Monday photo feature

Richard Savoie of Des Allemands, Louisiana, races in the C1 class in the 2011 Battle On The Bayou race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Photo by Robbie Capel.

This past weekend, Richard was back in Ocean Springs with his wife Celeste.  The pair took second in the C2 class.

Thanks for reading

Yesterday I woke up sore from Saturday's race, but not too bad.  I have a massage scheduled for my stiff upper back this Tuesday evening, and I hope that will bring some relief.

I had a tutoring appointment back in Memphis scheduled for yesterday evening, so I tried to get moving.  I took my boat down to the water and paddled for 30 minutes in the Back Bay of Biloxi, just enough to get some blood flowing in my tired muscles.  Then I loaded up and hit the road, arriving home about six hours later.

Sometimes, in pathetic moments of self-pity, I feel like nobody reads this blog.  But every now and then, somebody I've never met before comes up to me and tells me how much he or she enjoys it.  On Saturday, a race entrant from Pensacola named David Waters did just that.  Little moments like that make my day.  Suddenly, I realize that maybe there is a purpose behind all this computer keyboard typing.

In this post right after last year's race at Ocean Springs, I recognized Maggie Pyle and Robert Nykvist for their readership.  Maybe I'll start a tradition here: anytime somebody comes up to me at a race and tells me how much he or she appreciates my blog, I'll give that person a shout-out here.  So, David Waters, this one's for you.

Opening with a win

The 2014 Battle On The Bayou race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is in the books, and I took first place overall.  The complete results are available here.

Entering the race I figured my toughest competition would come from Mr. Christian Maßow (pronounced "massow"), a German native now living in the Houston, Texas, area.  In this race two years ago, Christian took the pace out hard and just about had me beat by the end of the first mile.  Last year, I kept pace with Christian and the tandem of Phil Capel and Brad Rex for much of the race, but got dropped with two or three miles to go.  Today, with a stiff northwest wind creating some mild chaos in the first mile of the race in the Back Bay of Biloxi, Christian handled the conditions in his flatwater K1 without much trouble, and I was afraid the race might be a repeat of two years ago.  But once we were up in the protected waters of Old Fort Bayou, I had managed to stay with Christian and we settled into a steady pace for the next few miles.

I knew that if I let the race come down to a sprint in the final fifty meters, Christian would win that with his superior power and faster boat, so as the race went on I tried to push the pace, leading more often than riding Christian's wake.  Time after time I would throw in a surge, and each time Christian covered the move and stayed on my starboard wake.  Every time I stole a glance in his direction, his stroke looked smooth and comfortable, and as we moved deep into the second half of the race, I began to despair that the outcome would indeed be determined by a final sprint.  But then I threw in one more surge, and this time Christian could not respond.  I continued to pile on some hard strokes to put some distance between us.  At that point I calculated that I had about twenty minutes of race left, so I paddled the strongest pace I felt I could sustain for that long.

All told, I'm pleased with how it went, and it was a nice affirmation of the training I've been doing.  I felt I had much more power throughout the race than I've had in the past.

Race-day-eve

This morning I met Joe at the marina and we paddled for about forty minutes.  I did four 12-stroke sprints during this time.  Joe is paddling tandem with his wife Carol Lee in the Battle On The Bayou race tomorrow, so I helped him load the long, unwieldy tandem boat on his car.  Then he helped me load my boat, and snapped this picture as we carried it up the ramp:

Then I got in my car and headed south.  Six hours later I was in beautiful Ocean Springs.  The Mississippi Gulf Coast saw very heavy rain yesterday and today, but it's just about moved out.  I drove through little more than a drizzle.

Ready or not, I'll be racing around 10 AM CDT tomorrow.  I'm doing my best to be ready.  A hot shower and some stretching are on my schedule for this evening.  I was hoping to stream the baseball game between the Cardinals and their Triple-A affiliate, the Memphis Redbirds, at Autozone Park in Memphis, but I just found out it's a rainout.  Rats.

