How I Got Lost While Having My Best Race of the Season

The lead pack, a missed turn, and one of my fastest paddles of the year

Athletes love telling stories about their victories. We post podium photos, celebrate personal records, and relive the races where everything came together exactly as planned.

This isn’t one of those stories.

Last weekend I drove to Alabama for a race I had spent weeks preparing for. I arrived early, studied the course, tested my nutrition and hydration strategy, and put together one of my strongest training weekends of the season. Everything felt right. My energy was good. My equipment was dialed in. My confidence was high.

By every measure that mattered, I was ready. Then race day arrived, and I got lost-ON THE COURSE! LOL.

I simply took a wrong turn.

What followed was a frustrating reminder that preparation and performance don’t always guarantee the outcome you want. Sometimes the race teaches a lesson you weren’t expecting to learn.

Looking back, that’s what this story is really about: not the result or the finish, but what happened when things didn’t go according to plan.

The Preparation Was Perfect

The day before the Coosa River Ramble, I drove to Logan Martin Lake to scout the course. We had a animated video layout of the course. I wanted to see it in real life understand the flow, see the turns, and get a feel for the conditions. Most importantly, I wanted to test my race-day nutrition and hydration strategy.

I ended up paddling 5.7 miles of the course that afternoon and finished in one hour and seven minutes—one of my best performances at that distance to date.

Everything felt perfect including my post-training recovery. I had added an extra 2,000 mg of vitamin C to my hydration mix- that was a new intervention I was testing out. As athletes, we spend countless hours trying to optimize performance. Sometimes we forget that no amount of preparation eliminates the possibility of human error.

Race Day

Saturday morning arrived with great energy. Paddlers from Florida and across the Southeast showed up ready to race. The volunteers and race organizers did an incredible job putting everything together. There were three race distances: a 15K, a 10K, and a 5K. The longest course followed a slightly different route than the other two races.

That detail becomes important later. Very important. The 15K racers launched first. Shortly afterward, our race started. I exploded off the line and for those first few minutes, everything felt fantastic as I settled into the lead pack with several of the faster men. My friend Matt was right beside me and we were drafting efficiently and moving fast. We were averaging over six miles per hour and feeling strong. At that moment, everything was going exactly according to plan.

Until it wasn’t.

The Wrong Turn

As we approached one of the early turns, things became confusing. The course markings weren’t entirely clear, and while part of our lead pack turned right, Matt and I continued straight.

At the time, it seemed like the obvious choice. We assumed we had read the course correctly and that everyone else had made a mistake. Confidence is a wonderful thing, but confidence and correctness are not always the same thing.

About half a mile later, something started to feel off. There was nobody ahead of us and nobody behind us. The two of us were completely alone, quietly convincing ourselves that we must be crushing the competition.

We weren’t.

As it turned out, we weren’t leading the race at all. We weren’t even on the race course anymore.

The moment we realized what had happened, we turned around and paddled back toward the missed turn. By the time we rejoined the course, the leaders were already disappearing into the distance. Any realistic shot at the podium was gone.

What made it even more frustrating was that both Matt and I had been in excellent position before the mistake. Off the start, I was leading the women’s division by three or four board lengths and feeling strong. Everything had gone according to plan until the moment it didn’t.

A Choice

Once we rejoined the course, there wasn’t much we could do about the outcome. The leaders were long gone, and no amount of frustration was going to erase the extra mile we had just paddled. At that point, Matt and I had a choice. We could spend the rest of the race complaining about the missed turn, or we could accept what happened and enjoy the day.

We chose the latter.

As the miles passed, the disappointment faded and the humor of the situation started to take over. We joked about our navigation skills, cheered on other racers, caught up with friends on the water, and settled into a pace that felt more like an adventure than a competition. By the end of the day, we had completed the entire race course plus roughly an extra mile. Instead of paddling 5.8 miles, we covered closer to 6.8.

Our finishing time was 1 hour and 38 minutes (our watches had 1 hour 20 min), which wasn’t the result I had trained for or expected. Still, it was hard to be too upset. The weather was beautiful, the company was good, and I ended up with a solid training session that I hadn’t planned on getting. That time was an excellent time, too.

Sometimes the race you end up having is different from the race you came to win.

What Racing Is Really About

When the results are posted, most people see finishing times, rankings, and podium placements. Those things matter, and every athlete enjoys performing well after putting in the work. What the results don’t capture are the experiences that happen along the way. They don’t show the conversations before the start, the friendships built through training, the shared miles on the water, or the stories that get told long after the race is over.

By the end of the day, several of our friends were standing on the podium, and despite our own navigational mishap, we were genuinely excited for them. We cheered, clapped, took photos, and celebrated their accomplishments because they had earned those results.

That’s one of the things I love most about paddling. While we’re competitors on the water, we’re also a community. We push each other to improve, support each other when things don’t go according to plan, and celebrate each other’s successes.

Of course, I would have preferred to stay on the race course and see what I could have done that day. I felt strong, prepared, and capable of a great finish. But one wrong turn didn’t take away the friendships, the experience, or the fun. If anything, it added another story to tell. Years from now, I suspect I’ll remember getting lost with Matt a lot more vividly than I would have remembered another race result.

The Unexpected Victory

The race result wasn’t what I wanted, but the things I had actually come to test performed exactly as hoped. The fact that Matt and I covered roughly 6.8 miles in 1 hour and 20 minutes, maintaining a pace that would have been competitive under normal circumstances, was rewarding in its own right and helped put the day into perspective.

Sometimes success doesn’t look like a podium finish, but it’s the small victories along the way—the confirmation that your training is working, your preparation is paying off, and you’re moving in the right direction, even when the outcome isn’t what you expected.

The Real Recovery Story

The only real consequence of paddling nearly 20 kilometers over the course of the weekend was a sore right hip the following day.

Fortunately, I had already been experimenting with a recovery and anti-inflammatory protocol, so I put it to work immediately. Within 72 hours, the hip had improved dramatically, and the progress was significant enough that it deserves its own article.

Over the years, I’ve learned that pain is rarely an isolated event. Training load certainly matters, but so do nutrition, sleep, recovery practices, stress, movement patterns, inflammation, hormones, and overall health. Recovery is never about one thing. It’s the sum of many small inputs working together.

That’s one of the reasons I approach health and performance coaching differently.

When someone comes to me struggling with pain, fatigue, recurring injuries, declining performance, or poor recovery, I’m usually less interested in masking the symptom than understanding what may be contributing to it. The goal is to understand why the issues showed up in the first place and create the conditions for the body to recover more effectively.

Whether you’re an athlete trying to improve performance or someone who simply wants to feel better, lasting results usually come from addressing the underlying factors rather than chasing symptoms from one place to the next.

In my next article, I’ll share the exact recovery protocol I used, why I chose each intervention, and how I’ve approached this injury as both an athlete and health coach. I’ll also walk through the progress I’ve made in just 72 hours and the lessons it reinforced about inflammation, recovery, and performance.

Through Paddle Performance Health, I work with athletes and health-conscious individuals to identify the factors that may be holding them back and create practical, personalized strategies for long-term health and performance.

Stay tuned. The race may be over, but the recovery story is just beginning.