I have a race up in Missouri this Saturday, and I'd like to do well in that. But there's a lot of season to come after that, and I'm moving ahead with my eye toward the future as well. A big date on the calendar is June 18, when the 35th Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race takes place. It's my hometown race, and that's reason enough to want to do well, but it's also a very competitive race. In some years there are as many as a half dozen guys right around my ability level, and we're all fighting it out to finish in the medals. And it's a short race--5000 meters--so I've got to start working on speed and lactic endurance more. So that will be a theme of the next month or so of training.
On Saturday I paddled for 60 minutes. After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did a set of eight one-minute pieces with two minutes recovery. I had my GPS with me and was shooting for 8 miles per hour during each piece. When I went too fast--at times I hit as high as 8.7 or 8.8 mph--I tried to back off the intensity ever so slightly while maintaining good solid stroke form.
Yesterday I did a longer session (100 minutes) at a strong tempo. It was a beautiful day and I paddled up the Mississippi above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and ferried across to paddle several kilometers up the Loosahatchie Chute, much like Ted Burnell and I had done last Monday. This is one of my favorite outdoor places in the Memphis area; when you're paddling up there with your back to the city, all you see is wilderness populated by birds and fish and turtles and beavers. Ted likened it to paddling up the Zambezi. Then when you come back downriver you have arguably the best view of the Memphis skyline there is.
I didn't see any jumping Asian carp yesterday, but the fish sure were active underwater. Three or four times I hit one with my paddle. They were probably catfish, though they could have been alligator gar or sea monsters or who knows what.
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