Challenging conventional wisdom

I met Joe downtown yesterday morning for an 80-minute paddle in the harbor.  We paddled easy, and I tried to will my stiff upper back to loosen up.  Last night I did one of my tub-soaking-and-stretching recovery sessions, and I'll do another this evening.

As I've mentioned before, I spent much of last year living out of a suitcase while the burned-out building I bought got renovated into a suitable space for living and working.  During that time most of my worldly possessions were packed in boxes and stored in a variety of locations.  One space was a storage room off a friend's carport.  When the time came to retrieve my things, I discovered the place had a termite problem, and several boxes of books and clothes had been eaten up pretty good.

I lost several books that have proven difficult to replace.  One of them was Every Crushing Stroke by three-time U.S. Olympian, three-time world cup champion, and three-time world championship silver medalist Scott Shipley.  When I began poking around online for a replacement copy, I was shocked to find that used copies were selling for hundreds of dollars in some places.  Fortunately, after a few months I tried again and found that Mr. Shipley himself was selling some new copies on Amazon for around thirty-five bucks.

For the last couple of evenings I've been reacquainting myself with this unique and invaluable manual of whitewater slalom training advice.  Even though I'm not racing much slalom anymore and this is not a slalom-racing blog, I still look to slalom gurus like Bill Endicott and Ron Lugbill and Scott Shipley for ideas.  That's partly because I simply love slalom and had some amazing experiences participating in that sport.  It's also because slalom training is full of principles that apply to all other paddlesports (and all other sports, period).  It is very common for top athletes in disciplines like wildwater, rodeo, extreme racing, and sometimes even flatwater sprint and marathon racing to have slalom backgrounds.  I also have seen good slalom racers enter an event in another discipline "on a whim," and finish at or near the top.

The first 20 pages or so of Every Crushing Stroke is a brief account of Shipley's life as a paddler and racer, from his childhood beginnings to his perch atop the world rankings.  When Shipley was a boy, Washington-DC-based racers Ron and Jon Lugbill, Davey and Cathy Hearn, and several others were in the process of reinventing the techniques, boat designs, and training methods of slalom, and dominating the world in the "new" sport they had created.  These racers were known for questioning the conventional wisdom: in a now-legendary (and possibly embellished) anecdote, Jon Lugbill was in Spittal, Austria, watching the 1977 slalom world championships (he was racing only in wildwater that year, having not even made the U.S. slalom team), and was harshly criticizing the performance of the winning C1 paddler, claiming he could have done the course much faster.  Of course, he was met with much scorn and derision ("Who do you think you are!?  You didn't even make your own national team!").  But Lugbill stuck to his guns and two years later he was world champion in C1 himself, and would repeat that feat four more times during the 1980s.

By the time Shipley was becoming a formidable racer in his own right, the methods and philosophies of those DC-area racers had themselves become the entrenched "conventional wisdom."  But Shipley was unsatisfied: his class, men's kayak, was the only one in which the U.S. had not ascended the medal podium in that otherwise glorious preceding decade.  A Pacific Northwest resident, Shipley lived far from DC's nerve center of U.S. slalom training and coaching, but that turned out to be a blessing: after the U.S. Team held a training camp led by a top French coach who shared the secrets of European dominance in men's kayak, the DC-area athletes largely reverted to the methods they were used to, but Shipley, uninfluenced by the DC "groupthink" back home in the Northwest, stuck with what he had learned from the French coach and over the next couple of years made himself one of the best kayakers in the world.

My own goals, meanwhile, are more modest than Shipley's or the Lugbills' or the Hearns': I don't expect I'll be conquering the world in slalom, flatwater, or any other paddling discipline anytime soon.  I'm not even sure I can improve on my results from past years--at age 46, I may have already done the best I can ever hope to do.  But I'm having some fun challenging some conventional wisdom of my own.

