I'm not ready to let go of summer

Some chilly weather has arrived, and I've struggled to make the adjustment.  We had a pretty hot summer here in the Mid South, and then I experienced some hot days out there in the Grand Canyon.  After that I came home to find some unseasonably warm temperatures in late September and most of October.  So, this weather we're having now, even though it's not really that cold, has felt like a shock.  It was windy and rainy in the middle of this past week, and that didn't make things any easier.

The good news is that winter isn't here yet; for much of this coming week, the forecast is showing Fahrenheit highs in the high 60s and low 70s.  But this weekend it's awfully chilly for this time of year: today's high is expected to be in the low 50s.

So, I've been rather grateful to have some non-athletic obligations keeping me indoors for much of this weekend.  All I've managed for this past week is some paddling on Monday and Thursday and a bike ride Friday afternoon.  With better weather expected in the coming days, I'll see if I can't ramp up a new fitness routine and get myself on a solid path toward the South Africa trip in late January.

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Monday photo feature

The ICF world championships of ocean racing took place weekend before last at the city of Durban on South Africa's Indian Ocean coast.  Here, Dawid Mocke drags his boat out of the surf for the final sprint to the finish line up on the beach.  Dawid finished ninth overall and first in the men's 45-49 age group.

In a mere three months I'll be in Dawid's hometown of Fish Hoek, over on the Atlantic side of South Africa.  There I'll be coached in downwind paddling techniques by Dawid and his younger brother Jasper, who finished 12th overall and second in the 40-44 age group at Durban.  Hopefully I'll also see Dawid's son Sam, who claimed the junior (under 18) title while finishing 30th overall.

If being around guys like that can't motivate me to do some training in the next three months, then nothing can.

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Colder and darker

Much of October has been unseasonably warm here, but there's little question chillier days are upon us.  Today it's raining and the temperature is expected to exceed 60 degrees Fahrenheit just barely.  And the forecast is showing daytime highs in the 60s and 50s for the foreseeable future.

In the boat the last couple of weeks I've been availing myself of wake surfing opportunities as the air and water temperatures have remained agreeable, but those days may be over for the year.  I did a bit of surfing Tuesday, but by yesterday I was taking a pass on a barge rig that was approaching from below the old bridges downriver from downtown.  On the non-surfing days I've been focusing hard on stroke mechanics, even doing some one-sided paddling drills to try to make the connection between leg drive and torso rotation.  Sessions like that are tedious, but I hope they'll pay off somewhere down the road.

Meanwhile, I'm transitioning into a wintertime fitness program that I hope will have me feeling ready for some downwind action in South Africa.  I did two bike rides this past week, and soon I plan to put together a dry-land routine similar to what I did last winter, with some running and some medicine ball drills and some body-weight leg and core exercises.

In the physical health department, my shingles rash is less red and angry-looking than it used to be, but it's still causing me discomfort.  Lately it's been very itchy, and resisting the urge to scratch is not easy.  Meanwhile, I'm still feeling some pain in the inside of my right biceps muscle.  I mentioned a while back that I think I strained it during the Pink Palace Crafts Fair, probably while swinging an axe, but it's possible that I could trace the injury back into the Grand Canyon, where I might have tweaked it doing a hard open-blade draw stroke in my C1, and the crafts fair activity simply aggravated it.

In any case, in the coming weeks I might have to scale back the paddling a little to see if the muscle will heal, while doing more general-fitness stuff on dry land.

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Monday photo feature

In what now seems like an annual phenomenon, a large portion of my dock is on the ground.  I took this photo while I was down there yesterday morning, when the Mississippi River was flowing at -8.7 feet on the Memphis gauge.

The bright side is that the water is still more than three feet higher than the record low of -12.06 feet that we saw two years ago.  The storm system that came through here Saturday evening stretched well to the north, higher up in the watershed, and while the current forecast isn't showing any rise as a result of that, that rain should at least keep the level somewhat constant for a while, hopefully until some wetter weather moves in.

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Just ambling along

The shingles rash is better than it was a couple of weeks ago, but it's in no hurry to go away entirely.  For all this past week there was a spot of vague pain, and now that's been replaced by an annoying itch.  To repeat what I've been saying since this started, I'm grateful that my case is not as bad as I hear other people's are.  But it's having a negative impact on my mood nevertheless.  Each morning I wake up to find the pain and/or itch hasn't gone away, and I think, "Sigh... one more day of living with this."

I've been fully functional in spite of it, working in my shop, attending to household chores, taking care of my pets, and, of course, paddling my boat.  I've been saying that my plan for this month is to keep things easy, but I had a couple of sessions in the boat last week that were not so easy at all.  The weather continued to be sunny and unseasonably warm, so when opportunities to surf presented themselves, I felt I should go for it.  Both Thursday and yesterday I paddled to the mouth of the harbor to find barge rigs coming upriver from the old bridges south of downtown.  Unlike the rigs I'd seen the week before, these were generating huge waves--so big that I was a little skittish as I paddled out to get on them.  I let the biggest ones get away and settled for a few decent rides on smaller ones.  While doing so I tried to work on my leaning and bracing, though no one ride was long enough for me to feel like I was accomplishing something.  But maybe I was.

Last night a system of thunderstorms moved through, with cooler air behind it.  Today's high temperature stayed below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and an overnight low below 50 degrees seems likely tonight.  When I went down to the river this morning it was about 62 degrees with a gusty northwest wind blowing.  I stayed in the harbor and allowed myself an easy paddle at last, though "easy" might not be the best term for it.  I focused hard on taking good strokes and linking my upper-body rotation with my leg drive, and after 40 minutes of that I felt plenty taxed.

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Still playing around with that Grand Canyon footage

I've had numerous things keeping me busy, but I'm still finding time to find creative uses for the footage I shot in the Grand Canyon.  The short film above features clips from Days 14, 15, and 16 of the 16-day trip.  That would have been September 9, 10, and 11.

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Monday photo feature

Here's another of the many, many fine photographs Rob Lieb took in the Grand Canyon between August 27 and September 11.  In this one, Kylie Haberman stakes her tent while J.D. Terry inspects the environs of our camping spot.

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