, in effect, that his accomplishments had been made with the effortlessness of gods.  With his good looks, black hair, and speaking out of the corner of his mouth with an easy laugh, he was great fun to be around. 

He once told me that today’s kids are much more interested in acting because then they can pretend to be cool, rather than just being cool.  Jamie McEwan was cool. 

Just the other day I saw a video he did, calling himself the “accidental Olympian,” in which he said that he had very little athletic talent when he was young — but leaving out that he had been a top wrestler at Bethesda’s Landon School and even captain of the Yale wrestling team.

He also made it seem as though it was by chance that he had gotten to the Olympics in canoeing.  But he left out that his parents had run the Valley Mill canoe camp where he had learned the sport at a young age and had his brother, Tom, as a training partner.

So, underneath the modesty, lurked the dedication of a fanatic, a friendly fanatic, yes, but a fanatic nonetheless — in other words, my kind of guy! 

He was also a great philosopher and we had many talks about government and politics, which is what I worked in.  Jamie was a libertarian and I was an FDR progressive.  So, we’d often argue about what was wrong with the world and how to fix it.  For some reason, I remember one of those discussions on a bus on the way to the 1977 Worlds in Spittal, Austria.  I remember another one in 1992 as we were sitting on the bus from La Seu d’Urgell on the way to the opening ceremonies for the Barcelona Olympics.  A helicopter flew by us at eye level because it was in a valley below us. 

I never do well writing things like this about an old friend who has died because it forces me to admit that he’s really gone.  So, now that this section is over, I will do with Jamie McEwan what I always do in these cases: I’ll think of him as still being out there, just someone I haven’t seen for a while. 

Great talent to work with

I once did a study of all the great coaches in all sports around the world.   And I found that they all were either great recruiters themselves or they had someone who did it for them. You can’t be a great coach unless you have great talent to work with.  And again, I lucked out; I had a lot of it just dumped into my lap through the Valley Mill Camp – Cathy Hearn, Norm Bellingham, Joe Jacobi, etc. It’s hard to screw up when you get gifts like that. 

Davey Hearn didn’t come from Valley Mill but he was inspired by his sister Cathy, who worked at Valley Mill one summer and learned from Jamie McEwan and Angus Morrison and others there. Davey trained with the CCA Training Squad, (CCATS) at Nantahala and the Yough around the time that his sister was at Valley Mill.

Jon Lugbill didn’t come from Valley Mill but he was captain of his high school football team.  In fact in the 1978-79 period he would come to canoe practice all banged up after having done a football practice that day! And when Jon came to our group, he brought his brother, Ron, with him, plus neighbor Bob Robison.  Jon and Bob both became World Champions in Team, and Bob got an individual Bronze in 1979. 

Jon Lugbill

  “Some people want to appear to be the best; others really want to be the best.”  That’s what Jon once told me when I asked him why he kept going when he’d already been individual World Champ 3 times.   (He went on to be the C1 individual World Champ five times, plus seven time World Champ in team.)  

Wow, that said it all!  So many of us are just content to pretend to others we’re better than we really are.  But a few people are unwilling to stop until they’ve proven it to themselves.

My canoeing association with Jon began in 1975 and lasted through 1992, and here are some of the things I recollect about him:

“Fascination for the process”

This was the most important thing because it led to everything else. Let me explain:

In my life I’ve worked with “top performers” in several fields – I was an assistant to U.S. politicians, including a U.S. President; an aide to a Marine Corps General, coach of World and Olympic champions, and my son was a rock star (Sam Endicott, gold and platinum record winning singer/songwriter for “The Bravery”).  From this, I believe that top performers share something in common that most of us don’t pay enough attention to, and that’s what I call “fascination for the process.”

They are so fascinated by all the little details of what they do that they inevitably do them more than anyone else and in so doing, they reach levels of understanding about their activity that most of us don’t even realize exist. If they have great natural talent on top of this, the sky’s the limit for what they can accomplish.  And they can motivate others to achieve great things, too.

Jon was like that and he stimulated others, including me, to be like that.  A number of my other athletes were like that, too: Davey Hearn, Fritz and Lecky Haller; Cathy Hearn, Dana Chladek, Norm Bellingham. 

Davey Hearn

Davey had the temperament of an engineer, always weighing things carefully and wanting to see objective evidence behind conclusions.  Jon might come up with an idea for equipment, but Davey would be good for technically figuring out how to make it.  He was also a great endurance athlete whereas Jon was more of a power athlete.  Two different approaches to Slalom and they pushed each other to be the best C1s for an incredible 11 years. 

The best summary I can give of their relationship is this.  One day I was running a session, and one of them – I forget which one – was in the workout but the other one wasn’t.  The workout was almost over and the one who was there was not bettering his times any more.  Then, the other one arrived at the workout, late – and the times for both of them started going down by a couple of seconds! 

Great confidence

All our athletes had great confidence.  They were cocky, young enough that they didn’t know fear, always optimistic about what they could do.  I wrote about this in my book “The Ultimate Run,” when I used the term “canoe macho,” the attitude that Jon, Davey, Bob, Ron, and Kent Ford and other canoeists had that they were unstoppable.  They had crossed that boundary into believing they could win.  And I had crossed it with them.  Thinking about that 30 years later still sends a chill down my neck and makes the hair on my neck stand up. 

Our enthusiasms fed off each other.  Someone once said our fascination for the process was a form of insanity that caused us to “put into it more than it was worth.”  Jef Huey once told me it was like being in a cult.  Others said it was like enlisting in a crusade.  Someone else said, “don’t tell us the cost now; just send us the bill when it’s over!”  Well, maybe those things were all true.  I can only speak for myself, but for me it was more than worth it; it was beyond measure.  

Group training

The importance of this is something I learned from the East Germans (who also taught me:  “As much as possible, time in zuh boat!”) Our athletes were part of a group that trained together and pushed each other pretty much all year round, for years.  The others in his C1 group were: brother Ron Lugbill; neighbor Bob Robison; Davey Hearn, and Kent Ford.  All of them were great characters in their own right.

In other classes there were K1Ws Cathy Hearn and Dana Chladek; C2s Steve and Mike Garvis, Fritz and Lecky Haller, Joe Jacobi and Scott Strausbaugh, and Jef Huey and Paul Grabow, and Richie Weiss in K1.  And there was Norm Bellingham in Sprint.  All were eventually World medalists and/or Olympic medalists.  

You can’t imagine how much fun it was to be the coach of a group like this. It was like being King Arthur with the Knights of the Round Table. (Or in the case of the women, should it be “Dames of the Round Table?”)  We had extraordinary can-do team spirit, which included all the parents and volunteers.

The Garvi

The Garvis brothers, whom we called “The Garvi,” were fraternal twins.  Mike had been a wrestler, which I always thought was great background for a Slalom paddler ever since it had been Jamie McEwan’s background. (I had also been a high school wrestler.)  The Garvi hardly spoke – I always thought it was because they understood each other so well they didn’t need to!  (Brothers often make good C2s for this reason.)  And when they did speak it was in very soft tones.  When they got 4th in the 1977 Worlds, I thought, “My god, these guys could win the Worlds,” which they did in 1981, and they got third in 1983.

I remember one time I noticed that Mike and Steve’s paddles did not go into the water or come out at the same time, which I thought was bad.  Mike said to me: “That may be true, but the power comes on at the same time and that’s all that counts!”  I realized he was right. 

Paul Grabow and a lesson

We also took 3rd in C2 in 1981 in an upset by Paul Grabow and Jef Huey and I learned a great lesson from that.  A while later I was running a workout on the Feeder Canal and Grabow was standing there watching. When it was over he said to me: “It’s only now that I realize I won a medal in the World Championships.  Up to now it was just another run on the Feeder Canal.”

What that pointed up to me was the advantage of training as specifically to race conditions as possible, that is, racing against top competition in practice.  Doing that prepares you psychologically to go out on autopilot and just do that one more time in the big event.

It meant that psychologically the proper frame of mind was not worrying about how the other guys were going to do in the race because you had no control over that.  It meant that all you had to do was concentrate on paddling up to your level of ability in the big race, just like you had done a thousand times before “on a good day in practice.”  That was something you could control.  

Do that and you were the “winner,” no matter what the outcome of the race was because no one could ask you for more than that.  Do that – just paddle up to your level of ability, no more, no less––and you’d probably do really well in the race because most of your opponents wouldn’t paddle up to their level of ability.