As I've said before, I was a distance runner in high school and college, and my training in the boat has always followed that decades-old running wisdom that says you log lots and lots of steady miles in the offseason, waiting to do shorter, higher-intensity stuff until the race season is on the horizon.  The science behind this method is more than plausible: the aerobic system takes the longest to develop, so you spend most of your time working on it; on top of this endurance "base" you work on your lactic and ATP-CP systems as a major competition draws near.

But under the influence of newer research, largely relayed to me by Ron Lugbill's blog, this year I've been doing a lot of shorter, faster stuff a lot earlier than I ever have before.  Or, to characterize it another way, I'm spending more time working on my paddling skill and less time dwelling on what energy system I might be working at any given time.  And make no mistake: paddling hard and fast is a skill.  A paddler with immaculate technique at one stroke rate and intensity might have terrible technique if you double the stroke rate and intensity level.

In short, this season I'm not doing the same-old, same-old.  If it makes me better, great; and if I'm no better than I was before, at least I tried something new.  I guess the Battle On The Bayou race this Saturday will be my first real indication of whether what I'm doing has made any difference.

Thinking happy thoughts

This morning I did the March strength routine and paddled for 60 minutes.  We're having another cool spell here, and I paddled in a biting north wind with a temperature in the high 40s Fahrenheit.  Every time I think it might be safe to put the pogies away for the year, more of this weather comes along and I dig them out of my bag and affix them to the paddle one more time.  The forecast for this Saturday down in Ocean Springs calls for a temperature in the 70s, so I hope not to have the pogies on during the Battle On The Bayou race.

The tightness in my upper back continues, and I'm trying to do whatever I can to help it go away.  Meanwhile, I'm trying to stay positive and not slip into self-pity: I've raced well with discomfort before, and I have to believe that I will again this weekend.

In the boat I did six 12-stroke sprints at three-minute intervals, and timed myself going not-quite-all-out from one set of pilings to the other beneath the Auction Avenue bridge.  My best time ever here is maybe 28 or 29 seconds, and today I was clocking about 32 seconds.  I tried extra-hard to keep my shoulders relaxed and let my lower torso do the work during all these sprints.

Monday photo feature

Here's another picture from the photo shoot with Joe last Wednesday.  In it we see "the dock" I'm always talking about, where my paddling sessions begin and end.

Stress

Blog posts aren't exactly flying off my fingertips lately.  I apologize to those who check in hourly hoping for new bits of canoe and kayak racing wisdom.

In the last week or so I've been experiencing some tightness in my upper back around the base of my neck, between my shoulder blades.  I first became aware of it during my time trial in the harbor last weekend.  I can't really tell you the cause of this discomfort, but I have noticed over the years that I tend to carry a lot of stress in this area--in other words, I get all worried over life's minutiae, and my body responds by tensing the upper torso area.

Anyway, it's not going to stop me from paddling or going ahead with my race at Ocean Springs next Saturday, but it's making things a bit less pleasant.  I don't know many stretches that target this particular spot, but I've been trying, with mixed success, to relax this past week.

That's been especially true in the boat, where on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday I put in 60-minute sessions that emphasized short, fast pieces with long recoveries.  Having recently done a long grind around the Loosahatchie Bar and a grueling time trial, I want to spend the remaining time before my first race reinforcing the notion that my boat is a happy place, a place where going fast feels effortless and fun.

Today I did a round of the March strength routine before lunch, and after lunch I did a recovery session, following a soak in the tub with some stretching.  The nice thing about soaking in the tub is that there's not much else I can do there but relax and enjoy it.  I'm bad about wanting to do chores even when I'm supposed to be relaxing and enjoying myself.

It's a bit frustrating to be feeling less than great six days before a race, but in the forty-six and a half years I've been alive I've seen this scenario a few times before.  There's still time to pull myself together and race well.

My glossies

Yesterday I met Joe Royer down at the marina so he could take some pictures of me paddling my boat.  He plans to use them as part of the promotional materials for the classes I'm teaching this summer and the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race this June 14.

