Beginning to take some photos

Yesterday I did another round of the January strength routine.  It's beginning to flow now as I've gotten used to the exercises, although that one-foot lift still feels a bit awkward to me.

I paddled with Joe in the harbor for 80 minutes this morning.  The Memphis gauge reading was about 30.1 feet--still not an outrageously high level.  But more water is on its way.  The National Weather Service has revised its crest-level prediction downward a bit--42 feet, rather than the 43.5 feet it was saying the other day--but that's still higher than all but three crests on record.

Mostly just for fun, I'm trying to snap a photo or two each time I go down to the riverfront over the next couple of weeks.  I took this one Tuesday, when the Memphis gauge reading was 27.3 feet.  I'm standing on Harbortown Marina looking over at the Montessori school on the bank.  That's my car parked over in the left side of the picture:

This morning I took this photo from the same vantage point.  The water level is almost three feet higher.  I reckon I'll have to park my car a bit farther up the hill next time I'm down there:

I took this shot today of my car from another angle.  You can see the water coming just past the guard rail in the right side of the picture:

So... check this blog every couple of days for the next couple of weeks, and we'll experience this high-water event together.

Some people are already flooded

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I send positive thoughts upriver to folks in Saint Louis and much of the rest of Missouri, where the flooding reports sound bad.  I think the greater Saint Louis region, where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meet, has a lot more residents in low-lying areas than we have here at Memphis.  Right now it sounds like they're re-living the nightmare of the 1993 flood.

Yesterday I heard on the radio that West Alton, Missouri--just a few miles up the river from Saint Louis--was experiencing some pretty bad flooding.  I went to a race there last August, and I believe it.  It was not high ground.

Meanwhile, here at Memphis things are just fine at the moment.  The Memphis gauge reading is 28.5 feet, just 1.2 feet higher than this time yesterday.  Like I said yesterday, it's a rather high level, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Lotsa water

I paddled my boat today for the first time in twelve days.  The layoff had been caused by both the little virus I had last week and some holiday travel to visit family.  The unfortunate thing about it is that I missed some balmy weather to paddle in: the Memphis area saw Fahrenheit highs in the 70s for most of last week, but today it was a much more seasonable mid-40s while I was on the water.

I paddled for 60 minutes, and concentrated hard on rotating fully and using my legs.  Generally I felt pretty good, although my right shoulder, the same one that was bothering me back in the spring, has been feeling a bit weak and sore.  I might have tweaked it while moving some heavy hickory lumber around in my workshop yesterday.  I probably should re-start the little rubber band exercises that helped it last time.

The big news in Memphis right now is some impending flooding on the Mississippi, the result of the huge storm system that moved across the Midwest Sunday and yesterday.  The current forecast says the river will crest at 43.5 feet on the Memphis gauge on January 9.  I'm hoping that figure will be revised downward a bit over the next few days, to minimize the impact on the lives and homes of people in our community.  Mind you, most Memphians will not be affected in that way: the city sits up on a bluff, beyond the reach of anything shy of a truly biblical flood.  So those thoughtful people who are concerned for my safety should rest assured that I don't foresee any problems whatsoever.  But there are some vulnerable areas, especially in the basins of the tributary streams.  The Mississippi backs up into those basins when it's in flood.

Today's level was 27.3 feet.  That's fairly high, but nothing we don't see practically every year.  The official flood stage on the Memphis gauge is 34 feet, and the river is expected to exceed that by New Year's Day.

Monday photo feature

A guy paddles a slalom K1 in the streets of York, England.  The photo, taken by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images, showed up on The Weather Channel's website.

It seems like it's been wet all over the globe in the last several days.  I've heard of flooding in South America, and right now things are getting pretty soggy from Texas up into Indiana and Ohio.  I spent yesterday looking at my Internet radar, transfixed by an incredibly slow-moving system that was parked over a large region that included parts of six states, with Fort Smith, Arkansas, right in the middle.  That system is only just now moving into the Memphis area this morning.

January strength routine

I started up a new strength routine this past week.  I plan to carry it through the month of January.  It's been a while since I've done any of the exercises in the Michele Ramazza video (embedded at the bottom of this post), so I've picked out a few and put together a circuit:

1.  Pushups
2.  Air squats and squats with a barbell
3.  Butterfly crunches
4.  Pullups
5.  Leg kicks and leg kicks swim
6.  One-foot lift (much harder than it looks!)
7.  Lateral abdominals
8.  Pullups
9.  Plank crunches
10.  Leg swing

So far I've been doing the exercises slowly as I get familiar with the movements and memorize the routine.  My plan is to work it into an aerobic circuit by making two rapid trips through it.

Mele Kalikimaka!

I've been laying low with a pretty bad cold the last few days.  All my life my rule has been that if I'm not running a fever, then I'm not really sick, and in keeping with that I'm trying to do at least a minimum of activity--namely, some stretching and stuff around the house.  But my energy level has been incredibly low.

Anyway... in the spirit of the season, and in honor of what I hope will be a happy and healthy trip to Hawaii in a couple of months, here's the Memphis Ukulele Band.

Monday photo feature

Jim Priest of Wenatchee, Washington, surfs a wave on Idaho's Lochsa River in 1996.

Gathering some of my favorite videos in one place

Nobody has ever accused me of being particularly savvy with computers and web design.  But I am pleased to announce that I have acquired a new skill in the last few days: I now know how to embed stuff in my blog posts!  My last post has a Google map embedded in it, and I've figured out how to embed You Tube videos as well.

As time goes on, I'd like to share all kinds of videos, particularly of exercises I incorporate into my strength routines: I always feel bad when I talk about exercises here without some way to show my readers what these exercises look like.  I might even shoot some video of myself doing some exercises if I can ever get myself organized to do so.

For now, I share here several strength-exercise videos that I have referred to many times in the last several years:

Core strength is an asset for paddlers of all disciplines.  Here's Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li demonstrating some simple core exercises one can do with a stability ball:




I love exercises that require little or no equipment.  In this video, slalom kayak world and Olympic champion Daniele Molmenti of Italy shows us some "backpacker" exercises, so named because they're easy to do anyplace on the planet you might find yourself:




The guy in this video, Michele Ramazza, has excelled in "extreme" or "freeride" racing--downriver kayaking in pretty gnarly whitewater:

 


Happy viewing!  And like I said, I'll try to jazz up this blog with some video more in the future.

Let me tell you about our harbor here at Memphis

I'm always fascinated with other racers' home training sites.  When I get to know a racer from another city or town, I tend to ask myself, "What kind of water does this person paddle on?  What does he or she see while out paddling?"  And whenever I visit another place, I always imagine what it might be like to live there and paddle there day in and day out.

Perhaps it's about time I told you more about where I paddle.  If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have seen me mention "the harbor" here many, many times.  "The harbor" is where I keep my boat, and it's the site of a very large percentage of my training.

Here's an interactive map of the Memphis riverfront:



The harbor is the sliver of water that separates Mud Island River Park from the rest of the city to the east.  Known as Wolf River Harbor because it was the bed of the Wolf River before an engineering project redirected the Wolf (you can see where the Wolf now enters the Mississippi by scrolling the map to the north a short distance), it is not quite five kilometers in length from its northern end to its junction with the Mississippi (marked as "Joe Curtis Point" on this map).  It is between a hundred and two hundred meters wide, on average.  It is largely protected from the wind, and it has no current, just like a lake, and that makes it ideal for practicing technique and speed without the distractions of rough conditions.  It also affords the paddler a safer alternative to the mighty Mississippi on very cold winter days and times like that.