After Grabow said that, I realized my job as a coach was two-fold.  First, it was to make sure these athletes had many “good days in practice” so they knew that their level of ability was high, and they knew they could just go on autopilot and reproduce it on demand.  And secondly, I knew that my job at the big race was to create as much as possible the atmosphere of  “a good day in practice” back home for them, in other words, keep them in a bit of a bubble and to the extent possible, keep outsiders from coming in and bursting the bubble. 

The Hallers

One last word about the C2s: the Haller brothers, Fritz and Leck.  Fritz always responded well to my motivational quips, like citing Beethoven’s quote “You must seize destiny by the throat!” or Thomas Carlisle’s quote “Every noble work is at first seen to be impossible!” He’d reply: “Bill you say that stuff and it makes me feel I can go through walls.”

Leck, his brother, had been an All-American Lacrosse player and even today when I hug him, he feels like he’s made of steel.  Leck is the only one, other than my own brother, who could make me laugh so hard I’d start to cry.  I don’t know what it is… some kind of slapstick humor, accompanied by mock intense expressions, antics, and uproarious laughter that gets me every time.  He knows how it works on me and he builds it up so that by the end we’re both just howling! 

Anyway, the Hallers trained with the Garvi and Huey and Grabow.  So no wonder they all got so good! There’s a great story about the Hallers training for the ’83 Worlds, learning from videos of Huey and Grabow who had been medalists in ’81.

Bill Endicott in winter coaching wearing his overcoat Fritz Haller called "big blue" and the orange coxswain's megaphone Dana Chladek gave him to save his voice. The French called him "Toucan" after that. 

From watching those videos, the Hallers developed a very fast paddling stroke rate they called “warp speed.”  But years later it was discovered that the videos had been playing at higher than normal speed; the Hallers had been copying something that never existed! 

Fritz Haller was one of my assistant coaches at the 1992 Olympics, in charge of the C2s.  His charges Joe Jacobi and Scott Strausbaugh won the magical gold.  So, there had been a chain: our C1s had stimulated the Garvi and Grabow and Huey.  They in turn had stimulated the Hallers. And one of the Hallers had helped produce an Olympic champion C2 team.

 

Norman Bellingham

 

Another character in our group was Norm Bellingham.  He was one more “young fanatic” who had fascination for the process.  I remember around 1980-81 when Tom McEwan from Valley Mill introduced me to Norm at the Feeder Canal and told me the following story.  He said Norm had been pestering him to go on the final whitewater trip for the senior kids at Valley Mill.  Tom told him it was dangerous and really for kids who were older and more experienced than he was.  Norm is alleged to have said: “Is there a 50:50 chance I’d live through it?”  To which Tom replied, “Maybe.” And then Bellingham said, “Then I want to go!”

 

50:50 chance and this kid wanted to do it?  Aha, here was an intensity and confidence I knew I could work with!    So he started out as a Slalom K1, then grew very tall, shifted to sprint racing and won the Olympics in 1988 in K2 with Greg Barton.  I coached Norm in sprint, while coaching the others in Slalom.  He carried over to Sprint the same sense of fascination for the process that he had when he was a Slalom paddler.  I also felt that the pulling muscles he developed in Slalom helped tremendously to make the transition to sprint. 

 

EJ

 

Another one of our K1s was an astounding athlete and character, Eric Jackson who later became World Freestyle Champion many times.  EJ would run Great Falls without a paddle.  Jon Lugbill once said, “he owns that place!” which, coming from him, was about the biggest compliment possible.

 

In those days EJ was constantly experiencing the “perils of Pauline”, usually some kind of financial crisis.  I remember one morning at 6:30 as we were paddling up the gates we had on the Potomac's Maryland chute, EJ mentioned to me the repo man had already been to his house that morning and repossessed his car.  I said, “Gee, have you thought about declaring bankruptcy?” He said he’d look into it.

 

But a few days later when I asked him about it, he said he couldn’t do it because declaring bankruptcy cost too much!  Nevertheless, he always seemed to land on his feet somehow and now he owns a couple of successful kayak businesses and is known all over the world.

 

Richie Weiss

 

Richie Weiss, another K1, had been a wrestler in a previous life like Steve Garvis.  He got a late start with serious Slalom training and I think that meant it took him a bit longer to reach his peak, which he did in 1993 when he won a Silver Medal at the Worlds.  

 

The thing I remember most about Richie was that he usually had bad equipment, a paddle that looked like beavers had been chewing on the ends, a boat that was too heavy, a beat-up life jacket that was ripped, and so on.  

 

We kept suggesting that he upgrade, but he wouldn’t do it.  He just never blamed his tools, even though he was a scientist with a fine eye for detail.  He was also a very hard trainer. 

 

 It was a terrible shock when Richie was killed in 1997 running a waterfall on the White Salmon River in Washington State.  When the press asked me my reaction, here is what they said I said:

 

“Husband, expectant father, PhD, world silver medalist, two-time Olympian, he was, in short, the best we had to give,” Endicott said. “I will never get over his loss, but I hope in time I can learn to live with it.”

 

A bunch of us from the BCE went to the funeral and one of the other K1s on the team, Doug Gordon, who raced for another club, was there.  When my wife, Abbie, a professional singer and voice teacher, sang Bette Midler’s song “The Rose” we all cracked up.  I remember seeing Doug crying with the rest of us.  Just a year later, in 1998, he, too, was killed running a big rapids on the Tsangpo River in Tibet and his body was never found. It was too much; there were definitely limits to this whitewater business.

 

Our astounding women

 

Then there were the women, Cathy Hearn, Dana Chladek, Yuri Kusuda, Boo Hayman, Kara Weld, and Kirsten Brown.  In the beginning, I’d never been involved with women in sports before, so I wasn’t sure how to proceed other than just throw them in with men and see what happened.  They all became World medalists.  

 

It was like that then: any woman who was willing to put up with the vagaries of whitewater and the teasing from the men had what it took to be a medalist.  If they didn’t, they just left the group.  

 

I found it was better for the women to train with the men rather than with other women.  I found the top women could do the same tough workouts the men could do, although they’d do about three quarters of the yearly volume the top men would do – they just needed a little more recovery time than the men.  From this I realized that a top trained woman could be just as good a soldier as most men.  

 

In fact, in 2002, Rebecca Giddens, who was World Champ and became 2004 Olympic Silver medalist, was the only woman in a group of eight out of 60 Olympic-caliber athletes who successfully completed the US Navy Seal Obstacle Course.  I never coached her, but as team leader of the 2004 Olympic Slalom Team that she was on, I "held her coat" at those Olympics.

 

 

Helping each other

 

Not only did all these folks beat each others’ brains out in training, we’d sit around watching videos of the workouts later and they would actually help each other by making constructive suggestions. The idea was that by helping the others, you’d help them push you more, so you’d get better.  Everybody got better. I got better.  I’d ask them how I was doing as a coach and they’d tell me the truth, painful as it was sometimes.  They pushed me to constantly come up with new workouts, new training information (which led me to write articles and even books about it), or just to run more efficient workouts.  

 

It was a coach’s dream.

The Glory Days begin; CCA Athletes at 1978 pre-worlds.

Top Row, from left to right: Mike Garvis, Don Morin, Chris McCormick, Cathy Hearn, Dan Isbister, Davey Hearn, Paul Flack, Yuri (Kasuda) Plowden, Tom McGowan, Linda Bennett, Chip Queitsch, Bill Endicott

Bottom Row: Jon Lugbill, Kent Ford, Ron Lugbill, Steve Garvis, Steve Draper, Bob Robison

Innovative time in the sport

 

The C1 group was particularly inventive back then.  They developed the “pivot turn” and invented the series of Max boats (Max, SuperMax, BatMax, etc.) that capitalized on the pivot turn.  The C1s designed those boats and then actually built the molds for them.  That stimulated our C2s and kayaks to do the same thing.  Can you imagine paddlers designing, molding, building their own boats like that today?  

 

They wanted to cut weight wherever they could, so they scrutinized everything – boat, clothes, paddle, helmet, spray skirt – everything. This resulted in things like inventing the “domer” helmet. It had no air vents in it, so water couldn’t get in and sit on your head and add weight. 

 

It led to spray jackets made part of the spray skirt so there would be no overlapping fabrics to add weight.  

 

8-pound kayak

 

Sometime after seeing the 1979 Worlds on TV a company by the name of Force Engineering called me and said: “How would you like to have an 8-pound kayak that’s so strong you can stand on it?” I said I’d love it – and we entered into a relationship with the company that made us these super light boats at a time when there was no weight limit on boats.  Eventually, though, the Poles complained saying rightfully there was no way they could get boats like that, so the International Canoe Federation (ICF) added a weight restriction to the rules.

