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.