He e-mailed me a few of the best ones, and I will post them here in small doses--Semele was killed when she laid eyes on Zeus in his full glory, after all, and I wouldn't want that to happen to my readers.  This one shows me looking particularly focused:

Compare it with this photo of Greg Barton, the U.S. kayaker whose career highlights include two Olympic gold medals, two Olympic bronze medals, and four world championships:

I dare anybody to say that Greg looks any more awesome than I do.  Yes, I know that in reality Greg is more awesome than I, but since when does reality matter more than appearance?

Monday photo feature

Okay, I'm ready for the race season to get going.  The tail-end of a long winter is a time of year when training feels really, really tedious.  Happily, my first race is just around the corner: a week from this Saturday down in beautiful Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

The photo above, meanwhile, was taken right here in beautiful Memphis, Tennessee.  It's yours truly approaching the finish line at the 2012 Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  My main memory from that day was that it was quite hot outside, and that last half-mile in the harbor, with the breeze at my back, was a killer.  But right now, with winter still refusing to leave us entirely, that doesn't sound so bad to me.

On recovery and the passage of time.

I did my hard paddling session yesterday, and then had sort of a late night last night (I had a party at my house and then went out to hear some live music), so a good recovery session seemed in order today.

Ron Lugbill, by way of his blog, introduced me to the idea of spending a couple of your official "workouts" of the week doing things that help the body recover from hard work: stretching, soaking in a hot tub, getting a massage, doing some deliberate relaxation exercises... stuff like that.  With the higher-intensity sessions I've been putting in this winter, it would make a lot of sense for me to incorporate some regular recovery sessions into the routine--after all, the body becomes stronger during recovery from training, not during the training itself.  Alas, my observance of these sessions sort of fell by the wayside during the crazy series of events I've endured in the last year.

But there's no time like the present to turn things around.  Before lunch this morning I treated myself to a nice soak in the bathtub followed by a comprehensive stretch routine.  I listened to the Cardinals play the Mets in a spring training game via Internet stream, and that served as a pleasant reminder that summer is on its way.

*          *          *

Continuing a thought from yesterday's post, I sometimes ponder the relationship the stopwatch has with paddlesports.

I competed in track in high school and college, and track is a sport in which records are kept meticulously.  The sport's governing body, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF), recognizes a world record in every one of its sanctioned events, and has very specific criteria a result must meet for world-record recognition (for example, a 100-meter time cannot be recognized if the athlete had a tailwind above an allowable limit).  And so track events and the stopwatch are very closely linked in the public consciousness: everybody understands the meaning of the phrase "four-minute mile," for instance.

For me, at least, this made track a very easy sport to understand, and gave me some obvious concepts to think about in training.  If I wanted to be competitive with guys who were running faster than 4:40 in the mile, I knew I had to average better than 70 seconds per quarter.

I took up canoeing at camp around the same time I took up running at school, but I didn't venture into competitive paddlesport until after I finished college.  I started with whitewater slalom, a discipline whose space-time parameters were entirely different from those of track and field.  No race course was ever used for more than one day of racing.  Even if it were, the constant fluctuation in water levels and shifting of riverbeds would make saving times in record books pointless.

In training for slalom, the stopwatch was a very important tool.  But it's used for relative measurements rather than absolute ones: your time for a course run relative to your times on previous runs and relative to the times of other paddlers; or, your time doing a gate combination one way versus doing it another way.  It took me a long time to get used to training this way, not to mention to get used to all the technical aspects of whitewater paddling that affect one's time at least as much as his degree of exertion.

I remember that when I was in high school, hearing that a rival had won a race was not necessarily enough to pique my interest, but hearing that a rival had, say, broken 4:30 for a mile most definitely was.  In slalom, a rival's time was meaningless; I had to consider other information, such as what other reputable racers were in the field, to know whether that rival had done well.  The best way to gauge your progress relative to that of your rivals was to do some training and competing with them.  Scott Shipley, the great slalom kayaker on the U.S. Team in the 1990s, preferred to do the majority of his training alone, but always incorporated some training time with other world-top-ten-ranked racers several times each year.