 

Another invention was the “kneeliak” that Ron Lugbill cooked up.  He kneeled in a kayak the way he did in a canoe, and quickly proved that the extra leverage he got by sitting up taller made for a faster boat.  But the ICF banned it. 

 

Power workouts in the boat

 

  In those days, when most people considered Slalom essentially an aerobic event, we considered it a series of anaerobic sprints.  If you just did continuous loop training in gates, we reckoned, you’d never build up the power to do a really fast pivot turn in an upstream gate, or sprint hard between gates (in those days on natural rivers, there were more places to do these sprints than on today’s artificial courses with continuous whitewater).  So all year round, even when we were concentrating on building aerobic endurance, we did short courses 2-3 times a week.  One such workout was the “5 on 5” that I picked up from the East Germans.  It was 5 timed – and scored – we always counted penalties – runs on 5 different short slalom courses, preferably on real whitewater gates.  

 

Other factors

 

There were several other things that contributed to our boaters’ success.  A very big one was the Potomac River, which has some really good whitewater on it. We had several places on the river where we’d hang gates.  It was often very difficult to hang these gates, but athletes would do it with me. I had a bamboo forest within walking distance of my house and I’d cut the trees into gates, bundle them up, and with the group, float them down the river to Little Falls, with wire in our boats. We'd get out on the shore and hang the gates.  Often it would take days to set the course.  

 

I remember one time when we first hung gates on the Potomac.  It was in the area just downstream of the Fish Ladder.  Mike Garvis fell from the cliff above the river – but emerged unhurt and unfazed. 

 

Another time years later, I remember racing up to Great Falls for a summer workout on Potomac Gates after work.  There wasn’t time to change out of my office clothes and I didn’t have anything to change into anyway.  So, I just jumped on the back deck of Yuri Kusuda’s kayak and she paddled me over to the island where the gates were and I got out and ran the workout. I got wet but it was a warm day and we had a great workout.   If the athletes were committed, I was committed.   

 

The Basin

 

Another factor was the David Taylor Model Basin.  It was an indoor 750 meter-long US Navy towing tank for testing the hydrodynamic properties of new ship designs, submarine designs, and torpedo designs. It was a 10-minute drive from where most of us lived – very convenient! The Navy would let us train in there between 7 pm and 7 am.  We’d usually go at night but sometimes at 5 am.  The Basin was flat water and we’d hang gates in there or do distance paddling or longer sprints there, sometimes as relay races.  So, when it was freezing out, the athletes could be so warm in the Basin they could paddle in just bathing suits.  It was dark in the Basin (to keep algae from growing) and Angus Phillips of the Washington Post called it “A great place for a murder.”  The Garvi called it “Club Fed” because it was owned by the Federal Government.

 

Dickerson

 

Then, there was Dickerson, about 45 minutes from the Feeder Canal.  It was a canal that a power plant (then Pepco) used to divert water from the Potomac River to cool its generators and then shoot the warmed water through a channel back into the river. 

 

In the 1980s in dead of the winter, we’d sometimes go to Dickerson to do slalom gates hung just below where the artificial course ends today or just do offset gates hung on the main channel, then with no obstacles in it. 

 

I remember one time standing there with Jon Lugbill and saying to each other wouldn’t it be great to have obstacles in that canal so we could have a real course.  Then we just looked at each other and laughed because we thought it could never happen.

 

Well, it did happen.  Towards the end of my coaching career, about a year before the 1992 Olympics, two young fanatics from the BCE, John Anderson and Scott Wilkinson, were able to get permission from the Pepco CEO to put obstacles in the canal.  

 

The Garvi, now long since retired from paddling, built a scale model of the course that John and Scott used for planning the course.   One day it was set up in the Model Basin for a special press event when the course idea was announced to the world.  The result was more or less the course you see today. 

 

 It was terrific; it was like a giant Jacuzzi – great for winter paddling! The last workout I ever had with Jon Lugbill was a 5 on 5 on that course.

 

After the Olympics, I asked the CEO why his lawyers ever permitted us to make that course.  He said: “Simple.  I never told the lawyers about it!”  Turns out he had a son trying to make the Olympic team in another sport, so he had sympathized with us.  The lawyers weighed in later, though, and implemented a number of restrictions!

 

Volunteer Jennifer Hearn, Davey's wife, organized a fund-raising drive to get money to do the job on that course.  A concrete company donated the concrete.  Man, how I loved those volunteers! 

 

In Sum

 

These athletes were an important part of my life because I learned many things from the adventures we had together. In those days just about anything seemed possible.

 

Perhaps the relationship was best summed up when Angus Phillips interviewed me and I commented “I go to practice every day because I know Jon Lugbill will be there.”  Later I heard Jon told Angus “I go to practice every day because I know Bill Endicott will be there.”

 

More than anything it was the intensity, the excitement, the accomplishing of goals –– and the 

 the  laughs, oh the laughs!  

 

I look forward to seeing what others remember about the Glory Days!

 

(Bill Endicott was an athlete on the U.S. team from 1970-1973; Manager of the U.S .team in 1975 and 2004; and coach of the U.S. team from 1977-1993, when he coached athletes who won 57 medals in World Cup, World Championship, and Olympic competition, 27 of them gold.  He was also the NBC Color Commentator for the 1996 Olympics in both Slalom and Sprint.  He was a co-founder and the first president of the Canoe Slalom World Cup from 1988-1992.  He authored 8 books on canoeing and kayaking and many articles, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish.  He was also a coach and/or consultant in 8 foreign countries.) 

History of the Feeder Canal

 

Since the Feeder was the most-used gate site during the Glory Days, it’s interesting to know about its remarkable history. In a nutshell, in antiquity the area was an Indian camp ground; the Feeder was built by George Washington; it helped lead to the writing of the US Constitution; and it was saved by a US Supreme Court Justice.  The essay below goes over these themes in more detail.

 

Indian campground

 

I know about this for two reasons.  First of all, I’ve found arrowheads down by the “neck” area of the Feeder.  One I gave to Bob Robison and the other I kept for myself.  From what I’ve read, they were probably made by members of one of the many Algonquian Indian tribes that inhabited Maryland in antiquity.

 

Secondly, I know about it because in the early 1980s, a woman writing a thesis about Indian tribes was after me, wanting to have us kicked out of the Feeder because she was concerned we were harming the area.  She raised a fuss for a while, but fortunately she moved away soon thereafter and the issue died.

 

Washington builds the Feeder

 

Before he became US president in 1789, George Washington had long been interested in western expansion into the fertile Ohio Valley.  In 1785, now a national hero after the Revolution, Washington became the president of the Potowmack Company, which was occupied with westward expansion along the Potomac River.  Part of the company’s work included building “skirting canals” around Little Falls and Great Falls. 

 

The Feeder Canal is the remnant of the upstream-most part of the skirting canal that went around Little Falls starting where Fletcher’s Boat House is today.

 

Legend has it that while he was US President Washington came out to see the work being done on the canal.

 

Helps lead to US Constitution

 

            An issue created by Washington’s skirting canals and other things was that of interstate commerce: who had the rights to charge for use of such canals?  This issue of regulating interstate commerce was one of the reasons the Articles of Confederation were junked and replaced in 1788 by the US Constitution and its commerce clause in Article 1, Section 8 that regulates the balance of power between the federal government and the states regarding interstate commerce.

 

 

C&O Canal

 

  Even with the skirting canals, navigating the Potomac was too difficult at various times of the year, so, long after Washington died (in 1799), in the 1820s, it was decided to build the C&O Canal and the rights of the Potowmack Canal Company were transferred to the new Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company.

 

That company built the current C&O Canal and towpath that goes by the Feeder.  They used part of Washington’s skirting canal, the part from what is now Fletcher’s upstream to what is now Lock 5.  And they kept the top-most part of Washington’s canal as a means of feeding water from the Potomac into the C&O.

 

The C&O was built from 1828-1850.   The majority of the laborers, or “canallers,” as they were called, were Irish immigrants, with a few Germans and American Indians and even a few slaves.  The back-breaking work of digging the canal prism was accomplished by using the simplest of tools—shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows.

 

Laborers worked 12 to 15 hour days in all kinds of weather, from sunup to sundown.  There are few estimates of the total number of laborers needed involved, but workers at any given time ranged from about 300 to 2,100. They lived in makeshift shanties at the worksite, often in a bunk house with 15 to 20 other men.  At least one cholera epidemic, in 1832, left many dead and caused others to flee to relative safety elsewhere.

 

Justice Douglas saves the C&O

 

In 1954, there was a proposal to pave over the C&O Canal and turn it into a highway leading into DC. The Washington Post, in a January 3, 1954 editorial, wrote the canal was “no longer either a commercial or scenic asset” and that a highway, proposed by the National Park Service and approved by Congress, was a fine way to make the Potomac Valley accessible to sightseers, campers, and hikers. “The basic advantage of the parkway is that it would enable more people to enjoy beauties now seen by very few,” The Post said.

