Workouts and recoveries

Friday evening was rather pleasant following an afternoon shower.  Yesterday morning was sunny and I could tell it would blossom into more heat and humidity, but not as badly as the previous several days had.  You know it's been a tough summer when my sense of the different degrees of hot and humid is this keen.

I paddled in the harbor for 80 minutes yesterday, warming up and then spending some time fussing with my rudder adjustments.  One of the rudder lines in my six-year-old boat broke recently, forcing me to make do with a stop-gap repair until I receive the replacement lines that the Epic Kayaks company is sending me.

Finally I was ready to go, and I commenced a set of eight half-mile pieces during which my target pace was 7.3 miles per hour.  On most pieces I achieved that pace without too much trouble, but on a couple of them it was all I could do to keep it above 7.0.  For recovery in between I paddled a quarter-mile between 5.5 and 6.0 mph.  I was feeling plenty taxed by the fourth piece but I managed to maintain the intensity throughout the workout.  The heat was getting to me a bit by the last two pieces and I did a couple of flips and remounts to cool off.

For my post-workout menu I tend not to use Gatorade or Gu or similar products marketed to endurance athletes because I don't find them very palatable.  I prefer my recovery food to be... food.  But after yesterday's workout I drank a bottle of water with an electrolyte tablet dissolved in it that somebody had given me at the USCA Nationals.  I also ate a nectarine that I'd brought down to the dock, and I drank a couple more bottles of water.  Back at the house I had my typical lunch of some celery and some crackers and peanut butter.  And my energy level seemed to rebound better than it usually does following a hard workout in tough temperature conditions--more often it seems that I feel just shy of catatonic for the rest of the day.

Today I went back downtown and paddled for 60 minutes.  I resolved to keep this one easy, but I didn't entirely succeed, as an upstream-bound barge rig was putting out some decent wakes and I just had to surf.  I got several good rides but missed out on several others because of my current rudder troubles, and the waves petered out pretty quickly, so I don't think I taxed myself too much.