Post-race decompression

At race time yesterday, the Mississippi River was at 33.75 feet on the Vicksburg gauge.  This is a fairly high level, but not exceptionally high.  Speaking in very general terms, you can expect higher water to produce faster times in a race on the Mississippi.  But as we saw yesterday, there are other variables in play, most notably the wind and the air temperature.  We had a beam wind for much of the race yesterday, and that always requires some extra energy and concentration.  And though the temperature was not oppressively high (high 70s Fahrenheit), it was quite warm to be racing in.  For me, the worst part was paddling up the Yazoo River toward the finish with the wind at my back: without a breeze to dry the sweat on my face, my eyes started stinging badly enough that I had to stop paddling and splash my face a couple of times to avoid paddling with my eyes closed.

In short, conditions were not as ideal for lightning-fast times as many of us had been hoping.

My fastest time ever in the Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race was 1 hour, 56 minutes, 34 seconds in 2011.  That day the river level was 36.4 feet on the Vicksburg gauge, and the wind was blowing from the west-northwest, mostly a tailwind on that particular section of the Mississippi.  The first half of the course was actually quite turbulent, but the river smoothed out once we rounded the bend into the long approach to the city of Vicksburg, and that was very helpful as I tried to conserve energy and paddle as efficiently as possible.

The following year saw me complete the course in my slowest time ever: 2:20:49.  The river was low--19.2 feet--and there was a pesky headwind the whole way down.  I think the main reason times are slower at low water is that the course is longer: sandbars that you can paddle over at higher levels are exposed on the insides of bends.

All this is part of what makes canoe and kayak racing so interesting: nature's dynamism makes the keeping of time records a less worthwhile pursuit than in, say, my old sport of track and field, where distances are carefully measured and the surfaces are flat.

This morning I took my boat back to the marina and did an easy recovery paddle of 30 minutes.  My upper back is all sore again, and all I wanted to do today was get some blood flowing in those muscles and flush out some of those nasty, achy toxins.  I'm also drinking a few glasses of water during the course of the day to increase the volume and lower the viscosity of said blood.