 

But US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who regularly hiked on the C&O towpath for exercise, wrote back challenging that idea and challenging Post editors to accompany him on a hike of the entire 185 miles of the canal.  Douglas’s actions attracted the support of conservation groups, such as the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Association, as well as naturalists, well wishers, and just plain curiosity seekers. 

So on March 20, 1954 Douglas started his now famous weeklong hike along the C&O accompanied by all these people.

 

As a result, The Washington Post retracted its initial editorial, and the National Park Service abandoned the parkway idea in 1956. However, it was only after numerous reunion hikes and years of sophisticated lobbying on Capitol Hill that the C&O Canal finally became a National Historical Park in 1971.

 

Clara Barton Highway

 

Instead of paving over the C&O, the decision was made to construct a highway along side of it.  In the early to mid-1960s, the Maryland portion of the George Washington Memorial Parkway was constructed from Carderock, underneath I-495, and ending at Glen Echo. 

 

Although the parkway was supposed to continue west to Great Falls and east into Georgetown, this never happened and it was extended only to Chain Bridge in the early 1970s. 

 

That took it past the Feeder Canal, in the configuration you see today. Before the extension, there was only a dirt road going by the Feeder.  In 1989, the Maryland portion of the George Washington Memorial Parkway was renamed the Clara Barton Parkway.

 

OTHER PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

[To be slotted in alphabetically by last name]

ALEXANDER, Bob --

The CCA Training Squad (CCATS 1973) (The CCATs were instrumental in developing area whitewater athletes who later achieved great things in the sport. After the initial 1973 season that Bob reports on here, there was a western US tour in 1974 in which such notables as Jon and Ron Lugbill, Cathy and Davey Hearn, and Mike and Steve Garvis –– all later to be World Champions –– participated.) After more than 35 years working for Government contractors, Bob is now semi-retired, and consulting parttime to a Government contractor. He’s enjoying spending more time with his grandchildren, a great niece, great nephews, and skiing.)

In 1973 a group of teens crossed the Atlantic (most for the first time) to race in Europe. Led by the ageless Dave Kurtz, a Penn State paddling legend, this group of a dozen up and coming slalom racers left Kennedy airport for Zurich Switzerland on Wednesday June 6. What follows is my best recollection of the trip with contributions from John Hefti, Dan Isbister, and Nat Cooper.

As teens who had never been outside North America, this promised to be quite an adventure. Since none of us was old enough to rent vehicles, Dave recruited assistant coaches
and managers May McEwan, Kim Williams, and Tom Johnson.

In addition to Dan, Nat, John and me in K-1s, we had Kim Goertner (K-1W), Brent Lewis, Charley Steed (C-1) and two C-2’s (Steve & Lee Gianonne, Bill & Chip Queitsch). Although most of us bought race boats in Europe, three boats accompanied us on the flight from JFK to Zurich. It was quite a sight to see them appear on the luggage carousel, it looked like the machine was giving birth.

After a very long drive across Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Austria, we arrived in Tacen near Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now the capital of Slovenia). Despite being jet lagged from more than 24 hours of travel, we were excited to be paddling in Europe for the first time. The water was very high, silty and muddy, with lots of flotsam that gathered in the eddies (made from small rocks and chicken wire) on the slalom course. I recall watching the European racers taking practice runs and thinking their stroke rates were so fast, just like in movies we had seen.

The race course started with a very large and fast drop through the sluice of a dam. When I got on the water, I was so focused on the drop that my paddle hit the bridge above the sluice, knocking it out of one hand. Luckily, I didn’t panic and was able to grab it in time to drop into the froth without a problem, I can’t say the same for May McEwan – she managed to flip above the sluice and swam down the drop.

One of the highlights of our visit, besides the race itself, was spending time with the Polish team who were camped near us. A number of them spoke English, including their top K-1, Wojeck Gawronski, who finished 3 rd at the world championships two weeks later. It was a wonderful way to meet racers from other countries and get to know them. Next stop: Merano, Italy, site of the 1971 and 1983 World Championships.

I remember seeing films of the Passer River course and thought it was a great looking course. It didn’t disappoint! Merano was one of the prettiest places we visited, camping in town with a short walk to the river. We trained there for the week leading up to the race and made friends with some of the West German women paddlers.

During a break in one of the eddies on the training course, one of the Gianonne brothers (I think it was Steve) made a comment in English that today would be considered inappropriate figuring she didn’t know what he was saying. When she replied in English, he decided it was better to paddle quickly away. Several of us thought the water looked clean enough to drink and paid for it about 2 days later. For me personally, it was the first stop on a tour of race courses that I had only dreamed of paddling.

We then went to Muotathal, Switzerland and the World Championships. The race organizer, Paul Bruhin, had visited my family in the 1960’s and joined us on several river trips
and camping in New England and New York. This relationship led to invitations for several of us to ‘forerun’ the slalom course prior to the championships.

On my two runs down the course I hit too many gates and had a very sloppy “official” forerun. Regardless, it is something that I'll never forget. We met more top elite racers and partied with them after the races finished and traded shirts. Who knew that a red hoodie with CCATS USA stenciled on the front would be so popular! Several of us ended up with East German shirts. I wore mine so many times during the next few years that it literally fell apart.

Being in the Swiss Alps was awesome – cowbells for alarm clocks and being offered fresh milk from the dairy farmer who owned the land where we camped. It rained almost every day, causing the river to rise during the championships and making us wet, cold and very muddy. We could also hear the high water pushing the river rocks.

Two days later we were in Augsburg, Germany paddling the course used for the 1972 Olympics. As the first man-made course, it was a special experience to paddle and swim (on purpose) the Eiskanal. It was much smaller than it had appeared on TV, but still a lot of fun.
This was before the Germans remodeled the rocks to reduce the waves and holes. During the two days there, I took nine runs down the course and rolled at least once on five of the runs.

Then it was on to Spittal, Austria the site of multiple World Championships. The glacier fed river was very cold and had big waves and big holes. Now that we were getting used to
international racing, we started performing better on the water. It was also cool to race against the best in the world who went there after Muotathal. This was the last stop on the organized
part of the trip.

For years I had wanted to paddle the courses at Merano, Spittal, and Augsburg. But I had one more dream stop to make: Lipno Czechoslovakia, site of the 1967 Worlds. I recall seeing
movies of the course with its three big drops. It was an eye-opening experience being in a Communist country. Unlike Yugoslavia with its easy entry and dull landscape, Lipno was a ‘resort village’ next to a beautiful lake with a dam that fed the racecourse.

But being there was a bit unnerving: crossing the border with armed guards, guard towers and two very tall barbed-wire fences. The guards walked through our campsite next to the river,
a few kilometers from the border. But I digress. The course was everything I had imagined – a challenging technical set of rapids just below the dam. Unfortunately, we were allowed only one practice run because the race organizers released the water for one practice run, two slalom runs and the wildwater race. They
even turned the water off between the first and second runs! It was definitely challenging to learn a course without water.

Although I had my worst runs of the trip, just being there was a highlight. The post-race party was great because we partied with the Poles, East Germans, and Czechs who had more freedom to spend time with western paddlers because we were on their side of the iron curtain.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized how lucky we were. The club environment of the 1960’s & 1970’s, along with parental support, were key factors in the success of this trip.
CCA provided the structure and organized the trip, with some funding from an anonymous donor. The exposure to European competition was priceless. We discovered how much more
there was to learn to become competitive.

When we returned to the US we were all much better racers and “more mature” young adults. I suspect that the Wienerschnitzel (it was the only thing on the menu that we understood) and the strong beer helped. There were several other CCATS training camps in the years that followed, but ours was the only one to go to Europe. It was the CCATS model of intense coaching, training, racing, and team camaraderie that led to the successes the US team had in the decades that followed.

 

ANDERSON, John

 

Reflections on Dickerson at 30

Thirty years ago, on October 28 1991, the Dickerson whitewater course was substantially complete. Heated water flowed over and around concrete obstacles, creating a warm water training course for the upcoming Summer Games in Barcelona. Although whitewater slalom was a small and little-known sport, the Dickerson story captured the national media’s attention. It garnered feature length articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, National Geographic, and 90 others.  It was news not just because of what had happened, but because it had happened at all. For those who were not around then, a brief history:

In the spring 1991, C-boater Scott Wilkinson approached the Dickerson plant manager, Dick Shakeshaft, about turning the warm water discharge canal into an Olympic training course.  Since the 1960’s DC boaters had set up gates in the warm water area below the discharge, and had dreamed of placing them in the concrete canal itself.  As coach Bill Endicott put it “We just shook our heads and said it would never happen.  So, no one asked.”  

