I taught another class out at Shelby Farms yesterday. This time I had about eight students, many of them in the ten- to twelve-year-old range, who brought whitewater boats with them. So I took a whitewater boat of my own out there and worked on a different set of skills from what I've been doing in these classes. It was a bit of a challenge, inasmuch as I've got the routine down for a touring-boat class but don't really have a practiced list of activities for people in whitewater boats. But I'm happy to say that everybody seemed to have a good time and got a reasonably good educational experience for a Saturday morning.
This morning I went another round with my new strength routine. That prehab/rehab exercise I'm doing often elicits a pop in my vertebrae right where I've been experiencing pain for so long, and I'm taking that as an encouraging sign.
This afternoon I paddled the K1 in the harbor downtown. Just like on Thursday, it was only a 40-minute session. The other day I saw my friend June, a loyal reader of this blog, and she remarked that an hour in the boat seemed long to her. I'd sort of been thinking the opposite--before this year, a typical session for me was 90 minutes or more--but her comment got me to thinking, and now I've decided to keep sessions shorter for a while for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it puts that much less stress on my back. For another, that K1 demands such a high degree of concentration and body control that I think an hour might be a little too long: even in the early part of a session, I allow some bad strokes to creep in among the good ones, and I'm hoping that spending some time doing shorter sessions with a higher percentage of good strokes will pay off after a while. Sometimes less is more. Thanks, June.
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