Once again I'm sorry for the dropoff in posting lately. A whole lot of stuff has been going on outside my boat. These days I'm trying to get on the water about three times a week, during which I work on my form and technique but mostly just enjoy myself.
On Thursday I arrived at the marina at the same time as my friend Joe Royer, and we paddled together up to the mouth of the Wolf and back. Joe and I get together for workouts quite a bit during the spring race season, but our schedules tend to diverge during other parts of the year. It was fun to catch up on things with him. I strongly believe that sessions like this, where you're paddling a nice steady pace that isn't too intense to allow conversation with a companion, are the most valuable. In other words, if you don't have much time to train, give this sort of session priority over intense intervals and stuff like that. In addition to smoothing out your stroke, you're building your aerobic system with new capillary beds in your paddling muscles to facilitate blood flow there. Distance runners call this an "LSD" (long steady distance) session, and it's the bread and butter of their training.
Regular readers of this blog have seen me mention the litter problem on the Memphis riverfront. In the last couple of years a group of honor students at the University of Memphis has teamed up with the national group Living Lands and Waters to tackle the considerable litter problem in McKellar Lake, a slackwater harbor downriver from downtown Memphis. This summer Joe approached this group about doing a similar event in Wolf River Harbor, the slackwater harbor right at downtown Memphis where he and I and other people keep our boats. The resulting event took place this past Saturday, sponsored by Joe's company, Outdoors, Inc.
Groups from all over town, including groups of honor students from the U of M and Christian Brothers University, showed up to help out. While volunteers spread out along the banks between Harbortown Marina and the harbor's mouth to address the huge quantities of trash there, I paddled my boat up and down the harbor in search of floating litter, which I picked up and ferried to the bank where a volunteer could put it in his bag.
Yesterday morning I went back downtown to paddle with Joe and his wife, Carol Lee. We admired the results of the cleanup effort: the banks looked significantly better and should remain so for the duration of this low-water period. Of course, eventually the water will rise again, and when it drops after that a whole batch of new litter will be deposited. And as we paddled along yesterday, we noticed quite a bit of floating trash that had moved in to replace what I had plucked from the water. So these cleanup events are not a permanent solution to the problem. I think they are important because they demonstrate that many people value clean water in this community, but the only thing that will rid us of the problem for good is an attitudinal change throughout our society.
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