Before.  Warm water discharge canal. 

It was an audacious idea, but Scott sensed that the upcoming Olympics might be just the nudge it needed.  In his meeting, the plant manager was unexpectedly open to the idea and asked for a proposal.  In June, Scott and I presented a short proposal for placing obstacles in the canal and amodel test at the David Taylor Research Center to assist in the design. In early August Pepco said they were interested and presented Bethesda Center of Excellence (predecessor of the Potomac Whitewater Racing Center) with a check for $5,000 to fund the model study (we hadn’t even asked for money).  

Less than ninety days later the course was done.  The 100-foot-long hydraulic model at David Taylor fueled this unlikely outcome, being highly visual, and carrying the imprimatur of the Navy facility with all its engineering and scientific might. Throughout the month of August,PRWC volunteers built and tested the model with guidance from DTRC engineers.  In September PWRC invited Pepco and the press to view the model in action.  After the presentation, Washington Post reporter Angus Phillips asked Pepco Vice President for Construction Mike Simms if they supported the project.  He replied yes and “it would be it ready by Thanksgiving.”  


Model test in the David Taylor’s recirculating water chamber. August 1991

Press event in September 1991

I then garnered help from a structural engineer friend who did the structural design for the obstacles.  He provided contacts well outside my limited circle that included rebar fabricators and concrete contractors--all necessary for building the obstacles.  Pepco was building new gas turbine generation plant next to the old coal-fired power plant and had a full construction management team working on site.  They provided their expertise in heavy construction and contacts within the crane industry needed to place the obstacles.  Construction and installation took just 10 days- scarcely enough time for the concrete obstacles to achieve their initial cure.  

Making the concrete obstacles.  Late October 1991

Cranes installing the obstacles.  Late October 1991

Surveying the completed course in November and on camera, plant manager Shakeshaft said “It’s really a credit to John Anderson and Scott Wilkinson-it’s just like they said it would be.” Pepco said that the positive press on the project far outweighed any public relations initiative they had ever done.  I would also guess that it has not been topped by anything done since. Coach Endicott stated that “This project was blessed.” 

Water on!

Visiting foreign athletes, when apprised of the story, remarked that it probably could never have happened in their country:  government obstacles, delayed permits (we didn’t even apply for one), ossified labor unions, corporate doubts, etc. would have doomed the idea.  In fact, there were scores of things that could have derailed the project here: risk adverse corporations (Pepco’s legal department wasn’t even consulted), bureaucratic delays on using the David Taylorfacility, no donors, no volunteered services.  In this regard it is an American tale.  The can-do attitude in our country can be rallied for a big idea at an opportune time—a heartening thought in our badly polarized time.  And timing is probably the chief ingredient for success:  I believe there was only a brief window of a few months where Scott Wilkinson’s trip to Dick Shakeshaft’s office would have been successful.  A request after the ’92 Games, or too far in advance, there would have been no project.  

A New York Times writer did a full feature story on Dickerson for their Sunday magazine and dubbed the artificial course Rio Pseudo.  I call it Cheapo Rio because PWRC’s out-of-pocket expenses were only around $75,000, all covered by cash donations--first in was Clyde’s restaurant, a long-time supporter of PWRC.  Donated time and services likely amounted to an additional $200,000 in 1991 dollars. At the time however, it didn’t seem all that cheap.  I didn’t know if I would become personally liable as expenses mounted faster than donations came in (I wasn’t).  And there were doubts—what if the obstacles blew out? What if I got fired from my day job in an architecture firm for moonlighting? (I did.)  It was worth it though, and I got a new career in whitewater design.  This, however, is a considerably narrower career than designing buildings, for which I have some regrets, but if given a chance, I would do it all again.

 

HEFTI, John -- The Color Purple

On the origins of the LFWC and its trademark color at the end of the visible spectrum (John Hefti was instrumental in introducing the color purple to the boats and equipment of early Feeder Canal trainees. He was the sternman in a slalom C2 with Carl Gutschick in the bow at the 1977 World Championships in Spittal, Austria. Later he was a ballet dancer and after that graduated from Stanford Medical School and has worked in the life sciences and biopharmaceutical sectors ever since.)

Perhaps my single enduring contribution to the sport of whitewater paddling is a leitmotif, the color purple, but first a little background.

My father bought a Grumman in the summer of 1969 and we paddled it twice on rivers. I joined the scout troop in 1970, where I met Henry Herrmann whose father was the scoutmaster.
Henry later became a dentist and gave free dental care to local members of the US team. From my perspective there were really only two ranks in our scout troop: bowman and sternman.
Everything else was just a distraction, a hoop or a gold star of one sort or another.

As an impatient but selectively ambitious kid, I wanted to advance up the ranks; I wanted my own ship to captain. So, as I’ve done in so many other areas in life since then, I decided that I’d short circuit the whole advancement protocol and buy my own kayak, which I did in 1971 from Jim Stuart at Appalachian Outfitters.

I headed home with a Lettmann Mark IV sitting atop my father’s car. I spent a month or two learning to roll at the Silver Spring YMCA under Jim’s tutelage. In January of that year, I took my Lettmann out on the river for the first time, on a run of the Potomac from the fish ladder to Sycamore Island.

Henry bought his first kayak in the spring or early summer of 1972, if I recall correctly. I taught him to roll in the backyard swimming pool that belonged to an adult leader in the scout troop. We paddled almost every day at Angler's Inn after school (or sometimes during school hours!), and weekends on nearby rivers such as the Shenandoah Staircase at Harper's Ferry. We first paddled the Yough together on Labor Day Weekend in 1972, shortly after the Munich Olympics. I celebrated the 50th anniversary of that trip to the Yough by taking my daughter and
three of her friends down it a few weeks ago. 

Little did I guess at the time that one year later I’d be three thousand miles from home at a national training camp in Kernville, California. It worked, in foundational ways I never could have imagined as an anxious but emancipated sixteen-year-old.

After that Johnny Evans and I returned to the east coast in March. Along with Russ Nichols, Louise Holcomb and others, we scouted out various training sites along the Potomac, quickly settling on the Feeder Canal. The first gates were placed near the top of the course, perhaps ten or twelve extending down to the first large eddy fifty yards down. But like an annelid with a thyroid problem, segments were added iteratively, until the course was a serpentine path of thirty or more gates that fanned out into flatter, wider sections below.

It became customary for many of us to run Little Falls after each gate session, which during the higher water of spring provided as much of an aerobic workout as did the training sessions. It was also a great and fun strategy to become comfortable in big, powerful water.

It was on one of these post-workout trips that the Little Falls Wildwater Club flickered into an idea. We had our slalom gates, we had a nice stretch of river to run as a cool-down, and we had the C&O canal to float us back to our cars. What more could we ask for?

But some petty frustration with the inexplicably outsized bureaucracy of the Canoe Cruisers Association (CCA) collided with my impatience a few weeks later, led to us (temporarily, as it turned out) divorcing from the CCA, to the extent that we formed LFWC–– and needed a color.

As far as I remember, the official color of the LFWC was an artifact of bad taste: I’d always loved the color purple, so everything I owned, built or purchased that came in a choice of colors, was purple. My first home-built boats were purple. I replaced my ugly (but perfectly functional) orange PFD with a violet variety. I dyed tee shirts and hoodies purple, I even wore purple socks when I could find them.

My peers — Bill Queitzsch, Willy Lynch, Johnny and Russ Nichols, Kent Ford and many others — seemed to have been indelibly stained by my bad taste. Race and club officials and parents began to refer to us as the Purple People Eaters (and several less charitable variations on that moniker).

I managed to get selected for a training team to race in Europe that summer of ’73 in K-1. The long car rides in a heavily burdened VW Microbus over Alpine passes was an ideal culture medium for cultivating the LFWC ethos. By the time we returned to the States in August and built our latest boats, the rivers were bleeding purple.

I had switched to C1 around then. I also paddled C2 and in Europe I bought the wildwater C2 used by Bill Endicott and his partner Brad Hager in the 1973 Worlds. Somehow, I got it back to the States without incurring an excess baggage fee on SwissAir. (Those were the days!)

I begrudgingly returned to high school that September, where a chance encounter with seismic aftershocks would effectively end my competitive aspirations in slalom. I raced for a couple of seasons after that, culminating in the 1977 Worlds, but the sustaining goals of my life had moved elsewhere.

