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.

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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.