I woke up Monday with one of those awful cricks in my neck and I've been coping with the discomfort all week. The neck is slowly getting better but I have a lingering headache that I think is related to muscle tension. Whenever something like this happens it's almost never because of my canoe and kayak training. I think this episode was brought on by some home-upkeep labor I've been doing. I've been repairing some peeling paint in my house, scraping and sanding the wall in preparation for a new coat, and it's put my body in some awkward positions, especially when my arms are up over my head. I think I withstood stuff like that better when I was younger.
Aside from that it's been a decent week of training. I'm in my last intense block before the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race and I'm doing a couple of hard sessions in the boat each week along with the current strength routine.
Having done a couple of steady 80-minute sessions Monday and Tuesday, I was ready to go hard again yesterday. The plan was to do three one-mile pieces, but when I got down to the river I realized I'd left my G.P.S. device at home. So for Plan B I picked a course in the harbor for which I have a well-documented history: the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the southern edge of the Auction Avenue (A.W. Willis) bridge. This stretch is about 750 meters in length, and my best time ever for it is a second or two under three minutes. I decided to do four pieces, seeking a pace I could sustain over all four. And I was pretty pleased with how it went: my times were 3:08, 3:08, 3:09, and 3:09.
I started a new piece every eight minutes. That meant that each time I finished a piece I had just under five minutes to get myself back to the HDB to start the next one. I had to hoof it a little bit to do that, and so my recovery interval was a bit more demanding than usual. But I held up just fine--it didn't take more than 30 seconds or so for my heart rate to settle down from the piece I'd just finished.
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