Whitewater slalom racing was about as different from distance running as it can get, and I struggled to achieve a modicum of competence.  But I think the experience has greatly helped my transition into forward-speed racing, which inhabits a middle ground between slalom and running.  In this type of racing, course times mean less than they do on the track (consider the effect of different water levels on the harbor that I explained yesterday, for instance), but there are subsets of the discipline, like flatwater sprint with its 200-, 500-, and 1000-meter events, where the stopwatch is a very reliable indicator of how fast an athlete is.

For some reason, the ICF does not seem to recognize world records in flatwater sprint events.  Some venues and weather conditions are faster than others, of course, but the same is true for track meets.  Just as water depth and wind direction can influence the speed of a boat on the water, surface firmness and altitude can influence the speed of a runner on a track.

Over the years here on my home water, I've established benchmark times on courses that don't change much over the Mississippi's wide range of water levels.  I know that if I can paddle from the Mud Island monorail bridge to the Hernando DeSoto bridge in under two minutes, or from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the Auction Avenue bridge in under three minutes, then I'm doing well.  I have a couple of shorter courses that help me measure my pure speed as well.

Anyway, like I said, the relationship between the watch and the movement of my boat is something I ponder, and over a number of years I've developed some decent training methods based on my observations.

Time trial

Conditions were ideal for a mock-race today.  When I got down to the riverfront this morning there was a light south breeze blowing, and the water was like glass.

The last time I timed myself on a lap of the harbor was three or four years ago.  It was before I started this blog, and right now I can't find my training log from that year, so I'm not sure what all the circumstances surrounding that effort were.  I'm pretty sure I did the whole thing at anaerobic threshold, and my time was about 56 minutes.

Today my plan was to go out really hard and see how long I could maintain an intensity level that was outside my comfort zone.  I did five 6-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals as part of my warmup, and then settled into the starting gate between two willow trees at the north end of the harbor.

I charged hard off the line and hammered a crushing stroke rate for about two minutes before settling down into a lower (but still higher than normal) rate.  I felt pretty good and relaxed for most of the first half, though I knew it was not an intensity level I could keep up for too long (better educating myself on this topic was one of the main purposes of today's workout).  As I approached the south end of the harbor, I was beginning to feel the effects of my fast start.

I rounded an imaginary buoy on the line you get by extending the Beale Street center line down into the harbor.  My time for the first half was about 24:50, but with the fatigue I was feeling by then I felt it was a long shot to break 50 minutes.

As I headed back north with the breeze at my back, my eyes began to sting and I had to stop paddling a couple of times to splash water on them.  I lowered my stroke rate and tried to paddle as efficiently as I could in my increasingly tired state.  I began to wonder if I would even break the 56 minutes or so that I had clocked several years ago.

But as I rounded the last bend before the finish line (the same as my starting line), I was surprised to find that I still had at least a slight chance of breaking 50 minutes.  I dug deep for my best possible finish, and ended up with a time of 50 minutes, 32 seconds.  Breaking 50 would have been nice, but I was pleasantly surprised at my ability to complete the second half not much more slowly than the first half even though my muscles were screaming for most of it.

And I was much faster than I was several years ago, although it's hard to compare one result to another in a sport like this.  I'd like to know how the weather was that first time, and also the level of the Mississippi--higher water submerges the insides of bends and allows a paddler to take straighter lines through them.  Hopefully I'll find that training log sooner or later.

Catching up

There have been a lot of things on my mind besides training this week, but I'm getting my work in one way or another.

I've done the March strength routine on Monday, Wednesday, and today this week.  I haven't really described this month's routine yet, so here it is:

It starts with an exercise on the exercise ball that you can watch Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li demonstrate at the 2:54 mark of this video.  It's quite a bit harder than it looks.

Then I do a set of clap-pushups.  I'll increase the number of reps per set as the month goes along, but I want to keep that number low enough that I can do each pushup with maximum explosive power.