I paddled rivers often, and with great pleasure. But I was blissfully unaware of the sea change that was building in the American whitewater racing community. But on the rare occasion that I did come to spectate at a race, I was pleasantly surprised to see the persistence of purple. At the time I don’t think I ever considered my connection to this — if indeed there is a connection. Perhaps it is just a legacy of coincidences.

 

ISBISTER, Dan

I started to paddle in 1969 on the other side of Baltimore where I grew up and began training regularly on the Feeder Canal in the fall of 1975 when I started at the University of Maryland.  I trained here most of the time from late 1975 thru 82.  

 

The feeder was a dramatically better training venue than the ‘Stakes in the Mud’ on the Chesapeake Bay or the moving flatwater on Winters Run, that Dan Demaree and I had back near Bel Air MD in the early 70’s.  While at Maryland, I commuted once or twice a day over to the Feeder or to the Model Basin in winters.  

 

Then after graduation, (Dec 1979) Don Morin, (C-2 & C-1 WW) and I rented a house in Brookmont in mid-1980, the first of the paddling clan to actually move into Brookmont. Both Don and I worked for Merle Garvis’ computer consulting company, and living in Brookmont enabled us to continue to train easily before and after my first job where I didn’t wear a bathing suit.

 

Recreation Paddling to a Full Time Obsession 

 

I was introduced to paddling by Carl Flynn, the assistant Scoutmaster for our Boy Scout troop 777 up in Bel Air MD.   Through Carl I met Dave and Dan Demaree who I ran rivers with and started racing more seriously. Barb Brown took me on numerous river runs with Ed Gertler in the early 70’s before I could drive on my own. We started going to several races in the springs: Brandywine, Petersburg, Loyalsock and others.   

 

 

I didn’t grow up as a ‘Valley Mill” Kid like some of the DC gang, but I did work at Valley Mill West in the summer of 1973.  The McEwan family ran the camp and it was a great experience working and living there with them.  And as Bill Endicott has indicated in his reflections, Jamie’s 1972 Bronze medal was the #1 inspiration for our generation of racers.  Alsoin 1973 I also participated in the first CCATS group, (a junior development team sponsored by the CCA), that got to race in Europe that summer. 

 

In the summers of ‘74-‘79 outside of racing season I worked as a guide at Wilderness Voyageurs in Ohiopyle PA or down at the Nantahala Outdoor Center.  So I got to participate in several sections of the sport: River Running, Raft Guiding and Slalom.  Paddling every day on rafting trips and again after work with a great bunch of paddlers all summer helped develop my paddling skills and another set of friends I still stay in touch with.    

Taking my first boat out of the mold at Carl Flynn house in 1969/70

 

Attending my first race in 1970 I got to see the evolution of the sport from a recreational thing to a more serious niche sport where people trained daily to be able to compete on a national and international level. My training partner in the early 70’s Dan Demaree, went to Europe and brought back some great techniques and experiences that helped us push each other in the 73-75 seasons.  

I was too young & unskilled for the 72 Olympics, and too worn out by 1982, so I never got the Olympic experience.  But I got to race on the ‘75, ‘79 and ‘81 teams in the World Championships, (World Championships were held every other year back then, with Europe Cup series races in even years). My best finish was 13th in Bala in 1981.

 

Having a bad team trials and missing the team in ‘77 was a good life lesson that life goes on after a setback, and you need to “get back on the horse” if you want to get ahead.  

 

One of the highlights of my racing career was finally winning the National Championships in 1979 after years of trying to best the great 9-Time National K-1 Champion Eric Evans who was such a wonderful mentor and pioneer slalom figure in the sport. Not enough can be said how much Eric helped advance the sport in the US.  

 

1975-82 On the Feeder Canal & Racing

 

In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s the Feeder Canal had many of the top US K-1s training here, and the new batch of C-1s that would come to dominate the sport, growing up literally and in the sport on the Feeder.  

 

Chris McCormick, Tom McGowan and I benefited from the push we gave each other under Bill Endicott’s coaching and trying to keep ahead of “The Kid”, Jon Lugbill.  While there was some rivalry, we were good friends and pushed each other daily. Those were fun years training and traveling all over the country and world together.  40 years later I can still get together with the friends I developed in those years and feel like we are picking it up where we left off.  

 

But in addition to talking about race runs or adventures in ‘liberating flags’ and other fun times at post-race parties, we can also now talk about raising families and a wide variety of interesting careers. I know we all feel like our lives benefited from the self-discipline and self-confidence we developed in the sport.  

 

Everyone probably has at least a dozen great stories, I still feel the aches from a moped accident in Nice, France with Dave Curran where we were lucky to have a French ER doc put us up for the night.    And in the Jonquiere years (1978-79), who can forget many great nights at the Jonq Brau Haus, a German beer hall in French Canada.  

 

I guess there is a theme here: we worked hard and played hard too.  For some reason these stories get better every year they are told with new embellishments.  

Dan & Chris McCormick clipped from Rus Nichols’ “Fast & Clean” movie on the Feeder. 1979 sometime

 

Family Support Was Key

 

The Feeder Canal gang also greatly benefited from amazing family support. The Garvis, Sessler, McCormick, Lugbill and Robison and other families were big supporters of the gang. I know my parents were great about supporting my early racing career, driving me to practice before I was 16 and they’d show up at many of the spring races over the years even after I’d left home.  The CCA families would shuttle the younger folks to the Feeder every day and hauled the gang all over the country to races.  That seems to still be going on at the Feeder Canal today.  For many a time I remember piling into the McCormick’s van for a race.

Family Support was Key, This is Dan and My folks at the 1979 National Championships at the Savage River.

 

Coaching -- Kudos to Bill Endicott

 

And coaching made a big difference down here.  Bill Endicott provided some great more formal coaching structure and was a great self-taught constant learner.  Bill was, and is still, a great object lesson in how to work hard at something if you want to get ahead.  As you can read in his musing of this project, Bill was/is a sponge for information, reading and reaching out to others to make himself a better coach and us better paddlers. I think we all benefited from our relationship with Bill way beyond our paddling.   

 

I had been use to training and coaching ourselves with Dan Demaree and sometimes participating in numerous training camps with the Ledyard guys some years up at the Yough, and down at the NOC with a big mix of folks from around the country.   (I can still hear Merle Haggard playing outside Eric Evans’s hotel room in Wesser.)  Bill’s devotion to the sport and the Feeder Canal Gang really advanced the sport in the US.   

 

Advancing the Sport in a Unique Environment

 

This generation developed new techniques, boat designs (in C-1 and C-2) and training methods and really pushed each other to get better and advanced our standing in the world. In K-1 boats, I used Dan Demaree’s Slipper in ‘75/’76, but then went with mostly European designs. 

 

Norm Bellingham often talks about what a unique time and place this was.  But for me, I assumed this was happening in lots of places, when in fact, we were probably a unique set of individuals that came together in an ideal setting, with a great coach, and family support to push ourselves and the US ahead.

 

Worn and Burnt Out, Time to Move on

 

By 1982, my elbows and shoulders were giving me too many issues and I was a little burned out with paddling and ready to move on in my life and start putting a career first.  So,after the 82 trials, I retired from racing.   Around that time I also met my lovely future wife Melissa, whose folks lived in Brookmont, ended up getting married a year and a half later, bought our house in Brookmont from Ralph Lugbill, had 2 great kids, raised our family and had a great 30+ career in tech.  I’ve been semi-retired since 2013, doing a little marketing consulting and still living a good life in Brookmont.  

 

After Racing - Life Long Friends

 

After I stopped racing I had a 10 year period where I didn’t paddle much at all, but then I started paddling some again with Jef Huey on Sunday mornings.  Now a couple other Broken Down Old Has-Beens (BDOHB’s), and I still try to attain up to Rocky Island most Sunday mornings when in town and the weather is warm.  

 

I also look forward to a western river trip every year.  In 2019 Bob Robison and I trained up last year for a 14-day Grand Canyon Trip organized by Neil Baxter, (an old Scott K-1 racer), with Dave Curran, Howard Fore and a bunch of other crazy Scotts.  

 

Last year I finally bought a new slalom boat I can fit into, but don’t really paddle gates much; I just can’t get the hang of the new techniques, but enjoy carrying a 18 lb boat, looking good and watching the young guns on the Feeder once in a while.  The new generation, while lower in numbers then our day, have great skill and boat control and are masters of the new techniques I can’t seem to grasp.

Dan, Bob Robison, Kent Ford & Norm Bellingham skiing in 2019 in UT.

