When I first discovered sea kayaking on Anglesey, it had me at hello! My background was in rock climbing and mountaineering but my long standing desire to see the world from the sea had always had a voice. And so in my move to Anglesey a few years back, quickly followed the purchase of a sea kayak and all the paraphernalia.
I approached sea kayaking the same way as climbing and progression came through solo kayaking until I found myself failing on my sea roll, 300m from any kind manageable exit. Leveraging my mountaineering experience, I told myself I had fifteen seconds to make a decision and commit to it. I did and I did, and finally scrambled up onto a stepped sea cliff, with legs cramping, dragging my boat alongside after 45 minutes in the water: “All the gear and no idea!”
From that day, I chose to get more structured training / coaching from a variety of local providers and tried to paddle more with others until I understood more of what I was really getting in to.
Eventually, after supporting my paddling buddy through his SKL training and successful assessment, I decided I would join him the following year. My strategy was different which has lead me to where I am now in a relatively short period. I chose to do my SKL then followed a very intense 6 month training period, to achieve my ASKL away from Anglesey in Scotland, to challenge my wider skills by removing local knowledge. This success gave me more confidence and set me up to leverage my climbing coaching background as a ex GB Paraclimbing Team coach to begin my coaching pathway of Performance Sea Kayaking Coach (Advanced Water).
After the intensity of going through the SKL and ASKL assessments in the same year, I promised myself a break from such things but very quickly I began to understand what I wanted and, as it stood, had the potential opportunity working on Anglesey to be the best coach I could be. And here we are, eyeballing the application form to proceed with the next part of the journey: Performance Sea Kayak Coach.
My personal ethos is that to become a specialist coach in a sport, not only does it require personal high level skills development but most importantly, a few years of intense focus and one’s ability to deconstruct the skills required and spend time creating a deep understanding of the frameworks that support the coaching knowledge transfer to athletes and students of the sport.
At this stage, the Advanced Performance Coach (APC), feels a bit like a post graduate degree on the sea and the depth of coaching theory and application has taken me some time to re-map and then align it with my own learning style and previous coaching experiences.
My transition into the APC pathway is driven by a specific commitment to adaptive coaching in the advanced environment. Drawing from my years coaching the GB Paraclimbing Team, I recognise that "performance" is not a one size fits all metric. In the dynamic world of advanced sea kayaking, where tide, wind, and swell demand precision, my focus is on deconstructing the biomechanics of paddling to suit the individual needs of the athlete. My aim is to ensure that the complexity of advanced water is accessible to everyone. For me, coaching is about removing the barriers between the paddler and the environment, ensuring that the "performance" belongs entirely to the individual, regardless of their starting point.
You feel like an imposter at first, but then you realise that this thinking is part of the same psychology that holds athletes and students back from pushing beyond the boundaries set by others to new goals and levels of personal achievement…
