Why we need things we don’t have to win

It’s funny really. We live in a world that encourages us to measure everything. Our steps. Our sleep. Our heart rate. Our pace. Our productivity. Even our relaxation seems to need a score. 

Yet every Sunday morning, around the UK, hundreds of people launch their paddle craft for a timed 5km… and most of them couldn’t tell you whether they were ten minutes faster or slower than last month. Or could they ….. 

With the rise of social media, the pressure to perform is very real. Athletes and very normal folk too are constantly updating their IG accounts with ‘how it went for me today’ and that is certainly on an upward trend. 

Now I’m not saying this is wrong, we should all be very proud of our achievements and social media is almost like an old-fashioned diary (albeit very public!) where you can log progress and feel inspired by it to carry on.  

Others can also encourage you to do more; you may follow someone who you aspire to be like or someone who resonates personally with how you feel, and again, there is nothing wrong with that – it’s a positive thing! 

PB’s and medals are regularly ‘shown off’ and quite rightly too – it’s a tough old world out there exercise wise – it’s hard work just showing up sometimes let alone constantly getting out there on the daily! 

So, our world is slightly obsessed with achievements and then there’s AquaPaddle. Nobody minds if you are first. Nobody minds if you are last and yet, the paddlers still keep coming back. Why is that? The answer is because, enjoyment is a perfectly good reason to do something. The achievement is actually just getting involved. 

How refreshing is it to just turn up and paddle – a bit like the hundreds of thousands of runners who turn up for parkrun all around the world – so many of them are joining in just for the fun of it; they don’t really care about their time. It’s about the community of other runners, volunteers, sharing a coffee afterwards to chat about their week, not about their PB or the new trainers that knocked seconds off their time! 

AquaPaddle has become the paddling equivalent of parkrun. Yes, there’s a finish time. Yes, you can compare your results if that’s your thing. But that’s never been the point. The point is that, for one hour every week, people of all ages and abilities share the same stretch of water, encourage one another and leave feeling just a little bit better than when they arrived. 

AquaPaddle reminds us that sometimes success is all about turning up. How many of us have lain there in bed listening to the alarm, and all we want to do is turn over and go back to sleep? Do we really need or even want to go to an event that has a fairly early set time to start. Surely, could we just go paddling later? But hey, what would we miss? Yes, the camaraderie, the joy of seeing that friend you only ever see at AquaPaddle, the regular paddlers and volunteers who all greet you with a smile, knowing how tough it may have been to get out of bed for this! 

So why spoil it by setting your watch, why spoil it by obsessively checking your time as soon as you are off the water, whatever happened to paddling or any exercise just for the sheer joy of doing it. Back in the day, unless you were a ‘proper’ athlete training to compete in National or International competitions and had a trainer watching over you with a stopwatch, you may never have known about your overall time, your ‘splits’ or how many calories you had burned.  

You don’t need ‘a win’ at AquaPaddle, you don’t even need a personal best; you just need the craft, the paddle and an hour to remind yourself of why you fell in love with the water in the first place.  

There are other things we need to remember about this sport; who has been that first-time paddler who apologises for being slow, only to discover that nobody cares – only enough to make sure you are not paddling alone. We have all been there!   

There will be many regular AquaPaddlers who are there every week but never look at the results, and all the volunteers who may get more enjoyment out of this than the paddlers. 

The conversations we have with others during and after, that are every bit as important as the paddle itself. 

We can all get caught up logging our paddles; I am someone who does it all the time, but when I forget my watch or just actively decide NOT to record the session, it brings a whole new level of freedom to my day. Paddling for the sheer pleasure of being on the water, either alone or with friends, not chasing the pack and equally happy paddling at the back with the ‘slowest’ paddler without worrying about how the stats will look. 

This is especially relevant when following a training schedule, it’s easy to be enthusiastic and keen to stick to it rigidly, but there may come a time when you become fatigued, and I don’t mean physically. It’s training fatigue, mentally tired about waking up to yet another daily workout – you can hardly bear to look at what’s up next. The numbers and reps seem confusing, and your brain has a fog that seems not to be able to understand any of it. You feel unmotivated and unable to achieve what you see as the daily slog of training. Time to speak to your coach and take a break! Now is the time to ditch the schedule, ditch the watch, and go and exercise for fun – go surfing, change it up, try a different paddle craft and get the love back. It won’t take long. 

So, if you’ve never done it before, do something that you are not going to win at, don’t even try, do it for joy, friendships, freedom, and coffee! Maybe that’s why people keep coming back to AquaPaddle. Not because they’re chasing a podium or trying to beat someone else, but because they’ve found something that’s becoming increasingly rare – a place where simply taking part is enough. 

Happy AquaPaddling!