Then it's back to the exercise ball, with an exercise that Jing Jing Li demonstrates at the 3:11 mark of that video I linked to above.  This one is also much tougher than it looks, both in the distress it puts on the abdominals and in simply keeping one's balance.

Finally, I do a little rotation drill with my ten-pound medicine ball.  I tried to find a video of this exercise, but couldn't find one of somebody doing it exactly the way I do it.  This guy comes close, but what I do on each rep is let the ball roll behind my back, and twist around and retrieve it for the next rep.  I do sets in both directions (clockwise and counterclockwise).

In the boat today I paddled for 60 minutes, doing six 12-stroke sprints and some balance drills in beam waves driven by a strong south wind.  Tomorrow I'm hoping to do a lap of the entire harbor for time.

Monday photo feature

As I was winding up my paddling session yesterday, Joe and Carol Lee Royer came down to the marina with the intention of doing just what I had done: paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  Here's a picture Joe took of Carol Lee as they descended into the lower portion of the Loosahatchie Chute, where one can see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and the downtown Memphis skyline.  Carol Lee is supposedly looking up at some white pelicans on their spring migration northward.

For those who don't know, the Loosahatchie Bar is a big island in the Mississippi River upstream of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  The Loosahatchie Chute is the channel of river between the Bar and the Arkansas bank.  In this photo, that's the Loosahatchie Bar to the boat's port (left) side.

I guess it's fairly common for me to share pictures that Joe has taken.  That's both because Joe is a good photographer and because he takes a camera in the boat with him a lot more often than I do.

Going around the Bar

Conditions were calm today, so I did that paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar that I didn't do last Sunday.  I felt a bit sluggish in the early going, but I did my best to shake it off and paddle a crisp pace with strong strokes.  I got up to the mouth of the Wolf River pretty quickly--about 45 minutes--and continued to feel good for another 45 minutes as I ferried across the river and entered the Loosahatchie Chute, which was beautiful on this chilly, somewhat foggy day.

With the wind at my back in the Chute, I was slowed by sweat stinging my eyes.  By the time I returned to the mouth of the harbor my arms and shoulders were aching pretty good.  I tried hard to keep my stroke form together as I made my way up the harbor back to the marina.

The elapsed time between my departure from the dock and my return to the dock was about two hours and ninety seconds.  The river level today was 18.4 feet on the Memphis gauge.

Fatigue and stroke mechanics

It's a nice sunny day at last.  Fahrenheit high in the 50s.  The last of the snow and ice is quickly disappearing.

My abdominals have been wicked sore since I did my new strength exercises on Tuesday.  I did a light version of the strength routine and then headed for the river.

I paddled for 60 minutes, doing a set of 30-second sprints at four-minute intervals during the half hour from 0:20 to 0:50.  I haven't wanted to admit it, but this is a tough workout.  I got in eight sprints, and during the last several I was debating whether my form was holding up well enough to continue.  I did finish it out because as a kid I was taught that that's what tough guys do, but I need to pay attention to my mechanical quality when I do pieces like these.

Still winter

The bleak, overcast conditions continue today, with the Fahrenheit temperature currently sitting in the 30s, expected to break 40--maybe--this afternoon.

Joe and I paddled for 70 minutes this morning.  There's still a lot of ice at the marina, melting ever so slowly.  My rudder was not frozen today, and that's positive news.

Freezing temperatures mean trouble for moving parts

I never lost my electricity, but it was a fairly nasty storm we had here.  A drenching rain very slowly turned to ice and made a real mess outside.

Since then it's only just barely risen above freezing.  I stayed in Monday and yesterday, and yesterday I started easing into a new strength routine for the month of March.  Lately I've been taking several days to get a routine together, sort of like a band working up an arrangement for a new song.  So far I know this month's routine will have some dynamic exercise ball drills and some clap pushups.  I'll describe it in more detail soon.