Three bridges span Wolf River Harbor.  The northernmost is the A.W. Willis Avenue (formerly Auction Avenue) bridge, which links downtown Memphis with the Harbortown residential development.  The next bridge to the south is the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which carries Interstate 40 over the Mississippi River.  The southernmost bridge is an access way to Mud Island River Park by both foot traffic and a monorail tram.

This photo, taken by a Daily Memphian photographer, offers a panoramic view looking south from about halfway up Mud Island.  That's the harbor on the left, with the main channel of the Mississippi River on the right.  You can see Harbortown Marina where I keep my boat, with the A.W. Willis Bridge just beyond it.

Many racers know Wolf River Harbor as the site of the last kilometer or so of the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, which takes place the day before Father's Day each June.  The finish line is next to Mississippi River Park, just south of the monorail bridge.

I keep my boat at Harbortown Marina.  If you zoom in on the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge, you'll see Harbortown Marina represented by two rectangles just to the north.  The marina is owned privately by its slip owners, like a condominium, and it is equipped with racks where kayakers and canoeists and rowers may store their craft for $100 a quarter ($400 a year).  The marina is approximately halfway between the harbor's northern end and its southern end.  It's maybe a couple hundred meters closer to the southern end; I know this because at my normal cruising pace, I typically take about fifteen minutes to paddle from the marina to the mouth of the harbor, and about 17 or 18 minutes to paddle from the marina to the harbor's north end.

Public access to the harbor can be found on its east side, using a boat ramp directly beneath the A.W. Willis bridge.  There is room to park during both high- and low-water periods.

In the many years I have been training in the harbor, I have established baseline times on several courses defined by permanent objects.  For instance, a good time for me from the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the southern edge of the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge is around three minutes.  From the southern edge of the monorail bridge to the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, it's around two minutes.  The A.W. Willis bridge has two sets of pilings in the water, and I've broken 30 seconds a couple of times sprinting across the harbor from one of them to the other.

Joe Royer took this photo of me as we paddled north from the mouth of the harbor.  That's the monorail bridge in the distance.

In each of the last several years, I have timed myself over one full lap of the harbor.  I've done it in mid-March, a couple of weeks before my first race of the year, as a test of my early-season fitness.  My "starting gate" is between two trees at the north end of the harbor; you can actually see these trees if you switch the map to satellite view and zoom in up there.  I paddle all the way to the mouth of the harbor, where, lacking a turnaround buoy, I make sure to cross the center-line of Beale Street before turning around.  Then I return to the north end of the harbor and finish between the same two trees that marked my starting line.  My best time on this course is a little over 50 minutes.

So, you could call Wolf River Harbor my gym... my dojo.  It's where I get myself ready for the races I do each spring, summer, and fall.  Needless to say, I have spent untold hours there.  And there is no question I have developed a relationship with the place.

As in any relationship, there are negatives as well as positives.  The harbor has a fairly serious litter problem.  After a heavy rain, especially when the water level is low, the harbor is choked with floatable trash that has washed in from the storm drains. The city has attempted to remedy the problem by installing a boom at the mouth of Bayou Gayoso (for some reason it's called Quincy Bayou on this map), but the litter continues to come in from other sources.  There's also some evidence of a broken sewer line (i.e., condoms), and I know the problem has been reported, but so far the city has been in no hurry to fix it.

The harbor's industrial denizens have not always been the best stewards, either.  Though I enjoy the vibrancy of the barge traffic that comes in and out of the harbor serving the LaFarge, Bunge, and Cargill plants, I bristle at the sloppy practices at the loading facilities that allow grain, Portland cement, and who knows what else to escape into the air and the water.  Some stricter enforcement by our city and county authorities is definitely in order.

To put it simply, I sense that these authorities don't consider the environmental health of the Memphis riverfront to be a great priority.  I detect an attitude that the Mississippi River is strictly a commercial and industrial waterway and has no recreational value.  Certainly, a few more recreational users to demonstrate a contrary argument would be nice--besides my friend Joe and me, I can think of maybe a half-dozen other paddlers who are down there on any kind of regular basis--but the folks with the power in our town could reap some benefit in the long run if they would embrace us rather than shrug us off as a mild annoyance.  When I look at southern cities of similar size--Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Chattanooga, Nashville--I see cities that have lovingly brought back their once-decrepit waterfronts and made them destinations for citizens (all of them, not just the ones with money to spend) to enjoy the outdoors on or around the water however they please.  In this way as in so many others, my hometown seems to be several decades behind the times.

Well... I love our harbor anyway, no matter how few other people do.  I love the turtles that sun themselves on logs along the banks, and file off into the water when they see me coming.  I love the beavers that slap the water smartly with their tails.  I love the willows that stand in the shallow water up in the north end.  I love the birds--blue and green herons, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, geese, ducks, gulls, purple martens, eagles--that call the harbor home for at least part of each year.  I love the alligator gar that lurk near the surface in the summertime, diving deeper when my boat passes over them.  I love the high-water periods, when I can paddle among the trees, and the low-water periods, when I am surrounded by sloping muddy banks.  I love paddling from the harbor's relatively clear water onto the silty brown water of the Mississippi River, and back again.

I hope that paddlers visiting Memphis will find this information useful, and that they will value paddling on my home water as much as I do paddling on theirs.

Monday photo feature

Today's photo feature is a satellite image of the island of Oahu.  Why have I posted such a thing?  Because I am going there myself in a couple of months!  I'll be sharing more information about this trip as the date draws nearer.

What's been going on lately

My training activity has been light in recent weeks, and as a result the blogging here has been light as well.  I apologize to anybody who's been looking in vain here for new thoughts from me.

Since my last race in mid-October, I've been paddling twice a week, usually with Joe on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Typically we do a lap of the harbor (paddling easy, it takes us 70 to 80 minutes) and talk about every topic under the sun.  In terms of training value, I look at these sessions as a way to maintain muscle memory and practice stroke technique while giving my body a break from the intensity of being in race form.

For the last three weeks I've been doing four simple core exercises three times a week.  Two of them can be found in this video featuring Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li that I've shared here many times in the past.  Another one is an exercise I learned years ago at a slalom training camp where U.S. world champion and Olympian Rebecca Giddens shared some yoga-inspired exercises she'd been doing.  The fourth is a static position I think most people can visualize.

Specifically, my exercise routine is as follows:

1.  Static exercise shown at 1:03 of the Jing Jing Li video.

2.  A plank exercise that involved lying face-down on the floor and lifting the head and the legs in a "Superman" pose.  This is the exercise I learned from Rebecca Giddens.  I hold the position for 20 seconds, then rest for 20 seconds, and so on until I've done a set of five.

3.  Exercise shown at 2:55 of the Jing Jing Li video.  This exercise always hurts bad the first time and leaves me wicked sore for several days, so I always ease into it.  When I first did it several weeks ago I did sets of ten reps; since then I have worked up to 20 reps in a set.

4.  An exercise where I hang from my gymnast's rings and raise my legs up to horizontal in front of me (i.e., my body is in an "L" shape).  Each time I count "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi" and so on until I reach Twenty, and I do this two twice per set.



So, there you go.  This is how I'm spending my break from training this offseason.  Some of the aches and pains I was dealing with in the late summer have had a chance to subside while I carry on a minimum level of stuff in and out of the boat.  I'll probably continue this laid-back routine until after Christmas, and then I'll start putting on a more serious face for the 2016 season.

