Canoe for Your Life?
In the past several years there has been widespread publicity and public acceptance of the beneficial effects of conditioning exercise as a deterrent to the development or progression of coronary artery disease. Thousands have started jogging, cycling, and swimming. Perhaps some canoeists have tried to justify their paddling activities as being healthful exercise. Nothing could be less true. Paddling is the antithesis of beneficial exercise.
To begin with, the prerequisite for all wildwater paddlers is that they be in borderline states of psychiatric compensation. Paddling only partially maintains the patient’s tenuous hold on reality as a very weak brace. Abandoning the hopeless psyche of the canoeist, the physical problems associated with paddling are enough to bankrupt a prepaid medical plan.
Many paddlers build and repair their own equipment with resultant epoxy contact dermatitis, fiberglass itch, and glass sander’s silicosis.
The paddler loses sleep arising at ungodly time to travel for hours over ice-encrusted surfaces over the worst highways. If he is not maimed on the way to the river, his chances for an accident are increased by several orders of magnitude on the return trip when he is fatigued and brandied.
During the entire trip to the put-in and during most of the paddling, he is suffering the detrimental effects of anxiety. Adrenaline is pumping through his veins increasing his heart beat and blood pressure as well as increasing his blood sugar and lipids, both of which lead to arteriosclerosis.
When he arrives at the river, the cramps himself into his cockpit in a most unphysiologic position predisposing himself to neuritis and phlebitis. Often his skin is subject to fungal infections and folliculitis by being encased in sweaty, black rubber long johns.
The activity of paddling per se is of little physical benefit. It is mostly upper extremity exercise which does not involve large enough masses of muscle to encourage cardiovascular conditioning. It only results in strained ligaments, stiff muscles, and occasionally dislocated shoulders as infrequent and unpredictable stresses occur during flip-avoiding braces.
When the brace does fail, the paddler is punished by having his elbows, head or face whacked by the boulders. If he is able to scramble out of his boat before it folds around him over a rock, he bounces his gluteus to a pulp or raises grapefruit-sized hematomas on his shins.
The paddler traumatizes his palms into big weeping blisters. His fingers are lacerated into minute steaks by those spicules of fiberglass and resin that hide somewhere in the recesses of his boat to spring forth a la James Bond only at the times of those emergency grabs. He is exposed to direct and reflected sun, the skin-drying effect of water, chapping cold, wind-burn, and chilling alternating with overheating.
In the water he is steeped in microbes waiting to invade his integrity with such goodies as leptospirosis, hepatitis, amoebic encephalitis, pansinusitis, and salmonellosis.
When and if the paddler reaches the take-out point, he then begins his few minutes of exercise for the day. He jerks, cleans, and presses his 100 pounds of equipment and lurches 300 feet straight up an overgrown landslide covered mountain to his car — a sure prescription to unmask any latent problem whether it be a slipped disc, a budding inguinal hernia, or a narrowed coronary artery.
Thus is laid to rest the myth regarding the beneficial effects of wildwater canoeing.
By Paul Davidson, M.D.
This article was published in the May, 1971 CCA Cruiser newsletter, and is reprinted from Wildwater Splashes, newsletter of the West Virginia Wildwater Association.