 

 

The Sport has Evolved, For Good or Bad, Who Knows

 

I do think we were able to paddle in a great era.   Several factors seem to have impacted the sport in some ways since then.  Back in the day, the team would have 4 slots in each classin World Championship years, and sometimes 6 boats/class in Europa Cup years, which helped develop depth in the sport.  The single slot of more recent years seems to discourage participation.   

 

I’m also not sure man-made courses are helpful for the sport (sorry Scott.)   And I’m not sure I like the technique of only having to get your head through the gates.   Back in the day, slalom technique was good river running technique, and now some elements of the slalom technique seem unique to slalom, and I wonder if that’s good for the sport.  

 

And now there are a lot of different variations of kayak racing so not all the top boaters are in slalom.  That’s neither good nor bad, as it’s neat to watch the Green River Race or North Fork Championship or some of the play boat contests and it’s amazing what some of the boaters can do that I can’t even imagine doing myself anymore.  Competition-wise there weren't the diverse choices back in the late 70’s; slalom was it.  Bill covered the whole Olympic debate well; it would have been great to experience it, but I missed that window. 

 

Glory Days?, Maybe But Great Memories

 

Glory Days? Who knows, but great memories for me, and I’m still always glad to get together with some great old friends paddling, biking, skiing or just telling lies about some great adventures that we had in those years and those experiences were a big part of my life and who I am today.

 

JACOBI, Joe

Joe describes his winning run at the 1992 Olympics in a May 9, 2021 article he wrote called, “The Gap between Start and Finish:”

At the Parc del Segre, just a few seconds of sprinting our doubles canoe across calm water separates the Olympic start line from the first drop on the river channel where we descend into the whitewater.

From outside the river, our quick and synchronized strokes off the start line must look like an assault on the water.

But actually, it feels calming. Nearly comforting.

Only Scott and me. Our canoe. The water. The race course.

A moment like this is practiced, visualized, and dreamt about countless times over the span of many years.

And when the final run of an Olympic Games is under way, it is a relief to just paddle.

As we enter the top third of the 300 meter whitewater channel, the sense of connection to the water — and to Scott — is vividly high.

But, over the past 12 months, if anyone has felt the imposition of this river’s uncertainty, it is us.

Just a year earlier, in 1991, at our first competition at the Olympic canoeing venue, our lack of response to correcting mistakes led to one of our most dismal performances of that season.

I distinctly remember walking through La Seu d’Urgell back to the hotel after this competition, which had just been broadcasted on Spanish national television. Every television in every bar in the city featured the slow-motion replay of river water dripping from our faces as we rolled our doubles canoe upright from its previously capsized position… in the middle of the competition.

Not a good sight… and an even worse feeling.

My score card:
Uncertainty 1
Joe & Scott 0

Our failure to course correct seems to play on a never-ending loop on every television across Spain.

And the only difference a year later at these Olympic Games is that after the first of two competition runs, we are now the race leader… and the television audience extends far beyond the borders of Spain.

Based off of our nearly 100 days of practice sessions in La Seu d’Urgell over the past year, small mistakes on the 1992 Olympic canoeing channel have a way of snowballing into bigger mistakes extremely fast.

The first signal that our final run in the Olympic race may be a little different than our previous practice sessions appears at the halfway point of the course.

After our canoe is unexpectedly pushed to the far right side of the river and away from the center point of the river where we had planned to be, we adapt with a few quick and well synchronized strokes that counter the river current. This course correction lets us run our canoe at a higher-than-normal speed into the next upstream gate — a transitional maneuver in the course where boat speed is typically lost and and extra energy is spent.

For us, our course correction converts a mistake into an effortless slingshot of energy through this transition.

This energy aligns our canoe nearly perfectly with the river for the next quarter of the two-minute race run.

When your goal for the previous six years has been to simply align your canoe with the powerful force of the uncertain river, it is nearly impossible that some part of your body, mind, or spirit does not acknowledge when you are actually doing this….

To the best of your ability…

At the Olympic Games…

Which leads to an interesting final 10 seconds of this race run.

Carrying a lot of momentum into the last two gates of the course — two downstream gates offset from each other requiring a deliberate side-to-side traversing movement — we make a mistake. The kind of mistake that offers a very small window in which to course correct.

Just before these final two gates, we align our canoe more in the direction of the finish line instead of the gates themselves.

We pass through the first gate just fine. But, we are not traversing enough to the right side of the river to clear the last gate on the course.

As Scott cleanly passes through the left side of the last gate, I am on a collision course with the gate’s left-side pole.

The five second penalty incurred with touching this pole would negate our entire final run of the Olympic Games, which so far has been the best we have ever paddled on this river.

If I touch this pole and the five penalty seconds are added to our time, we would need to rely upon our first run in the final results — the same first run that our coach believed would not be good enough for a medal.  

This story is hardly about the traditional elements of peak performance that typically suggest stronger, faster, or better win Olympic gold medals.

This is exactly about deliberately and passionately correcting mistakes, deficiencies, and setbacks — big and small — over and over again… like life depends on it.

So, without space to adjust side-to-side for this last gate of the Olympic course, I just lean back.

Way back.

The life jacket I am wearing that extends from my chest passes under the left pole of the final gate… with the clearance space equal to the thickness of a single sheet of paper.

No poles touched. No poles left to go.

A few final strokes and we will arrive at the finish line.

Momentarily, my score card for this day will read:
Uncertainty: 2
Joe & Scott: 2 + A Course Correction As Thin As A Sheet of Paper

***

LAW, Craig.

I was a Valley Mill West camper and later Counselor, and recipient of the Tom McEwan coveted Red Shirt. I was also taught by Jamie McEwan, Tom McEwan, and Angus Morrison. For good measure, I went to high school with Davey and Cathy Hearn who showed
me how to get high school PE class credit from my workout log.

In my slalom journey, I earned some credible hardware, had some successes, had a few titles that got away and have always held onto what Bill Endicott said, “if you are not THE best,
be ONE of the best”. I have felt I had a hand in lifting up some other, up-and-coming paddlers, Norm Bellingham, Joe Jacobi, Eric (EJ) Jackson and Richie Weiss. All in all, while not a world champion, I had a good career in amateur athletics and learned lessons that served me well in life, career, and mentoring others to achieve excellence.

Sports Science

In terms of the sport’s evolution and impact, I wanted to add to the science of the sport and training. This was actually a pretty major inflection point in athletic training that changed much of sport, but I don’t think the whitewater slalom community got the cred for the revolution. It was in many ways a game changer.

I remember the US Olympic Committee sending their van to the Feeder Canal to do some basic physiological testing to see where we were vis a vis other elite athletes of our time. We scored well. Questions were asked and raised without any clear explanation why we scored so well. After all, we were not endurance athletes although most of us ran as part of our non-boat training.

Bill had stressed short sprint style slalom workouts of less than 90 seconds and often 60 seconds or less so we could set a high cadence race pace and focus on particular moves, perfecting the biomechanics and angles of attack. I think unknowingly or maybe intuitively, he saw this as a sweet spot of training. Part anerobic and part aerobic.

I had finished my undergrad in Kinesiology and was working on my masters in Exercise Science. This opened up a door for us to get access to physiological testing equipment at the University of Maryland in College Park. My masters thesis was on the Physiological Responses of Elite Slalom Paddlers. We brought Bill’s kayak ergometer to College Park and tested several elites on the treadmill and kayak ergometer (adjusted for canoers as needed). The results were astonishing. To that point in time, it was common knowledge that VO2 max was obtained after about 4 minutes of exercise. It had been validated over and over with middle distance runners and cross country skiers. It was settled science.

Surprising results

The results from the testing I led, showed that elite paddlers were able to reach VO2 Max in 30-60 seconds. That was a big deal. That changed the calculus of the very basis of how elite athletes should train, reshaped intensity, repetitions and validated what was being focused on the Feeder Canal.

The results from Feeder Canal paddlers of that time speak for themselves. There were many other revolutions going on, boat design and technology changes that were heavy contributors, but this was a big change in optimizing physical training.

My thesis was later re-published I think by the University of Washington, Seattle who were trying to get more science research accessible to the world. It apparently began appearing in literature sources and available electronically in university libraries. Inquiries came to me from Australia, England, France and New Zealand and a few others less memorable. It came from coaches and trainers from many sports. Word got out.

 

STUART, Jim

Early paddling before using the Feeder Canal

 

The Feeder Canal was dry from 1966-68, so there was no gate training on it until 1968.  But I started paddling way before that.

 

It was a four-mile bicycle ride from 4300 East West highway in Bethesda, where we lived, to the Feeder Canal.  By age ten I was riding my bike down to that area to explore the river and especially to look for wildlife.

