ACA Whitewater Open Canoe Downriver

I have outfitted my kayak as a canoe. I am now on my knees, with half a paddle, a C-boater for reasons C-boaters won't admit. For dark reasons middle-aged men won’t admit. I have switched to C-boating because I am headed into a florid mid-life crisis and want to be good at something, anything, before it is too late. Too late for what, I didn’t know, and it is the not knowing that has motivated me to paddle my kayak as a canoe. My C-boat is floating proof of my failure to improve as a kayaker. C-boating gives me permission to be mediocre in front of my paddling peers, who have to cheer me on because, well, everyone is impressed by a C-boat—at first. Like a three-wheeled car. No one notices whether I am paddling well; they are impressed that I’m paddling at all. Like a dog that...

So long as they’re in the womb of the Grand Canyon, river guides stand atop a social hierarchy of society's most accomplished members—doctors, lawyers, spies, moviemakers, and actors. But as soon as they leave—and eventually they all must—they enter a world where their river-running skills are useless and their prestige is not translatable. No one understood this better than Curtis Hansen

War has torn a hole in the lives of these wounded soldiers. The Team River Runner program has used the healing power of whitewater to help them discover life after combat

Troy Crawford was returning to the Malone House, a hotel for soldiers on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., when curiosity lured him toward a van loaded with kayaks. Despite the loud, piercing ringing in his ears, the result of a bomb explosion in Iraq, he heard a stranger’s question just then—and he heard it just fine. It didn’t hurt that Joe Mornini, the shag-headed paddling instructor and driver of the van, was shouting at him like they were buddies from way back.

Sherri Cassuto was a formidable rower back in the mid-80s. Two decades later, she's a dominant sea kayak racer

I should be worried about a number of things right now. About Deception Island, the barnacle-covered mound of rocks that seems to have pissed off the sea. I should definitely be worried about the standing waves and sucking eddylines of Deception Pass, the notorious strait that acts more like a massive river when the tide is coming in. The return trip should worry me, and so should the 25 racers in front of me—the ones who I would have to catch in the next four miles if I am going to win all categories of the Deception Pass Dash. The 100 racers behind me should be worrisome as well. They are, after all, paddling as hard as they ever have to catch and pass me.
But I’m...