Great story! This resonates powerfully with me. I’ve been a technique freak all my life, and share an eerily similar pursuit of multiple challenges.

For me, it began with playing drums and percussion instruments. Where most drummers just go buy a drumkit and start banging on it, at age eleven I bought a pair of sticks, a rubber-topped practice pad and a rudimental drumming book and spent the first two years doing nothing but learning to control the sticks and my hands. I learned the 26 standard drum rudiments, then practiced them in every combination imaginable, always starting slow and working my way up to 160bpm or faster. This devotion to stick control and technique eventually got me into the Juilliard School.

Not long after I got into canoeing, first flatwater, then whitewater. As with drumming, I was a technique freak and spent countless hours mastering a perfect J-stroke, draw strokes, crossdraws, sweeps, prys, etc. It wasn’t long before I discovered the C-1, which is a decked slalom racing canoe indistinguishable (to non-paddlers) from a kayak. I spent thousands of hours training on the Feeder Canal in Washington, D.C. along the Potomac River with some of the best whitewater slalom racers in the world. The sport was all about whitewater…but we’d spend hours just isolating a single upstream slalom gate in an eddy and practice achieving the perfect boat angle and trajectory and perfect blade placement coming into the gate. Over and over and over. The payoff? On relatively easy class 3 whitewater, I would execute moves that guys who regularly paddled class 5 rivers couldn’t do…and it embarrassed the hell out of them! I wasn’t doing anything special…I just knew how to precisely control my boat, and they didn’t (they tended to float through rapids, hoping to emerge right-side-up at the bottom).

Over the next decade, I applied the same fanaticism for technique to flyfishing (for trout, bass, and seafish), even building my own rods and tying all my own flies…and spending hours in the backyard with a tuft of thick yarn tied on my leader, casting to various targets…reading and re-reading books by Lefty Kreh and Ed Jaworowski about casting technique…even interviewing Lefty Kreh at his home in Cockeysville, MD for a documentary and getting a private lesson with him…then taking every opportunity to practice casting on ponds, lakes, rivers, beaches, and more grass fields and backyards.

All of the above applied to hang gliding…then snowboarding in hardboots on an alpine carving board…and finally motorcycling. I’m far from an expert at motorcycling…but for a “n00b” I’ve done pretty well, with 50,000+ accident-free miles in 2-3 years of riding.

One thing I’ve learned from all these things is that learning technically-challenging sports is a lot like learning languages: the more of them you master, the easier subsequent sports are to learn (which is not to say they’re easy, just easier). A willingness to “Zen-out” on the basics is key, along with the mindset and/or personality to not get bored repeating the same rudimentary moves or gestures over and over until they become second-nature.

I also think that when you approach a new sport from the bottom-up and take all that time to master the basics…the idea of not doing that when you learn something new seems ludicrous and dangerous (it does to me, anyway).

I’ve known people over the years who got pretty expert at things just by “hurling themselves into the deep end” repeatedly, crashing and burning repeatedly…and eventually figuring it out that way. I guess that approach mirrors a different personality type, ’cause it always struck me as the hard way to go!

Carl