Recovery time

This morning Joe and I paddled for 80 minutes in the rain.  Even though it was the misty variety that sort of oozes out of the sky, the rain was quite heavy at times, and we got drenched.  Fortunately it wasn't that cold, and it actually made for a beautiful scene.

A couple of easy paddles like this each week is what I'm planning for the next few weeks.  I also want to try to keep up some "active recovery" activities--stretching, soaking in the tub, stuff like that.  I'm hoping that the aches and pains that have dogged me for much of this long season will have a chance to subside for good as a result.

I'm taking a little time off from strength work, but I'll start that back up before long.

Monday photo feature

Normally he's my training partner, but at this moment he's my nemesis: Joe Royer is hot on my heels as we make a buoy turn at the 2006 "Bacall" race at Key Largo, Florida.

Thoughts on the last race, and on the season

I closed my 2015 season with a brief immersion into a more surf-ski-centric world, and that gave me all kinds of things to think about.  I've spent the past week trying to organize the jumble of ideas in my head.

In every sport I've ever tried, I've been fascinated with the things that separate the elite athletes from everybody else.  There are surely more such things than I'll be getting into here, but I can think of one thing that's relevant in both slalom racing and surf ski racing.  There's no question the elite athletes are strong and speedy: when I was racing slalom C1 in the 1990s, I expect nearly every last one of the top C1 guys could have beaten me easily in a 50-meter sprint in our C1s across flatwater, and I expect every elite-caliber surf ski athlete could beat me easily in the same sprint in our surf skis.  But of course, slalom races take place on whitewater, and surf ski races take place in rough open-water conditions, and in both cases there's more to making a boat move than just speed and strength.  The elite athletes in these disciplines have an incredible degree of balance and control.  Where I would be throwing down a brace to avoid a flip, a top athlete would have the body control to plant just as good a forward stroke as he would on flatwater.  I got schooled in this area many times in my slalom days, and I was schooled again at the North Shore Cup last Saturday.

Mind you, I haven't exactly ignored these issues in my own training.  I believe the winner of any competition at any level is the person who does the little things better than anybody else, and several times this year I was that person.  And each time, I felt as though I'd earned the right to be that person, having done all kinds of stroke drills and balance drills and strength work that my competitors either hadn't done or hadn't mastered quite as well as I had.

But that brings up another theme of this trip: I got a healthy reminder that being a "big fish" in one part of the country does not mean there aren't many people just as good or better in other parts.  Going into the North Shore Cup I knew enough about guys like Austin Kieffer and Reid Hyle and Jesse Lischuk to know that I would not figure into the race up front.  But then there were another dozen or so guys and gals I didn't know much about, and I honestly didn't know if I would be the fourth-best guy or the twentieth-best guy in the field.  It turned out a fair number of racers were quite a bit better than I, at least on Saturday.

My guess is that these folks are in their boats a few days a week like I am, and work assiduously on their skills just like I do.  That they are faster in their boats than I might be because they train more than I do.  Maybe they have better training groups than I do, competing with one another and sharing ideas and collectively raising their performance to a higher level.  Maybe some of them have coaches to keep an eye on what they're doing and help them improve faster than they would coaching themselves.  Or maybe they're just better athletes than I am--stronger, speedier, more powerful, more agile.

And so, I come back around to the question that I ask myself all the time, and am occasionally asked by others: why do I do this?  "To win" is ultimately not the answer, even though I do feel a lot of satisfaction when I win.  Fascination with the process is what really keeps me going--the hours spent in my boat on the water in the outdoors, working on one skill one day, another skill another day, sometimes enjoying the company of a friend or two, sometimes relishing the solitude.  Eventually, once I've taken a little break and recovered from the wear and tear of this past season, I'll start preparing for another, and I will incorporate whatever lessons I've gleaned on this most recent trip.  I don't know that my future competitive results will be any better than they have been in the past; at age 48, I should probably be happy if I can just keep them close to what they've been in the past.

I'll conclude this post with one last encouraging thought.  I have a friend who is a career musician and music teacher, and he told me recently that as a teenager and young adult he was obsessed with perfection, really beating himself up every time he made even the smallest mistake.  Then, at some point in his life, he came around to accept the fact that he would never be perfect, and that he should relish the things he was doing well rather than dwell on the mistakes he was making.  Once he adopted that attitude, he found that his performances became much more consistently good, and as a teacher he has consciously focused on the good work of his students rather than trying to hammer out their mistakes.

Our sport requires such a variety of skills and techniques that nobody can possibly master every single one of them.  Even at the elite level, the winner is usually the person who has mastered the set of skills that most closely suits the conditions on the course that day.  There's no question I am good at some things, so-so at some other things, and terrible at some other things; in the interest of my overall happiness I'll try my best to enjoy the things I do well while taking those other things one or two at a time.

Surfing Carolina style

After breakfast yesterday morning, Rick and I headed for the Isle of Palms.  We left my car at the Fort Moultrie beach access, drove north and picked up Eric Mims at his house, and parked Rick's truck at the 57th Street beach access.

The wind was blowing slightly offshore but was creating some nice waves.  Eric, as both the local and the person with by far the most ocean-paddling experience of the three of us, offered his advice on launching through the shore break and maintaining a safe distance from the shore as we rode the downwind southward toward my parked car.  And off we went.

My confidence was shaky after Saturday's epic struggle, and it took me several tries to get myself going through the shore break.  I was also wicked sore in my midsection, and I winced each time I sprinted to catch a wave.  But soon enough I was getting a decent ride, and I began to relax a little.

Eric, who has become an outstanding downwind paddler since moving to the Charleston area several years ago, glided off into the distance ahead of us, and for the rest of the session it was Rick and me toiling for those all-too-elusive rides.  The conditions were somewhat confused and every ride we got took a fair amount of work.  Adding to my difficulty was my lack of a surfing rudder: the shorter rudder on my boat is wonderful for the mostly-flat conditions I encounter in the Mid South, but here in the Atlantic I found myself rudderless each time I was on the crest of a wave, sprinting to catch the sweet spot.

But somehow, I held my own.  Having surfed a few towboat wakes on the Mississippi late this summer, I was working on an experience level that wasn't absolute zero.  All told, I think I got perhaps three long, sweet rides and a lot of little two-second boosts.  I would catch something and glide past Rick, and then he would catch something and glide past me.  On and on it went until we brought it home in the protected waters of Fort Moultrie.

And with that, I plan to start heading back west today.  I still have many thoughts about this weekend of intense surf ski action that I have yet to process fully and articulate here.  I will try my best to say more about it in the next couple of days.

Monday photo feature

Reid Hyle of Rockledge, Florida, fends off the challenge of Jesse Lischuk of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to win the 2014 North Shore Cup.  The 2014 edition took place in November, and the temperature at race time was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.  Jesse armed himself with pogies and a ski cap, while Reid settled for three or four layers of shirts.  Photo by Vadim Lischuk; stolen from the North Shore Cup web page.

The 2015 North Shore Cup took place this past weekend--about a month earlier than last year--and the weather was cool and breezy but nearly 40 degrees warmer.  I was thankful for that because I got very wet during the course of the race.

Results are up; I'm still digesting it all

The results of the 2015 North Shore Cup are now posted here.

It turns out I was the 13th fastest overall finisher.  I was 11th among the men; the women had a separate start and so I wasn't racing them head-to-head, but two of them posted faster times than mine.  One of them was Alex McLain of Byfield, Massachussetts, a 26-year-old flatwater sprint racer who did yesterday's race in an ICF K1 (a Legacy).  I'm very impressed that she was able to keep that boat upright at all, let alone cover the course five minutes and two seconds faster than I did.

