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May 8, 2001 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Gene Teany is beat up.<\/p>\n
A lifetime in the Army and three tours of duty in Vietnam will do that to you.<\/p>\n
Teany is 65 years old. He has arthritis, a bad back, trick knees and weak ankles. He walks with the guarded gait of a retired NFL lineman.<\/p>\n
But seated in a sea kayak on Lake Lanier, Teany glides along gracefully. His boat moves, and time stands still. Teany has found something he can do for the rest of his life \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and he thinks more seniors should pick up a paddle and view the world from sea level.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t think I could get into one of these boats, but I found out that it’s really doable,” said Teany, a Lanier Canoe & Kayak Club member from Stone Mountain. “I think there’s a lot of people that could definitely benefit from something like this. It’s outside. It gives you something to look forward to.”<\/p>\n
Paddling is peaceful for Teany. He prefers to head north from the club’s boathouse at Clarks Bridge Park, north to where the boundary between Lake Lanier and the Chattahoochee River begins to blur.<\/p>\n
He often leaves the boathouse before sunrise and cuts his kayak through the morning mist. When the sun surfaces from behind the treeline, Teany stops, sits back and watches from the water.<\/p>\n
“That’s neat,” Teany said succinctly.<\/p>\n
“I’ve reached the point in my life where, quite frankly, if I don’t like it, I don’t do it. Obviously I must like this, because I continue to do it.”<\/p>\n
I accompanied Teany on one of his kayaking trips a couple of weeks ago. It was early afternoon, not morning, and we paddled until early evening. Our kayaks covered about 12 kilometers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 12 “clicks” according to Teany, who still peppers his speech with pieces of military slang.<\/p>\n
As we left the boathouse docks, Teany \u00e2\u20ac\u201d wearing dark sunglasses and a floppy camouflage fishing cap \u00e2\u20ac\u201d smiled and said, “I’m going to show you what I like.”<\/p>\n
He made a quick adjustment that released his boat’s rudder into the water.<\/p>\n
“With that, I don’t have to pay attention to my paddling,” he said. “I just do an automatic stroke, and look out and see what I want to see.”<\/p>\n
My boat, a loaner from the club, didn’t come with a rudder. Early on, that was obvious.<\/p>\n
“I’m not trying to drift away from you,” I yelled to Teany, as I traveled farther and farther off course.<\/p>\n
“Is the wind getting you?” Teany asked.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t noticed any wind. “I suppose we could blame it on that.”<\/p>\n
“It’s as good as anything.”<\/p>\n
Teany’s kayak is relatively new. Teany is relatively new to kayaking.<\/p>\n
Teany’s banged-up “underpinnings” no longer handle a hard day of hiking or skiing the way they used to, so he had been searching for a new recreational activity for some time.<\/p>\n
The search came to a sudden stop last July. That’s when Teany first sat in a sea kayak. His wife and daughter had dragged him along to a boat expo at Clarks Bridge Park.<\/p>\n
“I just fell in love with it,” Teany said. “I thought, ‘This I can do.'”<\/p>\n
Teany joined the Lanier club and began making the hour drive to the boathouse on a regular basis. For Christmas, his wife purchased him a top-of-the-line fiberglass kayak \u00e2\u20ac\u201d with rudder, and everything.<\/p>\n
“You know what’s fun?” Teany turned to me and asked. (By this time, I had figured out the “wind,” and was moving along beside his boat.)<\/p>\n
“Waves. I’ve been known to chase down a powerboat just to get in the wake.”<\/p>\n
There were very few powerboats \u00e2\u20ac\u201d very few people, actually \u00e2\u20ac\u201d along our path this weekday afternoon. The solitude was soothing.<\/p>\n
We weren’t alone, though. Fish were everywhere, splashing at the surface just a few feet away from our boats. Teany often spots deer on the banks. Wild turkeys, too.<\/p>\n
“That surprised me,” Teany said. “I thought we were too built up for turkeys.”<\/p>\n
Not on certain northern parts of Lake Lanier, where at least a veneer of undeveloped land prevails.<\/p>\n
“Sometime this summer I’m going to give myself a little shakedown cruise and camp out,” Teany said, gesturing to a barren beach with his paddle.<\/p>\n
Our 12 clicks came at a slow and steady pace. Plenty of time to talk. Or plenty of time to simply listen to the rhythmic splashes of paddles piercing silence.<\/p>\n
“You’re not ripping the lake apart,” Teany said. “You’re just gliding along. This is what I like. I leave the racing to somebody else.”<\/p>\n
It was fun. But it was also fitness. I could feel it in my back and shoulders.<\/p>\n
“Have you noticed a little more definition since you started paddling?” I asked.<\/p>\n
“Definition?” Teany repeated in disbelief. “You mean like sculpted? Son, when you get my age all you hope for is less fat.”<\/p>\n
The old man laughed. And so did I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
May 8, 2001 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Gene Teany is beat up. A lifetime in the Army and three tours of duty in Vietnam will do that to you. Teany is 65 years old. He has arthritis, a bad back, trick knees and weak ankles. He walks with the guarded gait of a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,3,24,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":583,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}