We build canoes.

Oeup

December 16, 2011

The Pueo has exceeded our wildest expectations. It has traveled to locations we can only dream of. It has won more races than we knew existed. But, most importantly, it has enhanced the lives of people around the world. While we believe it to be the best canoe on the market, we have taken on the challenge of creating its greatest rival. To do so, we are re-organzing, re-tooling, and gearing up to bring you the next revolution in outrigger canoeing. As of January 1st, we will no longer be taking new orders for the first generation Pueo. Feel free to inquire anytime about our progress on this new endeavor or about the availability of off-the-shelf canoes. And keep posted on our website for more information during this exciting time. We at Kamanu Composites thank you for your continued support over the years. Without it, none of this could have been possible.

*Edit: Due to some confusion, here is a bit of clarification:

1) The new canoe will still be the Pueo. As it will retain much of the design and performance aspects of it. Oeup, as the title of the blog post, was a reference to our first print advertisement for the Pueo. Not the name of the canoe.

2) It likely won't be available until mid-summer 2012. And we won't take orders on it until it has proven to be better than its predecessor.

3) The closing of the list has more to do with the excessive wait time and less to do with the new design

We Build

December 02, 2011

We Build Canoes. That three-word statement proudly proclaimed above was the simplest way to express what we do at Kamanu Composites. But the meat of that phrase is We Build. We don’t outsource, re-sell, or source canoes. We build them. Carbon fiber and epoxy come in and canoes go out.

The world is changing so quickly that it can be hard to catch a glimpse as it slips by. Five years ago most of us had never heard of Facebook or Barak Obama. Our phones hadn’t taken over our lives. Money was cheap and jobs were plentiful. Climate change was a distant threat. Tahitian dominance in the Moloka’i Hoe was still being blamed on flat water. And almost nobody was building canoes in Hawai’i. We, as Americans, were on top of a cloud. Debt financing was the way of the future. We didn’t have to produce anything. The cloud was supposed to take us as long as we kept consuming.

But it didn’t. Our extreme leveraging caught up with us and we collapsed. The market peaked in October 2007. Nearly the exact day that Kamanu Composites produced its first canoe. As fate would have it, we began our future here as millions of Americans saw their futures disappear along with their savings, homes, and jobs in the Great Recession.

That is the world that Kamanu Composites grew up in. And it has had a profound impact on where we’re at today. The canoe brought us together; formed us as individuals, as a company, and as a community. But, in the end it’s not really about the canoe. It’s about building. It’s about local production. It’s about being one small gear in this great machine of a world. It’s about the fact that we can’t continually rely on someone else. As a company, Kamanu Composites has framed every decision around one simple premise. We believe wholeheartedly in local manufacturing. Because part of America’s problem was that we forgot how to manufacture after giving it all away. Once we understood why we were doing what we do, it became easy to do what we do. As a community we can have a much greater impact than a small canoe building shop. Every decision we make puts us either one step forward or one step back. The answers are easy, but it starts with understanding why.

Periodawhat

November 18, 2011

BEEP BEEP BEEP As I separate dreams from reality. It’s still dark, why did my alarm go off? Shoot, it’s winter. Do I really need to paddle this morning? Maybe I’m coming down with a sore throat. Is that rain I hear? Must be a thunderstorm. I’ll sleep for just 15 more minutes and then feel better. Uuuggghhhh…. My bed is so warm. I hate paddling.

For most people in the Northern Hemisphere, winter means holiday music, fireplaces, and hot chocolate. For us it means paddling OC-1 in the dark. In the cold. In the rain. It means coming home late at night or leaving early in the morning. It means not seeing our family. Taking time off of work. Spending lots of money.

Paddling is a huge commitment. We all do it for different reasons. Whether it’s for racing, to stay in shape, to be on the ocean, to feel connected to our ancestors, to meditate, or all of them combined. We’ll never be able to agree on why we paddle. But we can all agree on the importance of making sure that every workout counts. That all of the sacrifice is worth it.

There are a few ways to train. Most common for recreational athletes would be a flat and linear method. Meaning that training density (volume/intensity) is relatively consistent throughout the year. Maybe for a couple of weeks before a big race it’ll come up, but for the most part we’re doing the same thing year round. What happens with this method is that the body will quickly adapt to the training and then plateau. So the only improvements we see are mechanical or knowledge (race experience, surfing ability) related.

