Powah!

I haven't worked out a complete strength routine for February, but I tried out several new exercises today.  I started with a couple of medicine ball drills, and since it's a beautiful sunny day today, I took the medicine ball downtown and did the drills in the Greenbelt Park just across Mud Island from my marina.

Then I went down to the dock and once I was in the boat, I jammed the bow into the side of the marina and paddled as hard as I could.  I did five sets of ten strokes (where I define a "stroke" as one complete cycle of a stroke on the left and a stroke on the right) with a minute or so of easy paddling in between.  This drill will take some getting used to; at first I was afraid one of my strokes would pull my boat over.  But by the last set I was getting the hang of it.

The purpose of all these drills is to incorporate some power into my training, an idea I've gotten from reading Ron Lugbill's blog.  I don't want to overdo it--Lugbill is writing for a slalom-racing audience, and slalom requires a lot more re-acceleration of the boat than straight-ahead racing does--but I hope some power training will improve my starts and also help with the occasional burst in the middle of a race.

Anyway, once I get a full routine worked out for this month I will describe it in detail.

After the power drills I continued paddling for a 90-minute session.  I spent the last ten of those minutes in the K1, since it was a nice day and the water around the marina was calm.  I'm still tentative in that boat, and for once I'm actually looking forward to one of our legendary Memphis summers, when a flip is sort of fun rather than a prospect of freezing to death.  For now, I remain a "project" as a K1 paddler, just like that player on the college basketball team who has college-level size but not college-level skills, and therefore won't really help the team until at least a couple of seasons from now.