It's warmed up over the past week, reaching the low 70s Fahrenheit yesterday. That's the good news. The bad news, certainly nothing new in the wintertime, is that the balmy temperatures have been accompanied by violent weather. Here in Memphis we got by with just some wind and rain, but it was quite heavy rain.
Yesterday morning I checked the Internet radar and the storms had advanced this side of Little Rock, so I got up and out and was on the water by nine o'clock. There was a pretty strong wind blowing from the south, so I warmed up toward the south end of the harbor, trying to stay relaxed and not fight the wind, and then did four 12-stroke sprints with the wind at my back. I then spent the rest of my 60-minute session doing pieces across the harbor, with beam wind and waves, at 3-minute intervals. I tried to take crisp, precise strokes while balancing on the waves that passed beneath me. The temptation here is to tense one's body and brace, and I strove to stay relaxed and rotate fully instead.
I thought for sure I would get rained on at some point, but the whole hour went by without a drop of rain. (The storm front was moving more slowly than I thought, it turned out; the heaviest rain didn't arrive until evening.)
By this morning the rain had moved out, and some cooler air was moving in behind it. Tonight's low is supposed to be around 30, but this morning it was in the fifties, warm enough to paddle without pogies. I did another 60 minutes, this time pushing the pace in that half hour from 0:15 to 0:45. By "pushing the pace," I generally mean race pace for a race of an hour or so.
On Friday I did ten sets of 24 Hindu squats and ten sets of 10 front and lat raises. This morning before I paddled I did ten sets of 25 Hindu squats and ten sets of 10 front and lat raises.
I'll be out of the boat for the next few days, as my mother and I are traveling to North Carolina to visit my sister's family.
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