Well, the Ocean Sports Academy kicks off again for another winter season of training with our first profiling session last Tuesday during half term. As usual the conditions at Carbis Bay were perfect, blue sky and clear blue water – if you don’t believe me ask Gordan! Below I have posted the results from the session along with squad groupings for this coming Academy this Saturday.

Accurate and consistent measurement is a corner stone of effective and progressive coaching (you should the amount of spread sheets I use to monitor training and design new training programmes!) but I hope that you are also able to take useful information from these continual assessments; for all those paddlers who have attended previous Academies over the 2011 – 2012 season please go to results and I have collated all of the Personal Best performances into one table.

I can not stress enough that profiling results are a measure of performance but as with any other measure these are not always black and white! The point I am trying to make is that as with any open environment weather conditions will always effect the results and must be viewed with an eye of caution. However, it is a good starting point e.g. warmer water increases the speed of the ski as does are temp, wind and swell also play their part although, this is reduced somewhat by including a turn in the 2km water time trial (heading into the wind first and coming back with a tail wind). The down side is that the 2km results will be approximately 25 – 30 seconds slower than if run in a straight line! 500m are what I call ‘flying 500′s’ because we run them with the wind making them obviously faster but closer to the speed of a sprint kayak (K1).

The most important result is to improve upon your own personal achievements but, it does not hurt to keep an eye on others too!

The above statement is essential but can be quite dangerous, particularly when taken out of context. The ultimate performance is to attempt to get as many things right as possible focusing upon your strategies, tactics and technique; if you get enough of these elements right the by product is an increased likelihood of an successful outcome (I didn’t say win as there is only one winner and is a very poor measure of performance!). This obviously profoundly contradicts my bold assertion earlier! Well, we humans (particularly men) can’t help measuring things and allowing a small glimpse of how you may or may not stack up against another person is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it is not the only thing you focus upon. The issue here is quite often others and winning are very bad measures of performance – a win might seem great when you have paddled out of your skin but what if the others had an off day? or what if you still paddled out of your skin and did not finish where you wanted? Both not great. In short, focus upon your own improvements and successes no matter how small, do not make others your focus of attention but merely use them as ‘a’ (one) measure of performance.

Finally, I have included one more measure of performance; total time and total water time. I have included these as they give an overall performance of the athletes reflecting more than just paddling ability; when viewed holistically you may find that some paddlers are closer than you may have previously thought when viewed this way. I have also separated out run times as these can significantly influence total time in favour of a fast runner; it is very interesting that those significantly ahead in one distance are often reeled in in another.

Finally, finally, I use a percentage measure of performance differences either between paddlers (this has a tendency to remain more stable and avoids deviations in weather fluctuations) but also in relation to previous performances. When a score is recored as 112% this indicates that that person is 12% slower than the fastest time. I hope this makes sense? Anyway, enough from the Gospel according to Glenn and on to the squad groupings and results.