           Once I started whitewater kayaking –– well before I could drive –– luckily some of the CCA elders would come by and pick me up, and then off we went to many adventures. Friday night I would sleep on the screen porch, and Jim Rieber would arrive at 4 AM. I would climb down the rose trellis (so as not to wake other family). By 5 AM we would be eating breakfast at Ben Tracy's house in McLean, and then by 10 AM we would be paddling a river somewhere near Petersburg, West Virginia.

 

I first encountered “slalom” when I met Wick Walker in the parking lot of Angler’s Inn in early spring of 1966.  He had the Dartmouth Group down for spring training.  But before 1970 there were only a few paddlers “training” on the Potomac, and we almost never paddled together: Charlie Bridge, Les Bechdel, Jim Raleigh and John Connett, John Berry and Bob Harrigan, Carolee Lewis and Swede Turner, Brent and Kevin Lewis (but they were kids), and Barbara Brown sometimes. Dan Sullivan –– he didn’t really train, but he did paddle Little Falls often after work –– in his underwear, with no PFD or helmet!

 

Training on the C&O at Great Falls

 

While there was no training on the Feeder, from 1965-1970 the CCA Slalom Division, under the leadership of Rosemary and Dick Bridge, did conduct organized training on the C&O Canal, at a footbridge about 300 yards upstream from the Great Falls Visitor Center in Great Falls, Maryland. Every Sunday after rolling practice quite a few paddlers went out to these sessions.

 

Dick Bridge and I set up and after took down four wires, ten gates, and ran timed practices, with penalties counted.  Later on, some sessions were held there on weekday evenings.

 

But for most of us “training” just involved conditioning by paddling on the river. Most of that was at Angler’s Inn, but in the summer also up near the Fish Ladder.

 

I only started actual training in gates in 1967 through spring 1969, as I wanted to make a run at The Team.  By chance, I was the first one training in gates at the Feeder, simply because I was the only one training in gates!

 

Hanging gates on the Potomac was problematic for two reasons; (1) it was really hard - especially alone; …and (2) you could run afoul of the National Park Service. They were funded back then, and crews and rangers were up and down the towpath in maintenance trucks quite frequently and didn’t want wires across the river, and gates.

 

Feeder comes online in 1968

 

A moderate flood circa 1966 washed out the Feeder Canal's downstream Irish stone retaining walls and control locks. Afterwards the NPS completely blocked off the Feeder Canal, reducing the fresh-flowing passage to a shallow swamp.  And it remained stagnant for two years as repairs were (eventually) arranged.

 

Being in the right place at the right time

 

It came to pass in the summer of 1968 that CCA kayakers Dan Sullivan, Ben Tracey, Ed Richmond and myself ventured up the C&O from Lock Six and put-over into the Potomac for a Saturday morning run through Little Falls.

 

By chance we arrived at the very instant a power-shovel was unceremoniously liberating the Feeder Canal, lifting the last boulders away from the entrance, just downstream from where we were.

 

As soon as the final rock was lifted out of the hole that let water flow, we slipped right into that gap, directly under the steam shovel bucket, waving at the operator on the way through. 

 

So, we got to run that big fleeting drop before the empty Feeder filled up –– a once in a lifetime opportunity.  We followed those newly forming rapids downstream the half-mile to the reconstructed concrete containment dams and control lock.

 

Recreation field vanishes

 

Along the river right side of the Feeder Canal, on the bank of lower High Island, the NPS had built a large, flat recreation field about 30+ yards wide by 200 yards long, carpeted green with new mown grass, and had positioned one not-so-big overflow culvert down the middle of it to the river.

 

But when the water was released at the top of the Feeder this spillway filled up fast and blasted a fresh flume of waterpower into the Potomac.

 

We thought about running this last five-foot free-fall drop, so took out to scout, but it was way too ugly.  We watched small boulders being boiled up from the river bottom.

 

We started back to portage the boats –– only to discover them floating across that fine new field to meet us, on an eight inch deep tsunami. The engineers obviously had miscalculated how much flow would be coming down the Feeder. Within a few weeks the NPS's entire ball field was eroded away. The site has been a tangle wood duck sanctuary ever since.

 

Sometimes the secret to adventures is being in the right place at the right time!

 

First gates on the Feeder

 

            After the Feeder was full again I had the fortune / misfortune of being the only kayaker self-training slalom in DC in the 1968-69 period.  I didn’t think the Park Service would let me get away with hanging wires across the canal, so at first I hung some poles by just tossing lined poles through the branches of the overhanging trees.  This was at the very top of the Feeder.

 

Then I developed a few quick gates made with long parachute cord with poles attached directly to the line. I attached the ends on either side of the canal, and adjusted the pole height by simple tension.  I took them down after each session, rolling the cord up around the poles. It was tedious so I would only hang three gates maximum.  It wasn't possible to get a lot of people in there to hang gates –– because there weren’t any other people interested in hanging gates!

 

I also often practiced at the Feeder Connector at Lock 5 without gates. When the control gates are opened a bit there was quite a bit of turbulence to work with.

 

I also hung wires and gates at Maryland Chute, and even at S-Turn in the summer. We held a training camp at S-Turn once; Eric Evans attended. Those locations were ‘invisible’ to the NPS.

 

Dirt road

 

Before the early 1970s, there was only a dirt road running by the Feeder and it was possible to park my car right at Lock Six.  It was a rough dirt road and after a rain it became a muddy quagmire. I once got my car stuck up to the floor and had to jack it out with boards, etc.  To run Little Falls we ran a shuttle down McArthur, crossed Chain Bridge, and parked on the Virginia side.  It was a steep takeout.

 

Bridge over the Feeder

 

Have you ever wondered why there is a road off the towpath at the top of the Feeder?  It’s because there used to be a very nice footbridge at the very top of the Feeder going over to High Island on the other side.  The bridge was substantial enough to accommodate service trucks but was mostly for walkers.  It conveyed hikers over to a NPS hospitality / rest house on the island that I visited several times before the 1966 flood.

 

It was a nice CCC kind of structure, and an enjoyable place to take in the views of the river, and have your bag lunch. The river is so wide there that floods rarely get that high. Back then the NPS had money, and provided services.

 

But after the mid-sixties their funding dried up, and after the 1966 flood they knocked down the High Island visitor house and the road bridge over to it and did not rebuild any of that. 

 

My first slalom race

 

I don't know when the first Canoe Cruisers Association (CCA) slalom race was.  I didn't start paddling on the Potomac until 1964. I assume that someone may have put on a slalom race somewhere before then, but perhaps not.

 

The first slalom race that I participated in, and it was on the Potomac, was put on by Wick Walker at Difficult Run's Maryland Chute.  He and the Dartmouth Ledyard Canoe Club crowd was down for spring break training. I think it was in March/April 1966 but it might have been in 1965.  It was a sunny, cool day.

 

Wick had an artistically drawn sign-up poster in the parking lot at Angler's Inn. There was a $2.00 or $5.00 entry fee. I think he called the race "The Bhutan Kayak Challenge"–– he was already dreaming of Himalayan adventures.

 

There were eight gates hung, but you had to negotiate through them four times –– in different sequences, according to Wick's hand drawn map. There were 28 gates total.

 

I asked Wick how to tell which gates to run on each loop through. He answered: "You just have to memorize the course - and right now - we're about to start! Anyone who paddles slalom has to be good at memorization!”

 

            As Sandy Campbell and I were awaiting our turn to start, I asked him how to get rid of the butterflies in my stomach.  He told me to hit my midsection as hard as I could with my fist and they would disappear!

 

            The water was 5.2' on the Little Falls gauge, so there were lots of big boils to contend with. Paddling up through the boils against the center island eddy was challenging. You had to paddle hard, got pushed left or right, and up against and under the rock wall, and mostly backwards.  Then you had to ferry out across a hole into the center pushy, boily upper eddy.  And then ferry out into the main current, across, and then go downstream. There was a tough upstream on the river left by the big island. 

 

Sometimes a gate was a downstream on the first pass and sometimes the same gate was a reverse on the third pass –– I can't recall the whole course now. That was also my first whitewater combat roll –– and the water was cold and muddy. Happily, I did finish the course.

 

I believe that Les Bechdel, Charlie Bridge, Jo Knight (?), Eric Evans (?), John Burton (?), and Tom Wilson were there; ...and about 10 others. CCA’er Ken Wright was there too.

Creation of the Z-Channel

In the summer of 1991, we created a new “Z-Channel” slalom course on the channel that runs off the Feeder Canal back into the Potomac. This 175-yard course was another whitewater gate site to use when the A-Team was practicing on the upper Feeder gates. Twenty-five gates were hung there and 1-day weekend races were held.

 

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