Memphian Kata Dismukes finished third among the women, and was only nineteen seconds slower than I was.

I spent last night in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, at the home of Rick Carter's girlfriend Wyndy.  Today we're hoping to do some downwind paddling in the Atlantic if conditions are right.  It's time to start loosening up my sore muscles.

Feeling sort of defeated

The 12-mile North Shore Cup took place this morning on Lake Marion near Summerton, South Carolina.  I am now exhausted and haven't had a chance to process my post-race thoughts; I have only glanced at the results and they are not yet posted on the Internet.  But I'll just say it was quite a different event from any other I've entered this year.

First, there was a high-caliber field, featuring arguably the three best racers in the U.S. right now in Austin Kieffer, Reid Hyle, and Jesse Lischuk.  It was my first race this year in which I wasn't expecting to be in the hunt for a podium finish and I had to formulate a different kind of strategy.

Second, there was the course that would take us across the heart of a large lake, and the northeast breeze that would make the conditions rough in a way I haven't encountered in a race in a long time.

The first several miles went well enough: though I was farther back in the field than I'd hoped, I figured at least some of the guys in front of me had gone out too hard and I told myself to relax and use the middle part of the race to start reeling some of them in.  Three miles into the race we reached a buoy turn that would send us into the crossing across the heart of the lake.  For the next mile or so after the turn, I felt good about my competitive chances because there were a lot of little waves that I was able to catch and ride for several seconds without paddling.  This was the closest I came to having some pure, unadulterated fun in this entire race.

Alas, as I advanced deeper into the middle of the reservoir, those waves disappeared and were gradually replaced by right-to-left beam waves seasoned with a mess of confused haystacks.  As time went on, I thought less and less about running down this guy or that guy and more and more about simply keeping myself upright.  I was soon expending an alarming amount of energy on things other than the forward propulsion of my boat.

In the distance sat a buoy marking a turn in the course to follow along the Interstate 95 bridge.  As it drew nearer with infuriating indolence, I kept my eyes on it in the hope that the water conditions in the next section of the course would be better than I was in now.

Finally I reached the buoy, and the conditions beyond it were indeed better, but I was so exhausted from fighting the water in the previous section that my motor control was practically nil.  Several dozen meters after the turn, over I went.  I climbed back on my ski, took a few more strokes, and flipped again.

During the long crossing I had managed to overtake several racers.  One of them was Ted Burnell of Chattanooga, whom I had narrowly beaten at Baton Rouge back in August.  I had somehow achieved a fairly commanding lead on him, but my flips threw the door right back open for him.  Soon enough, he and another guy overtook me, and it was clear he had a lot more left than I did because my attempt to hop on his stern wake proved feeble and futile.

By now there was less than two miles left to the finish, and I spent it watching Ted and the other guy pull away from me and trying to keep my own boat moving as efficiently as possible.  I ambled across the line an hour and 48 minutes and a few seconds after I had started.

I will post a link to the results once they are posted.  All I know at the moment is that I was the fourteenth fastest paddler in the field.  That, and the results of the race up front: Austin Kieffer of Asheville, North Carolina, claimed a convincing victory over Reid Hyle of Rockledge, Florida, and Jesse Lischuk of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

In the Palmetto State

I must be fairly far from home, because all the rivers are flowing to the Atlantic Ocean rather than the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm in the South Carolina low country, and I've made camp in Santee State Park on the western shore of Lake Marion, a vast reservoir created by a dam across the Santee River.  It's late afternoon, and I've just paddled for 40 minutes on the lake near the campground.  I did another set of 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

The base of operations for tomorrow's North Shore Cup race is across the lake in Summerton.  I will head over there shortly to check the place out and see what I can find out about the course.

I resurface

I apologize for the radio silence of the last ten days.  Although I did manage to paddle a loop of the harbor with Joe on both Tuesday and Thursday, last week was focused on non-paddling activities as I was involved in the annual Pink Palace Crafts Fair here in Memphis.  I was out of the boat from Friday through Monday, and I'm not sure that was such a bad thing.  Here in the waning moments of the race season I've been feeling weary and ready for a break, and shifting my thoughts to something else for a few days was helpful.  I don't think I lost any of the aerobic fitness I'll need for a 12-mile race this Saturday.

And now, here I am on my way to South Carolina for the North Shore Cup on Saturday.  I left Tuesday afternoon and spent the night with a friend in Nashville.  Yesterday I continued east to the Charlotte-Gastonia area, where my sister's family lives.  I stopped along the way for 40 minutes of paddling on Center Hill Lake, a reservoir on the Caney Fork River on the Cumberland Plateau.  I did six 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals, and felt sharper than I'd expected.

Today I am hanging out visiting family.  I hope to get an early start tomorrow for Lake Marion, where I'll make camp and do a few more sprints and try to be ready to compete.

There's work and then there's play

I went down to the river on a beautiful sunny morning today.  I think the temperature had warmed above 70 degrees Fahrenheit by the time I was on the water.

Last week I didn't do any 8-stroke sprints until Saturday because of all my annoying little ailments.  I did three of them on Saturday before starting my workout, but they didn't feel sharp at all.  Today I did another set of three, and they felt much sharper.  Then, as I headed out of the harbor and onto the river, I saw a big Corps of Engineers rig churning upriver and producing some good looking waves.  So out I went and threw in another set of sprints and managed to catch several nice rides.  And just like that, I got a good "just for fun" workout today, as opposed to Saturday's more formal workout.

Monday photo feature

Lee Sanders competes in the spring slalom race on Alabama's Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River in 1997.

Back to work

Yesterday I did a set of eight 2-minute pieces with two minutes recovery in between.  Just like in the workout I did last weekend, I shot for a pace at or slightly above what I hope to maintain in the 12-mile North Shore Cup in two weeks.

My body was doing better by yesterday.  I still had a small bit of hip discomfort, but otherwise I felt pretty good in the boat.

We're just several days into October, but yesterday could have passed for a November day.  It was overcast and breezy and about 58 degrees Fahrenheit outside--not quite the Arctic, but nevertheless an abrupt change from the weather we'd been having.  I had to dig out some cooler-weather clothing that I had put away back in May.

Yesterday's workout might be the last substantial session I have before the race.  Next weekend I'm involved in the Pink Palace Crafts Fair and will be out of the boat Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Bleah

I'm happy to say that the aches and pains I complained about earlier in the week have abated.  I'm not so happy to say that some new discomfort has presented itself almost every day this week.  The latest has been one of those neck cricks that I think result from sleeping in some weird position; I seem to have had an inordinate number of those in recent weeks.  I've also been hurting in my hip area, where it feels like something is out of joint.  It's all stuff I've had before and that's worked itself out in two or three days, but right now I'm yearning for even just one day free of pain.

I've paddled pretty easy both Tuesday and yesterday.  I'm hoping to get in some kind of workout this weekend if my body feels up to it.

Monday photo feature

I took trips down to Key Largo, Florida, in 2004, '05, and '06.  Each time I made sure to visit the mangrove tunnels in Florida Bay just inside the boundary of Everglades National Park.

