Thursday, April 6, 2017

Signs of the season

Joe and I enjoyed a calm, sunny, 70-degrees-Fahrenheit morning on Tuesday.  We did a loop of the harbor in 80 minutes or so.

Last night a front moved through the region with some pretty vicious winds, and this morning the temperature was in the 50s on its way to a high in the mid 60s.  A brisk northwest wind made things chilly indeed, but the sun shone and as far as the harbor's flora and fauna were concerned, it was still spring.  The turtles were out in full force, sunning themselves on floating logs along the banks.

Typically when some turtles on a log see me coming, the majority of them file off into the water, acting very cute as they make little "ploop-ploop-ploop" sounds.  But one or two turtles boldly remain on the log, not about to let somebody like me make them abandon their sunbathing bliss.  Today I saw a log with nineteen--nineteen!--turtles on it, and not a single one of them fled.  They just stood their ground, still as stone, and regarded me warily.

I love our turtles.

I warmed up by paddling to the north end of the harbor, and did three 8-stroke sprints.  Then I did ten 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  I felt a bit tired in the boat but tried my best to focus on technique.  In particular, I tried to make a nice clean transition from inserting the blade into the water to pulling on the paddle.  This isn't hard to do when paddling at a moderate pace, but when you're paddling hard it's easy to get a little sloppy with this transition if you're careless.  It's also easy to get sloppy toward the end of a workout when fatigue is setting in, and I tried to avoid that today.

I did my current strength routine Monday and yesterday, and plan to do it again tomorrow.

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