- Sometimes I forget, but I try to remember to look at my watch when I reach the Hernando DeSoto Bridge during the OICK race. Yesterday my split at the HDB was about 10:30.
- There's an exceptionally likable gal named Marie Mason working for Outdoors, Inc., who has taken on the O.I. blog with the intention of making it more current and more lively than it had been. A few weeks ago she decided that a profile of yours truly would be a good addition to the blog, and I consider that quite an honor. We met for lunch and she asked me a series of questions, and this past week she went live with this post. "Professional" is a rather elastic term for the title, but then again, I did get 75 bucks for my third-place finish yesterday.
- I had house guests this weekend, as Dana and Nick Kinderman came up for the race. Dana and Nick are the directors of the annual Battle On The Bayou race down at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and I have had the great good fortune to get to know them in the five years that I have participated in that event. Besides racing yesterday morning, we visited my neighborhood microbrewery Friday night, ate some barbecue yesterday afternoon, and saw Roseanne Cash perform at the Levitt Shell last night.
- 188 boats finished the race yesterday. That's a score-less-one better than last year's 169 boats, but still down a bit from the 200-220 boat-counts of the previous decade or more. I can't really tell you why registration is down a bit, but I would guess it has to do with more people being away on vacation in June (up until 2010, the race took place the first weekend in May), or people having other plans for Father's Day weekend, or maybe people not being used to the new date yet. The race was no less exciting this year than it's ever been, but I hope it'll rise back above the two-hundred-boat level in the years to come. I want my hometown race to be the biggest and best.
- The Memphis gauge reading during the race yesterday was 18.5 feet.
- This afternoon I learned that Jamie McEwan has passed away. Jamie was arguably the person responsible for the glorious performances of U.S. athletes in the sport from the late 70s through the early 90s. He won the bronze medal in the C1 class at the 1972 Olympic Games at Augsburg, West Germany--the first major medal ever for a U.S. athlete--and legend has it that Cathy and Davey Hearn heard the news on the radio during a family trip in Montana, and decided then and there that they wanted to pursue paddling greatness themselves. Over the next 20 years the Hearns and D.C.-area clubmates like Ron and Jon Lugbill, Bob Robison, Kent Ford, Mike and Steve Garvis, Fritz and Lecky Haller, Dana Chladek, and Jed Prentice stood atop the slalom-racing world. Jamie was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and though he downplayed it publicly, it apparently was too much for him in the end.
I woke up this morning feeling pretty good for the day after a race, but I knew some active recovery would be wise just the same. I went to the river and paddled easy for 30 minutes, breaking a nice sweat and getting the blood flowing in all my paddling muscles. When I got back to the dock I did a round of stretches throughout my body. Then I cleaned up my boat, which had gotten dirty from being moved around at the start and finish areas of yesterday's race.
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