Welcome to Wavelength

From Liam Malakoff, Owner and Chief Instructor

I remember many afternoons spent learning to paddle and fish in open canoes as a child in Maine and on the Potomac River upstream of D.C. Then one Christmas as a young tween I received my first whitewater kayak — a long, purple, 30-year-old Perception Dancer.  

Shortly afterwards I saw a whitewater rodeo competition on the Potomac River and something in me took flight. I was quickly obsessed, spending hours searching Google Video (later Youtube) for paddling footage, messing about in the play-spots of the Potomac, and tagging along with more experienced paddlers to the Upper Youghigheny and Gauley Rivers in Maryland and West Virginia.

In high school I ventured into canoe slalom, training under Olympic medalist Dana Chladek and U.S. National Team coaches Silvan Poberaj and Cathy Hearn. Whitewater racing exposed me to an attention to detail and discipline that heightened my experience of the river, quietly planting seeds that gradually grew and are still bearing fruit. By the time I graduated from T.C. Williams High School (Remember the Titans!) I had competed in races across the United States, Canada and in Europe as a member of the U.S. Junior National Whitewater Slalom Team. And I was paddling the big drops on the Great Falls of the Potomac every chance I got.

In college, lacking a car and busy with the business of making youthful mistakes, I took a few seasons off -- but life without paddling was just plain worse than life with it. So after I moved to Boulder County in early 2018, I re-dedicated myself to the river. Since then, I’ve become a certified Level 4 ACA Kayak Instructor and worked as a slalom racing coach at the Alexander Dawson School (in Lafayette, CO) and for the non-profit Team Colorado Whitewater Racing Club. These experiences reminded  me of how much I love teaching a sport in which, previously, I’d only seen myself as a student.

The challenge, wonder, and community that whitewater paddling provides are why I’ve been paddling for fifteen years with no plan to stop. Along the way, I’ve come to believe that dogma gets in the way of advancement. There are certainly fundamental practices and pieces of wisdom passed down from one generation to the next that can be learned and refined over a lifetime -- but how each paddler comes to embody them depends on the particularities of that person’s mind and body. 

You might learn best from watching someone else perform a technique, then mimicking it. Perhaps you’d rather see video of yourself. Maybe you’re highly analytical, wanting stroke angles described in numbers and the biomechanics of each movement deconstructed. Perhaps metaphors and similes are your primary language. Chances are you’re some mixture of the above types. So, it’s my job as an instructor to seek to understand what recipe works best for you, what you want to achieve, then provide the structure and feedback that gets you where you want to go.

Sharing the water with veteran paddlers, novices, and everyone in-between under the banner of Wavelength Paddlesports is a pleasure — and I consider it an honor as well. There’s plenty to learn about paddling whitewater, but there’s just as much to learn from it. So, let’s learn together.

See you on the river,

Liam M.