What's the meaning of all this?

On Monday I did two sets of the May-June strength routine.

Yesterday was another rather hot but lovely day out on the river.  I started with four of my little power-building drills, where I backpaddle and then do eight hard forward strokes, overcoming the inertia; then I did ten 30-second sprints with two minutes recovery in between.

This morning I did two more sets of the May-June strength routine.  On Friday I'll do my last round of this routine before the June 20 Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.

Here's a question I'm sure every athlete asks himself or herself once in a while: Do I really need to be doing all this training?  Could I perform just as well on eighty percent of the training I've been doing?  Sixty percent?  Forty percent?

I'm not really going to attempt to answer this sort of question.  The answer is different for every athlete, and there are many variables: the athlete's age, the level of competition, the type and frequency of competitions... the question will always be asked because there is no definitive answer.

But it's a good question nevertheless, because I think you should always analyze and evaluate what you're doing.  Long-time readers of this blog know that in the last couple of years I've been focusing more on the mechanics of my stroke and not quite so much on the physiological stuff like aerobic fitness and lactic endurance and so on.  I think I've said on many occasions that technique is more important than anything else for the person who wants to go fast in a kayak or canoe.  And, as I get older, my body doesn't handle a high volume of training so well, but I can always make technical improvements.  And it's not like my fitness doesn't benefit even though I'm paying more attention to technique.

Then again, the physiological principles do remain important, and I'll say a few words here about how they play into my preparation for the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race ten days from now.

The OICKR is a pretty short race--about 5000 meters.  When the starting gun goes off, racers sprint off the line to get the best position they can; after several hundred meters, they settle into a pace they can sustain for the majority of the race.  For those familiar with the course, I'd say this transition takes place about where racers pass the boat ramp at the north end of Mud Island.

Racers maintain this sustainable (but still pretty quick, to be competitive) pace down the Mississippi for some three to four thousand meters, passing beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge in the process.  As they round the southern tip of Mud Island and head up into Wolf River Harbor, where the finish line awaits some 700 meters away, they pick up the intensity again for the final push.

That "middle of the race" pace is something I think I can handle no matter how much or how little training I've done.  Sure, it'll probably hurt more if I'm out of shape, but I can still make it happen.

It's the first several hundred meters and the last several hundred meters that I'm really preparing for in my training.  In my experience, if I haven't been practicing any kind of speed, then I have no turnover to get myself quickly off the starting line.  And in that final surge to the finish, lactic acid is beginning to assert itself in my muscles, and if I haven't done any kind of work on that energy system my muscles simply tie up and leave me in the lurch.

So that's been the focus of these workouts last week and this week.  (Ideally, I'd have started this sort of work a few weeks prior, but my shoulder ailment put that on hold for a bit.)  The workouts I did last week were for the lactic system: most of the pieces were at least as long as the recovery interval, and the objective was to maintain good stroke form while paddling at my OICKR start/finish pace throughout the workouts.  Yesterday's workout was more of a speed workout: the pieces were 30 seconds, versus two minutes for the recovery interval.  But the pieces were long enough for my body to go a bit lactic toward the end of each one.

The plan for tomorrow is to do the last hard workout before race day.  I'll discuss it in my next post.