I knew the center. It had the world’s largest man-made whitewater river and was where Team USA Canoe & Kayak trained for the Olympics. Rob reasoned that because I could practice on a course that never changed, I could learn to relax enough to focus on building my skills. But ever since my scare on the Usumacinta, I’d felt shattered. I’d desperately wanted to rebuild my confidence, but when I thought about getting back into a kayak, it felt like a physical wall lowering down on me.

Still, about two months after getting home from the Usumacinta, I was there, at the Whitewater Center, on the first of several training trips. And I was silently wondering if I could get back into a kayak without being stricken by paralyzing panic.

I was feeling completely overexposed and nervous, like a power line with a frayed wire, crackling and spitting electricity. The puzzling part was that I’d already survived much harder rapids than anything I would encounter here, with much greater consequences.

So why did I feel paralyzed? With all that training under my belt, I hadn’t gotten better. Instead I had actually regressed. Maybe part of it was the realization of what I was doing. You start out in high spirits, totally clueless to all the dangers and pitfalls, and one day something happens, and those consequences become terrifyingly clear.

I had assumed that I would find a way to keep pushing forward, at first incrementally, perhaps, but then building until I was rising in a sweeping arc upward, all the way to a dramatic crescendo. But that had been dead wrong. That arc, if it ever existed in the first place, had been severed in the Usu. Maybe it wasn’t always linear, I speculated. Maybe progress was more like a giant wave in a big river hole that rises upward and then crashes backward on itself before continuing its run downstream. If the arc was broken and there was no way forward, maybe I had to go backward.

One of the center’s kayak instructors, Casey Eichfeld, had agreed to be our second guide. Since he knew the channel better than anyone, he would be my lead caller, while Rob would paddle ahead, assuming the role of safety, in case I swam. Casey was on the national team, currently training for his second Olympics. I took a breath, feeling fortunate to have an Olympic paddler as a guide.