Contemplating the month of May

I spent all yesterday driving, and now I sit in the charming North Carolina Piedmont town of Lincolnton.  My mission: to see my nephew become and Eagle Scout tomorrow.  My mother and I plan to visit for several days and then come home Tuesday.

I'm out of the boat for this period, so I guess it's a good time to consider my training plan from  now until my two big races next month.  On June 1 there's a race at Little Rock of some 9 kilometers in distance, and two weeks after that we have the big Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race here at Memphis, a 5-kilometer dash down the Mississippi.  Both events will feature very good competition.

So I've got some work to do to get ready, but that's not all.  Just this past Monday I completed my purchase of a two-story building in which I plan to relocate my workshop downstairs and my domicile upstairs.  It sounds great, and it is great, but like everything else in my life, it's not that simple.  In January a fire ravaged a large percentage of the upstairs, and so the place is not exactly move-in ready.  I'll be paying contractors to do as much of the work as I can afford, and since that sum is all too finite, I'll be doing a lot of the work myself.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to function in my vocation as if all were normal.  Right now I'm midway through a bookcase/cabinet project for a valued client, and I want to keep that moving along as steadily as possible.

So I'm one busy guy these days, and I need to get the most I can from what training time I have.  In past years at this point in the season, I've often done my higher-intensity workouts in the middle of paddling sessions that were rather long overall: for instance, I might paddle steady for 45 minutes, then do a set of intervals that takes a half-hour or so, and then paddle steady for another 45 minutes for two hours or so in the boat.  This season I think I'm going to do all the workouts I usually do, but not paddle for so long before and after.

And this might not be a bad plan.  As Ron Lugbill has pointed out in several recent posts on his blog, modern-day research is challenging the conventional wisdom that high-volume low-intensity training is necessary, even for long-distance endurance sports.  So to some extent I'll be testing that out for myself this coming month... although I should point out that I have put in a fair amount of volume earlier this season.