This morning Joe and I braved the still-frigid weather and paddled in the harbor for 80 minutes.  Often in the wintertime I find my rudder frozen, and spend the first several minutes of the session working it free.  Today, however, it stayed frozen for almost the entire session.  At first it was stuck in a right-turn position, and I paddled one clockwise circle after another trying to work it loose.  When it wouldn't budge, I got out of the boat and moved the rudder by hand into a straight position so I could at least paddle forward.  For the next hour I paddled a boat that kept tending very slightly to the right, and every minute or so I would have to do some extra strokes on my right to correct the course.  Finally, about ten minutes before we finished, the cables came loose and I was able to steer pretty well even though the rudder was still not fully functional.  Back on the dock, I unscrewed the cap on the stern deck that allows access to the rudder's post (this cap had been frozen on earlier), and discovered that this area was packed full of ice, preventing the rudder from moving more than just a little bit.  It must have filled up with that drenching rain Sunday evening.

Anyway, it was just one more ordeal in this seemingly never-ending winter.  Spring will feel that much sweeter if and when it finally arrives.

Monday photo feature

(I've decided to go ahead and post this Sunday evening.  Looking at the winter storm developing outside right now, I won't be at all surprised if I have no electricity in the morning.)

More summer memories for an icy Monday: Mike Davis, who worked with me at Camp Carolina in the late 80s and early 90s, draws a quick breath right before being dunked in a hole on the Pigeon River during the summer of 1992.

Adjusting on the fly

I mentioned yesterday that March had come in like a lamb.  Turns out the lion wasn't far behind, and it's now feasting on said lamb.  When I got up this morning it was perhaps 50 degrees Fahrenheit but predicted to drop some 20 degrees during the course of the day.  This was definitely a day to be on the water earlier rather than later, and I was in the boat by about twenty minutes after nine.  According to my car's temperature display, it was already below 40 degrees by then.

I've said before that I've been doing longer paddles on Sundays, and all this past week I had been looking at today as a good time to go around the Loosahatchie Bar, a trip that usually takes me 130 minutes or so on average when I start and finish at Harbortown Marina.  But I ditched that plan when I found the wind blowing hard from the north.  To those inclined to call me a wuss for doing so, I'll just say that I see things a little differently: epic slogs are not very useful as a training staple, in my opinion.  Sure, one or two per season might provide a little boost to one's mental toughness, but in general I don't want to think of my boat as a place of pain and suffering.  In the boat I want to feel crisp and sharp and, you know... speedy.

So instead I did a 60-minute session in the harbor with lots of short sprints--30 seconds or less, generally--with full recovery.  I capped off the workout by timing myself from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the monorail bridge, and clocked about 1:58.  I think it might be the first time ever I've broken two minutes on this course, and definitely the first time in the surf ski.  It was wind-aided, but I'll take it just the same.

I came home feeling good about what I'd done.  Like I said yesterday, I've been feeling a bit unenthusiastic about training lately, and I think what I did today was a much better antidote than a long, hard, frigid ordeal would have been.

Out of sorts

I'm going through a period of low motivation right now.  I have these occasionally, as do, I would guess, most other athletes, and I'm just trying to keep moving and work through it.  It's taking me a few extra ounces of gumption to get myself down to the river to paddle or do my strength routine here at the house.

On the bright side, February is gone for another year.  It's almost certainly my least favorite month of all: any afterglow from the holiday season has worn off, and the worst weather of winter often comes at this time.  March has arrived like a lamb, with calm conditions and a high temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

But winter's not done yet: according to the forecast on The Weather Channel's website, it'll be back down in the 50s and raining tomorrow, and the high will be 29 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday.  Sigh.  Surely we're almost finished with this stuff... aren't we?  Aren't we?

Well, I'd better stop rambling and tell everybody what I did today.  I paddled for 60 minutes, during which I warmed up, did eight six-stroke sprints at one-minute intervals, and did a half-dozen or so long (30- to 40-second) sprints with full recovery.

This past week I did the February strength routine on Tuesday and yesterday.