It's makin' me achin'

In last Wednesday's post I mentioned that my lat and shoulder woes had eased.  But in the second half of last week I found myself with a new problem: back pain and stiffness from my neck down to my waist.  My back has mostly felt good all this year, and I really hope I'm not slipping back into the problems I dealt with for much of the previous decade.  In my life I've had all different kinds of injuries: sprained ankles, iliotibial band syndrome, and knee tendinitis from running; cut fingers in the workshop that were bad enough to send me to the emergency room; and shoulder pain and wrist tendinitis from paddling.  But none of that is as bad as discomfort in my back.  Back pain and stiffness has a way of making my very existence seem like an ordeal--a bummer, even--every minute of the day.

The problems weren't that bad yet when I paddled on Thursday, and I went out and had a good, satisfying workout.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did six two-minute pieces with three minutes recovery in between.  My goal pace for each piece was at or slightly above what I think my pace should be in the North Shore Cup next month.

By Saturday morning I felt terrible, and I kept the paddling brief and easy.  I paddled for 40 minutes mostly in the harbor, venturing out on the river near the harbor's mouth for just a few minutes.

When I woke up yesterday morning the condition had eased to just a little bit of soreness up near the base of my neck.  I went downtown to paddle and ended up feeling good in the boat.  I paddled for 80 minutes at a good strong pace with a few surges thrown in.

Back here at home I'm just trying to do all the things I've learned to do in many years of dealing with back aches.  I sure hope I can work myself out of this sooner rather than later.

Balancing technique practice and fitness training

I'm pleased to say that my upper back and lat-muscle area is feeling better.  Yesterday I paddled a moderate pace in the harbor with Joe for about 70 minutes.  Joe has been away at trade shows for several weeks--a periodic part of his life as the co-owner and president of Outdoors, Inc.--so it was nice to catch up with him and have some company on the water for the first time in a while.

This morning I read this interesting article about the science-based training program of a top college middle distance runner.  For the last couple of years I've been emphasizing technical practice over physiological principles in my own training, but that doesn't mean the physiological stuff isn't important, and I'm already kicking around a couple of new ideas in my head after reading this article. The nice thing is that you can always practice technique no matter what the main focus of a workout is.

Monday photo feature

Tinsley Taylor snapped this photo of me just after I'd crossed the finish line at Saturday's Gator Bait race outside Jackson, Mississippi.  I think the look on my face says it all.

Recovery day

This morning I went downtown and paddled easy for 50 minutes.  I'm still having this soreness in my lat muscles, and the only thing I can think of that might have caused it is the bent-over row exercise that I'm doing as part of my strength routine this month.  I suppose it could also have happened during my surf session last Tuesday, when I was paddling while off-balance and probably using my arms and shoulders too much; but in my experience most of my injuries have occurred out of the boat, not in it.

But I don't know if I would even call this an injury, as it's not really disrupting anything.  In the meantime, I'm just trying to give the area plenty of love--thorough warmup and stretching, stuff like that.

Escaping the gators

When I woke up this morning I was still feeling some discomfort in my right lat muscle.  I had breakfast and did some stretching in my motel room before heading to the race site.

Fortunately I felt good in the boat as I paddled around for a warmup.  As the 9:30 AM start time approached I found myself a spot on the starting line and waited.

The course had been about 8800 meters (5.5 miles) long in previous years, but today it had to be modified a bit because of low water, and the result was a circuit some 1000 meters shorter (4.75 miles or so).

The gun fired, and paddlers set off across an expanse of open water.  To my right Joseph DiChiacchio of Rising Fawn, Georgia, grabbed the early lead, flowed closely by Shane Kleynhans of Brandon, Mississippi.  I sensed the presence behind me of Rick Carter of Eutawville, South Carolina, and Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi.

Over to the left I saw the Pellerin triplets (Conrad, Carson, and Peyton) looking strong.  I've been seeing these kids at races down along the Gulf Coast for a few years now (they are from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana) and now, at the ripe old age of 13, they are showing some real progress.  The boys were in one of those hybrid team boats you see in ultra-distance races like the Texas Water Safari and the Tour du Teche, and were paddling it as a K3.  As we approached the entrance to the narrow channel that would take us behind a couple of islands and into the dreaded lily pads, it was apparent to me that they were setting the pace to beat, so I sprinted hard to get on their stern wake right at the end of the open-water crossing.

Knowing I would need energy for a strong finish later on, I sat on the triplets' wake throughout this "back stretch" portion of the course.  By this time we had opened a lead on the rest of the field, but as we entered the lily-pad-infested area that stood between us and the return to open water, I could see a paddler out of the corner of my eye, working hard to join our lead pack (it was Rick Carter, I would learn later).

Work crews had cut a decent channel through the lily pads for us to follow, but there were plenty of stray plants here and there, and I hoped the weed guard just fore of my rudder would be equal to the challenge.  The water was also quite shallow here as a result of the low lake level, subjecting us to a brutal bottom-drag effect.

Finally we emerged from the mess and crossed open water toward a buoy.  After rounding this buoy we would have a final approach to the finish line of maybe 2000 meters.  I held my position on the triplets' stern wake in the meantime, with Rick Carter hanging in there some ten meters back.

As we made the right turn around the buoy I took advantage of the slower turning ability of the triplets' long boat to move up onto their starboard-side wake.  The race was on in earnest now.  It was a long finishing stretch and I didn't want to move too soon, but finally I threw in a surge... and the triplets responded immediately.  I had heard they had spent a lot of time in the boat together this summer, and it was showing now as all three brains were on the same page.

I dropped back onto their side wake to regroup.  I tried a couple more surges, and the triplets hung tough each time.  Finally, with about 600 meters to go, I knew I would have to take control for good or (figuratively) die trying.  I began to surge, and this time I refused to stop, even as my internal tachometer soared into the red zone.  The triplets responded again, but little by little I continued to gain.  By the time I entered the cove where the finish line was, they had disappeared from my peripheral vision, and I crossed the line to claim one of the more satisfying victories I've had in a while.

Experience beat youth this time around, but of course youths don't stay youthful forever, and I think I'd better savor every day I'm still able to beat these kids because those days are probably numbered.

Now, at the end of the day, I'm back home in Memphis.  My right lat muscle still feels sore, but no worse than before.  I believe an easy recovery paddle is in order for tomorrow.

My time was 42 minutes, 32.1 seconds.  The triplets were eight seconds back.  Rick Carter took third place overall, followed by Jeb Berry in fourth.  Myrlene Marsa of Rising Fawn, Georgia, was the top female finisher with a time of 50:05.6.  The complete results are posted here.  The triplets' boat is listed as a K2 under the name Carson Pellerin, but it was in fact all three of them paddling that boat.

Race director Michelle Blair and her crew of volunteers deserve props for a well-organized and thoroughly enjoyable event.  I hope the Gator Bait race will remain a fixture on the calendar for many years to come.

Deep South pre-race

I'm spending tonight in the opulent Candlewood Suites of Flowood, Mississippi, ahead of tomorrow's Gator Bait race on Ross R. Barnett Reservoir.  The reservoir is named for the man who served as governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964, and the nicest thing I can say about him is that he was not my kind of guy.  But when you're a governor or the president or some such, you're assured of having some stuff named after you no matter what kind of guy you are.  The reservoir itself is actually quite lovely, and if I were a resident of the greater Jackson area I would likely be spending many hours in my boat on it.

The race will take place on a part of the reservoir called Pelahatchie Bay, so named because it's the inundated watershed of Pelahatchie Creek just above its confluence with the Pearl River.  It's a neat course, with a couple of open-water crossings and a narrow channel that runs behind a couple of islands, but there's a hazard in the form of thick water lilies about two thirds of the way in.  This afternoon I paddled out there to see if I could find the route through, and did not succeed.  I went over the map with race director Michelle Blair this evening, and she assured me there would be personnel in place tomorrow pointing the correct way, so with any luck all will be well.

