The week that was

With my next race a while off now, I'm trying to settle back into a good-quality routine.

On Thursday I paddled for 60 minutes in very windy conditions on the Memphis riverfront.  I did three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, and then spent some time trying to surf some medium-sized waves out on the river near the southern tip of Mud Island.  I wasn't achieving much sweetness in the surfing department, so when I got tired of trying I returned to the harbor and did some balance drills in the beam waves.  All told, I got a pretty good practice session in, and because I was having fun with it I didn't feel like I was working that hard.

On Saturday I paddled for another 60 minutes, and this time the conditions were mostly calm, but quite wet.  We had just had an enormous amount of rain on Friday--3.41 inches between 6 PM Thursday and 6 PM Friday--and there were a few remnants of that system lurking around the river Saturday morning.  As I paddled from the mouth of the harbor up toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, I could see heavy rain falling on the Loosahatchie Bar, less than a mile away.  About ten minutes later that rain was drenching me.  But I forged ahead, having learned at camp years ago that "skin is waterproof."

My plan is to do a longer paddle on Sunday for the next several weeks.  Today I paddled for 120 minutes, going up to the mouth of the Wolf River and then a couple of miles up the Wolf.  The Mississippi, at a pretty high level of 30.1 feet on the Memphis gauge this morning, was backed up the Wolf for quite a few miles, so the couple of miles I paddled between the mouth of the Wolf and the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge consisted basically of flatwater.  On this section of the morning's route I pushed the tempo for three minutes out of every ten minutes.  I was getting very tired by the time I was heading back down the Mississippi, and I tried to paddle with good form even though the intensity was dropping.

Meanwhile, I'm still doing the June-July strength routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.