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.