It seems that my little surfing indulgence on Tuesday did indeed strain some muscles in my upper back area, as I spent Wednesday in considerable discomfort.  By today it was down to just a little bit of soreness in both lat muscles.  Tomorrow morning I'll stretch and warm up as thoroughly as I know how, and hope for the best.

A race now and a race later

With the Gator Bait race coming up this Saturday, I turn my attention to being ready.  Since I'm looking at doing an event with some fairly elite competition next month, I'm sort of "training through" this week, but that doesn't mean I lack the proper respect for the task at hand.  I know of at least one strong racer registered for Saturday's race, and I can't expect to challenge him for the overall win if I don't bring my "A" game.

And so, I'm trying to get some rest this week--both physical and mental.  The week of a race is also a good time to work on the ATP-CP energy system because you can do so without putting excessive stress on your muscles.  A robust ATP-CP system allows a racer to get a good fast start off the line for some ten seconds before he starts tapping into his aerobic and lactic systems.

Yesterday in the boat I warmed up and did six 12-stroke sprints with full recovery in between.  Each sprint takes me between ten and fifteen seconds--the outer limit of time the body can draw from the ATP-CP system before it starts going lactic.

My intention for the rest of the 60 minutes was to paddle easy--take good strokes but otherwise keep things restful.  But when I got to the mouth of the harbor there was an upbound barge rig producing an enormous wake, and at this time of year, when the weather is hot and the river is low and the water is warm, no self-respecting paddler passes up an opportunity to surf.  So I surfed, and chalked it up to my training effort for next month.  I feel a bit tired today, and sore up between my shoulder blades, but I've still got time to rest up before Saturday.

I did the September strength routine both Monday and today.  Because of the race I'll wait until next Monday to do it again.

Monday photo feature

What's neater than a steel railroad trestle?  Not a thing, that's what.  One of the things I love about paddling is that I get to paddle under railroad trestles all over the place.

This one, spanning the entrance to the Back Bay of Biloxi near Ocean Springs, Mississippi, has the added niftiness of rotating ninety degrees to allow ships and barges to pass through.

Trying to stay the course

It's been a week in which I've felt overwhelmed by all of life's minutiae.  I've felt tired and anxious, asking myself how I can possibly get down to the river in this state, much less be ready to race next Saturday.

And yet, I've been feeling pretty good in the boat.  My sessions have been mostly unstructured, doing sprints and surges as I've felt like it rather than as sets of intervals, but my strokes have felt smooth and effective.  I'm also feeling good about this month's strength routine, which I'm doing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

On Saturday I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and paddled out onto the river.  A barge rig was churning upriver very quickly, and I ferried out hoping to recreate the surfing sweetness of last Tuesday.  But I couldn't get any sort of ride on these waves.  A stiff breeze from the north wasn't helping.  I spent the rest of the 60 minutes doing a loop up above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and back down into the harbor.  The water out on the river was quite choppy from the wind and the towboat, and I did a couple of two-minute surges and felt like I was moving the boat pretty well on that water.  I have a feeling next month's North Shore Cup race on Lake Marion near Charleston will have some similar conditions.

Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes again, and this time I managed to get a couple of good rides behind an upbound tow.  I really had to hammer to keep the boat ahead of each swell, and by the time it was over I had piled up quite a few all-out sprints.

For the rest of this week I think I'll be paddling a bit easier with a few short sprints to get myself ready for Saturday's Gator Bait race.

Mid South surfing

On Saturday I paddled for 60 minutes, and felt pretty good in the boat even though I was still feeling a bit beat-up from the construction work I'd done earlier.  I did three 8-stroke sprints, and those went reasonably well.  I wasn't nearly as sore from my new strength routine as I thought I'd be.

I was out of the boat the rest of the holiday weekend, spending Sunday at a family gathering up in Jackson, Tennessee, and doing two go-rounds of the September strength routine yesterday.

This morning I felt tired and unmotivated as I paddled away from the dock, but out on the river I found an upstream-bound barge rig spitting a huge wake from its stern, and I ferried out to see what the surf was like.  Turned out it was great.  It took me a few tries to figure out the stroke timing, but soon I was getting some sweet rides.  In the end I got in a nice set of sprints without the tedious feel of doing an interval workout, and that's just what I needed on this particular day.

Monday photo feature

Sonny Salomon cruises down White's Creek on the Cumberland Plateau in the spring of 2001.  Photo by Julie Keller.

A new strength routine

It's time to start doing some strength work for the month of September.  I did a round of this routine this morning:

1.  Rubber band "pre-hab" exercises demonstrated at 8:42 and 9:30 of this video
2.  Hindu squats (demonstrated in this video)
3.  Military press with a pair of dumbbells
4.  Knee lifts, done while hanging from my gymnast's rings and gripping a ten-pound medicine ball between my knees
5.  Bent-over rows


It's been a while since I've made this clear, but it's normal for me to make two trips through a strength routine on any given day.  Today, since my muscles are not yet used to these exercises, I made just one trip through.  I'll probably still be sore later.

Regarding the weight of the dumbbells: I use dumbbells that are heavy enough to limit me to twelve reps or fewer, so I'm working on power and not just endurance.  Beyond that, I concern myself much more with good technique than with a number of pounds or kilograms.  After all, I'm a paddler, not a bodybuilder.

As for the Hindu squats and knee lifts, my number of reps should go up as the month goes along.  What I've always done with Hindu squats, in fact, is add two reps with each session.  Today I did 60 reps; next time I'll do 62 reps, and the next time 64 reps, and so on.

Regrouping

For some reason I felt tireder than usual after last weekend's competition, and I've been letting myself take it easy for a few days since then.  I did an easy 30 minutes in the boat on Sunday and about 40 minutes with Joe on Tuesday.  I haven't done any strength work this week, though if I'm going to attend the North Shore Cup next month I should probably get some good work in between now and then.  I'm thinking tomorrow I'll work up a new routine for the month of September.

I'm also spending this week catching up on a few construction chores.  Yesterday I finally put up some rain gutters on the back side of my building.  They'd been sitting there waiting to be installed for months, and the main reason for the delay was that I didn't own a tall enough ladder to get up there.  But this week my friend Mike, who did the tile work on the front side of my building last winter, is working on another building in my block, and he offered to loan me a tall ladder of his, so I jumped at the opportunity and got the gutters up at last.

The reason I mention that here is that I was afraid I'd hurt myself.  I believe I own the world's heaviest cordless drill, and while working yesterday I was often at the top of the ladder with my arm fully extended, boring holes at all kinds of weird angles with that thing.  By the time I was finished my right shoulder muscles up around the base of my neck felt strained, and the discomfort continued once I was in bed for the night.  I'm happy to say that the condition seems better this morning, however.

In fact, I felt surprisingly good in the boat today, paddling for 50 minutes out on a choppy Mississippi.  I kept the pace moderate and just tried to enjoy the reasonably nice day.  The river has settled down to its low-water levels that are typical in late summer.  I enjoyed paddling out there while it was bank-full of water, and I'm enjoying it now with its exposed sandbars and muddy banks. The Mississippi is never the same river two days in a row, and I love that about it.