Another method that a lot of elite athletes do is also linear, but the training density slowly increases to keep the body from adapting and plateauing. However, what invariably happens is that the athlete will increase the training load until they literally fall off the cliff. They will go from overreaching to overtraining. The body will reach its physical limit and without being able to recover and adapt, it will break down.

The most effective way to train is to combine these two systems. It’s called Progressive Overload. Training will increase in a linear fashion until the athlete goes to the edge of their physical abilities, and then they will stop and recover. Everytime you stop, the edge of the cliff gets extended. Your body supercompensates. The most common way of instilling this in to your training program is to separate each month into a four week cycle. Each four week cycle consists of three weeks of building and then one week of rest. Then the next cycle starts with a slightly higher training load than the previous. In this fashion you keep increasing the load, you avoid plateauing, but you also avoid overtraining. The hard part is finding the sweet spot. Finding the edge of the cliff. Go too far and you overtrain, go to little and you plateau.

The other key training tool is Periodization. It’s an intimidating word for an extremely simple concept. It’s a term for splitting your year into periods, or phases. The reasoning being that the body adapts to different intensities in different ways. Our body has three main energy generators. If you make a movement right now (throwing your computer out the window for example), the energy used for that motion is stored in your muscles in the form of Adenosine Triphosphate. You only have a couple of seconds worth of stored energy before you need to start converting glycogen into the energy required for motion. If you were to throw your computer out the window and then sprint after it, you would be metabolizing carbohydrate without the use of oxygen. Which is a quick and powerful way to produce energy, but the by-product is lactic acid. There is recent evidence that suggests that lactic acid produces Human Growth Hormone, but, we're concerned more with the fact that lactic acid causes rapid fatigue in the muscles. It’s that burning sensation you get at the end of a regatta. As paddlers, our primary source of energy is going to be aerobic. It means that we’re metabolizing glycogen for energy but able to take in enough oxygen to neutralize the lactic acid. It is where the energy would come from after you chased down the computer, realized it was broken, and then had to run to the Apple Store to buy a new one. Anything over a couple minutes will be aerobic.

Each energy system reacts differently to training. Anaerobic fitness comes quickly, but goes just as quickly. Aerobic fitness is slow to come, but slow to go. Which is where the term base training comes from. Base training means that we are working on expanding our aerobic potential. It’s the low intensity training that expands our lung and heart capacity, our metabolic pathways, our circulatory system, and even the mitochondria in each cell. All of these physical changes occur very slowly. Whereas high intensity anaerobic training adaptations happen much quicker, especially if someone has a well developed base. What this means, and what Periodization does, is that high intensity training will be focused at the end of the year. Right before the race that you want to achieve peak performance in. The hard part, for paddlers, is to put in the time at low intensities.

A lot of the physical adaptations from training will happen at both high and low intensities. But, the main reason to focus on keeping the intensity low for most of the year is that your body can’t handle high intensity and high volume. So, you get more benefit with a higher training volume and a low intensity.

With all of that in mind, setting up a training schedule according to the precepts of Periodization and Progressive Overload is easy. The next blog post will be on the specifics of Periodization and on how to set up the schedule.

So that next time your sitting in the dark in your car, with your windshield wipers on, your heater blasting, your coffee cradled in your hands, debating on whether you should rig your canoe. You’ll have an answer. And hopefully you’ll have a little more inspiration to get on the water.

Ka'apahu Video

November 07, 2011

I know this isn't Friday and we promised to update the blog every other week, but... this is a special occasion. Makana Denton (Team Kamanu rider extraordinaire and Kamanu Composites canoe Finisher/Repairman/Sprayer extraextraordinaire) has put together a short clip of the Ka'apahu. The footage is from a practice run they did with some GoPros and the end footage is from an Iphone at the Pa'a 'Eono Hoe (that the Ka'apahu won). And, the canoe also happens to still be for sale. The price has been reduced to $18,000 (comes with 'iako, hull, and ama), and can still be custom painted. You can read more about it here: kamanucomposites.com/2011/kaapahu.

New Commercial

November 04, 2011

Here's our newest commercial. Thanks to Devin Graham for filming the solo and putting this together for us. Hopefully next time there's a bit more surf.

It will appear on the three episode outrigger canoeing series that will be on Shaka Shakedown on K5 and hopefully one day on Ocean Paddler Tv.