A pain in the neck

I woke up this morning with a crick in my neck on the right side.  Ugh.

That made the idea of training today considerably less enticing.  But glumly I commenced my sprawling strength routine for this month, with pullups and leg raises here at home followed by medicine ball exercises in the Greenbelt Park followed by resistance paddling in the boat.  Today I tried a new method of resistance paddling.  I had been butting my bow against the marina and trying to "push" it, but I found it very difficult to maintain good stroke form that way.  Today I tied one end of a long polypropylene rope to a five gallon bucket, looped the other end over my torso, and towed the bucket for twenty strokes at a time.  I felt that I was taking much better strokes this way.  Polypro rope floats, so at the end of a set I could just take the loop off my torso and leave the rope wherever it happened to be in the harbor while I paddled a recovery interval of a couple of minutes.

After all that I continued paddling for a 90-minute session.  My neck had bothered me during all the strength exercises, but it didn't really bother me as I paddled.