Monday photo feature

In honor of my trip to Baton Rouge over the weekend, here's a picture of another Baton Rouge paddler, Randall Peterson, my friend from camp.  What's Randall doing here?  Just horsing around, that's what.  The year is 1995, and the place is the Woodall Shoals parking lot at the Chattooga River.

Post-race fun stuff

The results of yesterday's Big River Regional race have now been posted.  My time for the 13-mile race down the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge was one hour, 26 minutes, 20 seconds--three seconds slower than the overall fastest time posted by the OC-2 team of Gary and Matt Wise.  (Only one member of each "team" boat is listed in the results.)  I'm not sure I believe Ted Burnell was eight whole seconds behind me, but that's what it says.

Gary Wise was the sternman in the OC-2, the man I spoke to during and after the race.  It turns out Matt Wise is his grandson.  As I mentioned in my last post, I thought I understood Gary to say he lived in Austin, but according to today's Baton Rouge Advocate, he and his grandson live in Miramar Beach, Florida.

The results are posted in photograph form on Face Book, so I share them here.

The race organizers also posted the following photo on Face Book: a group shot of everybody that happened to be hanging around the post-race party when the awards rolled around.  Even though it's a huge group of people, I'm easy to spot because I happen to be standing over on the far right.  That's me in the grey Outdoors, Inc., shirt.

Red Stick Racing

I'm back home from my whirlwind trip to Baton Rouge.  I ran down there Friday; shared a hotel room with fellow racer Phil Capel of Sherwood, Arkansas; raced yesterday morning; hung around the post-race party until the awards; and motored back up here to good old Memphis, Tennessee.

The Big River Regional race started right at downtown Baton Rouge, several hundred meters above the Mississippi River (Interstate 10) Bridge.  The starting line was out in the downstream flow, and with just over 200 paddlers registered, there was some bumping and jostling as we tried to stay in position while waiting for the gun to go off.

The gun did go off right on time, good for a check in the "plus" column of my mental evaluation of the event.  I hurried out into the main current and was joined by Kata Dismukes, whose company I'd expected, and an outrigger C-2 paddled by Gary and Matt Wise, with whom I was unfamiliar.

When I have the early lead in a race, I have to decide whether I should try to put the thing away early or hang back and exchange wake rides with other paddlers for a while.  After some internal deliberation I chose the former tactic and opened up a gap... and not much later I was wondering if that had been a mistake.  Fatigue seemed to be setting in sooner than usual, and with nearly half the race still ahead of me, I began to shift from "attack" mode to "maintain position" mode.

As I approached the big leftward bend in the river that leads into the long homestretch, the OC-2 was hanging in there over my right shoulder and Ted Burnell, a surf ski paddler from Chattanooga, had moved up onto my stern.  Ted then moved to my left and took a much tighter line through the bend than I'd intended to take.  I'd have preferred to stay out in somewhat faster water, but I didn't want to lose contact with Ted, so I played it his way, and by the time we were emerging from the bend he had taken the lead and I was sitting on his stern wake, hoping to chill out for a while and conserve energy for a strong finish.

Over to our right the OC-2 was mounting a strong surge and in a matter of minutes it would take the lead.  This is where some might argue that I should have just let them go, and focus on winning my own class.  But in situations like this my ego and macho insecurity have a way of kicking in: I wanna be the first boat across the line, by golly.  So I dug in and moved onto the OC-2's wake.

With an Australian accent, the stern paddler said to me, "Be careful mate--they might not like you drafting outside o'class."  I replied that I hadn't heard the race director say anything about it.  It's an issue I'm aware of, and I've always understood that it's up to each race organizer whether drafting outside of class is allowed in his event; if there had been an announcement declaring the tactic illegal, I'd have gladly abided by it.  But having heard nothing, I'd assumed that all wakes were fair game.  In any case, I spent the last couple of miles sitting there wondering if I'd be summarily DQ'd at the finish.

As we entered the last several hundred meters to the finish, it was obvious that the OC-2 had a lot more juice left than I did.  I made a game attempt to sprint for the win, but my arms were tying up and the outrigger glided away beyond my reach.  And then I noticed Ted closing fast on my left.  The finish buoys were placed at a bizarre angle and I wasn't sure I had Ted beat until the very last stroke.

I half expected the OC-2 stern paddler to lay into me with a lecture, but instead he just smiled and said "Nice job, mate."  I responded in kind, and asked where he was from.  I think he told me he was now living in Austin, though he was clearly a native Aussie.  I didn't have much time to process our conversation because when I got out of my boat I sank thigh-deep in ultra-fine silt.  "On the mat!  On the mat!" shouted a girl who was helping finishers onto a rubberized plastic mat where they would not be subsumed into the fabled Mississippi Mud.

Kata Dismukes came into the finish several minutes behind Ted to take the female title, both overall and in the surf ski class.  I later learned that she had been struggling with shoulder pain for the entire race.

All told, I had an enjoyable trip and am satisfied with how I did.  What's next?  I'm not sure.  For today, I plan to go downtown for a short recovery paddle and put my boat away at the marina.  I'm tentatively planning to do a low-key event, the Gator Bait Race, on September 19.  A couple of friends have encouraged me to enter the North Shore Cup, north-northwest of Charleston on Lake Marion, on October 17; I'll have to see how the next few weeks of paddling go and how I'm feeling and how eager I am to drive all the way over there.

We'll see.

Another race already

Here's a quick note before I head down to the river, do a short paddle, load up the boat, and head south for tomorrow's Big River Regional race on the Mississippi at Baton Rouge.

I've kept the intensity low this week because of some achiness in my lats and shoulders.  It's never felt like something that would keep me from racing tomorrow, but since I'm already as trained-up as I'm going to be for tomorrow, there was no reason to push it this week.  I paddled with Joe in the harbor on Tuesday and Thursday, and today I plan to try a couple of short sprints and see how it all feels.

Monday photo feature

The last time I paddled on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge was 22 years ago in a whitewater C-1.  I was accompanied by this guy, Baton Rouge native Barry Kennon.  Barry, a frighteningly-talented paddler, was a member of the U.S. whitewater slalom team at the time.  A few years later he would win the C-1 class at the world championships of whitewater rodeo.  Photo by Randall Peterson.

If I remember correctly, we put our boats in the water in almost the exact spot where the Big River Regional race will be starting this Saturday, just upstream of the Interstate 10 bridge.  I'll be in a much different-looking boat (a surf ski) this time.

Back home and recovering

This morning I paddled in the rain for about ten minutes, and thought I detected a theme for the weekend.  But then the rain let up and I did the rest of my 70-minute recovery paddle under overcast skies in high humidity.

I'd decided that as long as my boat was on the car I ought to paddle someplace different, and give myself a break from the same old, same old.  I drove down south of downtown Memphis to McKellar Lake, which in fact is not a lake at all, but a slackwater harbor off the Mississippi, lined by an assortment of industrial concerns as well as TVA's Allen Fossil Plant.  It'll never be mistaken for pristine wilderness, but it's ours, by golly.

Beautiful McKellar Lake.

I felt sluggish and tired in the boat--not unusual for a recovery paddle.  The whole point of a recovery paddle, after all, is to flush out the lactic acid and get some fresh blood into your race-damaged muscles so they can mend more quickly.  Tempting though it is to stay home and lie on the couch after a race or hard workout, you'll feel better sooner if you drag yourself down to the river and paddle a bit.

Now I turn my attention to my second competition is as many weeks: the Big River Regional, a 13-mile race on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.  I have five days to get my (as of this Friday) 48-year-old self ready to go.

