Paddle Assist

notes from the most physically active month of my life

Today is the last day of what turned out to be a month-long vacation. Not to brag but I’ve been constipated in 3 different time zones in the past 4 weeks. Since this isn’t a travel blog I’ll spare you the details of my adventures, except for one. For the first time in over a decade, and in a new country, I went kayaking.

Kayaks come in singles and tandems. But tandems only work if both participants are in sync— if they can paddle in rhythm. If they both have the same level of competitive drive. More on this later.

I went kayaking as part of a group on a multi-adventure trip to Croatia. This trip is not something I’d usually sign up for unless my crush was going. But my family wanted to go on an active vacation and I wanted to test out a new sunscreen, so I went.

The group was like a non-denominational youth group that also had adults. By the end of it we were all friends. There were a few families with kids around 18-26, a mother daughter duo and a mother son duo, and my family. Everyone was from the US, all over, and some happened to play D1 sports in college but that’s neither here nor there. There were around 24 of us in this group, which was aptly advertised as “families with adult children.” An adult child is a 26 year old who lives alone but calls her mom in Maryland to ask if the yogurt in New York has gone bad.

Most of my fellow adventurers are reading this now because my mom (see, WME talent agent) convinced them all to subscribe. They’re all worried I’m going to mention them by name but I only do that for brand sponsorships now. This newsletter is brought to you by Terry brand padded bike shorts. Feels like a diaper, stops complaints at the source. 

Some of us got seasick on boats, some of us got drunk in a nightclub on an island, some of us fell off of our bike on day 1, some of us fell down hiking, some of us ate ice cream, others not so much, some jumped off cliffs into the Adriatic, some of us watched from a respectful distance. There were mothers and fathers and stepfathers and brothers and sisters and skeptics and cautious people and adventurous people and we were old and young and tired and awake and it was beautiful chaos. But this is not a travel blog, this is about kayaking.

The leader of the kayaking excursion paired us all up into boy/girl teams. Because as we all know, boys strong and girls weak. The idea was to have the boys in the back of each kayak pulling the weight and killing the game for dinner, and the girls would be in the front luring sailors to their untimely deaths. I insisted that my sister and I go in a “girl boat.” I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be a bonding experience. Girl-powered kayaking is what the women’s suffrage movement was all about.

Jackie, my older sister and a person who technically shares the most DNA with me, is competitive in ways that I am not. This makes her an excellent leader, visionary, doer and thinker. And she’s very good at board games and sports. I tend to hold the bags at the bottom of the roller coaster. My hot dog is still digesting.

Jackie wanted to go faster in the kayak to “catch up with the rest of the group” but I was too busy enjoying the scenery. She told me I needed to engage my core and dig the paddle deeper into the water so we could actually move the boat forward. I don’t like engaging my core. I like engaging in conversation. I like the idea of getting engaged. I have specific rules for my eventual engagement (no candles, no rose petals, no beaches). Engaging my core doesn’t end in a pretty emerald ring.

Jackie and I fought on the kayak. It was the most picturesque backdrop for a spat. Gatorade water, clear skies, olive trees lining the shore. She told me to look at Patrick (name unchanged because he is painted in a favorable light) and copy him. She told me to look at his rowing form and “do what he’s doing.” Patrick is a D1 rower at Cornell. 

People talk about how camping brings out the core of a personality but I think it’s sports. Recreational kayaking is a sport. A sport is anything where you’re sweating and someone is telling you to push harder. Some classic sports include yoga, basketball, and childbirth. Kayaking brought out everyone’s true colors. The parents were having a blast because they all liberally applied sunscreen and had time away from their kids for a moment. The D1 athletes were thriving in their natural environment. Patrick even clipped his boat to ours and at one point towed us. If I ever have a son I will not know how to feed him. More on that later.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the other days of our multi-adventure trip were biking days. And not just any bike, E-bikes. Something E-bikes have that kayaks do not is the ability to go Sicko Mode, otherwise known as “Turbo.” In the kayak, while I was unable or unwilling to pull my weight, I was praying for a little button to appear to take the load off. To have some paddle assist. But in life there are no “easy” buttons to help you in a pinch. No E-bikes. Well technically there are, but they’re usually taken and your Citi Bike app hasn’t been working anyway.

After bobbing around the crystal clear water for probably 30 minutes, we reached our destination which was lunch. My favorite subject in school. The place where I discovered Oreos. My arms were throbbing, probably because I wasn’t engaging my core. But we all made it to the shore to eat the same food at the same time. No matter how long it took us to get there, we all arrived. There’s a metaphor I won’t get into. We ate lunch outside in our bathing suits and suddenly, we were all in the same boat.