Trying new things

I'm still in North Carolina visiting my sister's family.  My mother and I plan to head back to Memphis tomorrow.  In the meantime, we're mostly just hanging around doing a whole lotta nothing, and that's kind of nice.

But I'm still observing my minimum-level exercise routine.  This morning I did ten sets of 27 Hindu squats and ten sets of 10 front and lat raises.

My right hamstring feels somewhat better today.  I was a little concerned about it yesterday afternoon when I played baseball with my nephew Ben.  For a while I pitched to him and he kept hitting grounders to left-center, each of which I had to chase at a dead run (it was just the two of us out there--no fielders behind me).  I was just waiting for something to pop in my right leg, but it held up fine.

This post is one of a number on Ron Lugbill's blog that have been influencing my approach to this coming race season.  Basically, I hope to work as much race-pace training into each session as I can, and this post summarizes as well as any the research that supports such an approach.

I've never been convinced that long, slow paddling sessions of three hours or more are a good idea.  For one thing, a paddler who does a great many of these is simply practicing to go slow.  For another, since it's hard to maintain good stroke mechanics for a very long period of time, the ultra-distance paddler is probably ingraining poor technique.  The longest sessions I ever do (not counting multi-day wilderness trips, which are another matter) don't last much more than a couple of hours, and I do only a handful of them each year.

Meanwhile, I'm inspired to try this latest round of new things by something my woodworking instructor Carl Swennson has said many times: you shouldn't expect different results if you keep doing the same thing.  So, thanks to Mr. Lugbill and his blog of research-based training advice, I'm embarking on something slightly different this time around.  If it doesn't make me world-class, well, neither did the training I'd been doing before.