Fun while it lasted

Racers gathered at Alton Slough on the Mississippi River yesterday morning with the intention of racing ten miles, doing five laps of a two-mile loop.  But right as I was completing my second lap the race was called due to lightning.

I had checked the forecast at www.weather.com before I left the motel, and it predicted slim chances of rain before noon.  But a check of the Internet radar showed some heavy storms moving east from the Jefferson City area, and when I arrived at the race site the sky looked like it would let loose well before noon.  In the pre-race meeting, race director Bryan Hopkins said the race would start on time, but that the Corps of Engineers, whose rangers were operating safety boats for the event, would call the race if lightning moved into the area.

We lined up and the gun went off, and I found myself with plenty of company in the first few hundred meters even though I had sprinted hard off the line.  After making the first buoy turn, two tandem kayaks and I began to separate from the pack a bit.  I found myself in a stiff competition with Jim Short and Dylan McHardy of Springfield, Missouri, and Ron Ladzinski and Mira Doneva of Olathe, Kansas.  The pace was fairly brisk and I found myself working hard to stay on my competitors' wakes.  I wasn't exactly on the ropes, but by the time we were finishing our second lap I was wondering whether I would be able to hang with these tandems for all five.  Then the sirens went off, calling everybody to shore, and the question became moot.

We gathered in the park pavilion and discussed what to do next.  One option was to try to resume the race with everybody where he had been when the sirens had started, but since that could not be done truly fairly we decided to do the whole race over, this time over two laps instead of five.  The plan was to start the race about seventy minutes later, but a heavy rain began to settle in and the storm became ever more severe, the Internet radar showing no let-up, so eventually the race organizers decided to send us home.

Medals were awarded based on each racer's position at the moment of the stop-command.  I had been in second place overall, right behind Dylan and Jim and right ahead of Mira and Ron, but since I was in first place among single kayakers, I got myself a first-place medal.  It wasn't really fair, of course--there's no telling who might have mounted a surge and taken me down later in the race.  But the race organizers had medals to get rid of, and there was no fairer way to hand them out, so there it was.  After getting thoroughly drenched while carrying my boat back to the car and strapping it down, I drove away generally happy to have gotten a good workout and paddled in a somewhat different part of the country from most of my race settings in recent years.

As I drove south through the city of Saint Louis, the rain eased and finally stopped.  I found a place to park and had lunch consisting of an apple, celery, and some crackers.  Then I stopped for dessert at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, a Saint Louis institution since 1929.  At the suggestion of the radio announcers for Cardinals baseball games, I tried the lemon crumb concrete.  It was mightily good.

Monday photo feature

This week's photo feature is actually a set of photos I took this past Friday.  It supports my belief that if you look hard enough, you can find some whitewater in almost any part of the world.

As I've been mentioning in this blog, the Mississippi River recently spent several weeks at a pretty high level--around 32 and a half feet on the Memphis gauge.  When the water rises that high, it inundates a wide swath of bottomland in the basin, and oxbow lakes like Dacus Lake, on the Arkansas side of the river just across from downtown Memphis, become reconnected with the river from which they were born.  If you look back at some of my recent posts you'll see that I was able to paddle onto Dacus Lake during training sessions.

Then, when the river level drops, all that water must run off the bottomland back into the main channel.  On most of the acreage of the Mississippi basin, this happens as quickly as the water recedes; but in places where the floodwater fills in a lake, more interesting things can happen.  The photo above shows what happens where Dacus Lake drains back into the Mississippi, straight across from The Pyramid.

The waterfall in the photo is actually an artificial creation: somebody--the Corps of Engineers, maybe--piled some boulders and poured some concrete in the channel, perhaps to maintain a higher "pool" level in Dacus Lake.  And so, as the Mississippi drops back down from flood stage, water cascades over this precipice just like it would in a mountain creek.  Here's another shot of the falls:

Yes, fellow whitewater paddlers, I most certainly did scout the falls for good lines.  But the rapid is full of sharp rocks and concrete and steel rebar (that's rebar sticking up in the foreground), so a paddler would be banging and scraping at best and pinned at worst.  But if you can ignore the non-natural aspects of this rapid, it does at least offer the pleasant sensations of fast rushing water, and it's a nice place to visit on a hot Mid South summer day.  Here are several more shots of the channel as it runs out to the main river.  You can see The Pyramid across the river in the last one:

I get very excited whenever I find a place like this out there in the vast Mississippi basin, but I've found it difficult to get anybody else to care.  I posted one of these photos on Face Book the other day, and the response I got was mostly a bunch of chirping crickets.  Oh well... perhaps it's an acquired taste.  My excitement is probably similar to what astronomers feel when an eclipse happens.  Over the next few days this rapid will dry up as the Dacus Lake level drops below the top of the concrete-and-boulder dam.

Feeling hot, in a good way

We had some truly delightful weather late this past week.  Now the heat and humidity are moving back upward, but it's not too bad yet.  Actually, today was the sort of day I think all summer should be.  Summer should be hot; just not so stifling that I dread stepping out the door.  I think today's high was around 92 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was fairly humid but not suffocatingly so.

I paddled for 80 minutes this morning, doing my usual 8-second sprints before settling into a strong pace with several hard surges.  I felt good in the boat and am looking forward to racing on the mighty Mississippi above St. Louis next Saturday and at Baton Rouge the Saturday after that.

Balance is a skill

Today I did two rounds of the August strength routine.  A couple of the exercises require some pretty keen balance, and when I started the routine a week ago I could barely do them.  Today I'm doing them a lot better even though they're still not easy.  It's a nice little reminder that balance is something you can improve with some practice and persistence, even in a very tippy race boat.

Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes out on the Mississippi.  As usual I started with a warmup and several 8-second sprints.  During the course of the session I did several pretty hard two-minute surges.  Anybody who's raced with me knows that mid-race surges are a big part of my racing game, and I hope to be prepared to throw in some more during the two races I've got coming up this month.

We've finally gotten a true break from the dog days of summer, as some drier air has moved in from up north.  I don't know if it'll last until my race a week from this Saturday, but maybe the weather won't be as oppressive as it has been for the last few weeks.

Monday photo feature

It looks like an exotic coastal locale, but it's actually just Greer's Ferry Reservoir back in September of 2006.  Greer's Ferry is a hundred miles or so west of Memphis near Heber Springs, Arkansas.

River dynamism here in the flatlands

Today's forecast called for a high temperature near 100 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index up near 110.  But once again I got out this morning before conditions were that bad.  I paddled for 80 minutes, and my energy held up well and I felt about as good in the boat as I have in quite a while.

I paddled over to the channel where Dacus Lake drains into the Mississippi.  A couple of weeks ago I was able to paddle up this channel and onto the lake, but today, with the river some 18 feet lower on the Memphis gauge, there was a waterfall where the channel meets the main river.  No joke--there's a pile of boulders there, probably put there by the Corps of Engineers long ago, and the water that had filled Dacus Lake during the recent high water period was rushing down the channel and over these rocks.  I paddled right up to the base of it, and for a brief moment I felt like I was on a Blue Ridge Mountain creek as I felt the spray and took in the smell of the aerated water.  I also beheld with curiosity the sight of the clear green water from the lake flowing into the muddy brown water of the mighty Mississippi.

This afternoon I submitted my registration for the Big River Regional race on the Mississippi River down at Baton Rouge on August 29.  I'm now signed up for two races on consecutive weekends: on the 22nd I'll be doing the Firecracker Race on the Mississippi up at West Alton, Missouri.