You cannot expect to do any differently in a race than you do in practice. If you want to improve your race performance, just improve your training performance.
How do you improve your training performance? By making every run in practice a big deal. Pretend that your training run is a race. Study it carefully before you go. Plan every move ahead of time. Then, take off at race speed and with the same sort of attention to detail and care that you would in a race.
Raise the level of your practice runs. Get sufficient rest between runs so you are fresh for each run. And stop practice before your performance goes down. Maintain good technique throughout the training session. And pretend that there is electricity is running through the poles so you make the extra effort to stay clean.
Do not do low-quality workouts. It's better to avoid paddling at all than to go out and practice bad habits. Slogging through the gates just to do it for a certain period of time often leads to lower quality workouts. Design your workouts so you pursue excellence, not just try to get through to the end.
Get feedback to see if what you are doing is correct. Get regular, varied feedback from coaching, from having someone count your time and penalties, from watching and comparing with other boaters, and from watching video of yourself and other boaters. The feedback will help spur you on to excellence. Just paddling alone all the time without varied feedback is usually lower quality training. If you don't have a coach, get a friend or relative to video and time you sometimes.
Make excellence a habit in your training. Then, you won't know how to do it any other way. Every run should be a quality run that you care about. It is your masterpiece, your work of art. Something you care about deeply and are proud of. If you take this attitude and care about each run, you will develop the habit of excellence.
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