That discomfort in my neck and the muscle-tension headaches I mentioned last week persisted a lot longer than normal. My intuition is that the headaches were brought on by stresses in this strength routine I've been doing. Several exercises are kind of hard on my shoulders, especially the "explosive" pushups.
Because of that, and because of the strain of Monday's hard workout and the tree-cutting and all, I was feeling pretty beat-up for a few days. It was a good reminder of the importance of getting enough rest to recover from all that.
I've heard many athletes talk about how they flirt with overtraining in the weeks leading up to a big competition. "Overtraining" is what happens when you don't allow your body adequate recovery from the workouts. It's during recovery that you actually "get in shape" because that's when your body fortifies itself to withstand the new stresses you put on it in those workouts. Without adequate recovery the body has no chance to complete that fortification and instead languishes in a damaged state. An athlete who has overtrained sees his performances get worse, not better.
And so, an athlete in the midst of a hard training block has to be careful, and careful is what I'm trying to be right now. The 5000-meter Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, two weeks from Saturday, is the shortest race I'm likely to do this year; it's too long to be an all-out sprint, but I'll be paddling at a high level of intensity for the better part of 20 minutes. And so my training right now includes a whole lot of short- to middle-distance pieces done as fast as I can do them. With the strength training I'm also doing, I'm good for a couple such workouts in the space of a week. The rest of the time I need to be disciplined about getting my rest; the storm-damage-cleanup responsibility hasn't helped with that.
But that's all settling down now, and I'm feeling a bit better just in the last couple of days. The aches in my head and neck seem to have eased up. I think the paddling I did with Joe on Tuesday was a big help: we just did an easy, relaxed loop of the harbor, and by the time it was over I felt I'd done just what the doctor ordered.
By yesterday afternoon I was feeling ready for another intense session in the boat, and this time I drove out to Shelby Farms to join about nine other local paddlers for some 500-meter sprints on Patriot Lake. My stiffest competitor would likely be Kata Dismukes, one of the top female racers in this part of the country, whom I don't see that much because we live on opposite sides of town and train in different places. Jason Salomon and his daughter Ahava would also be pushing me in their tandem surf ski.
We did four sprints--apparently the buoys were set so that the distance was more like 495 meters than a full 500--and my times were all in the 2:10 to 2:15 range. I was a narrow winner over Kata in each one. The recovery interval was however long it took everybody to get back up to the line--about five minutes, I think. That was just enough time that I felt ready to go hard in the next one.
After the sprints we did an up-tempo lap of the lake. The distance for a lap is just under two miles, and we didn't go as hard as we would in an actual two-mile race, but the pace was somewhere approaching anaerobic threshold. Whatever the case, it felt easy after doing those intense sprints. That's a state of fitness I'm always striving for, where the body feels like it's getting a break whenever I'm not surging in a race.
I did a round of the current strength routine today and plan to do it again Monday and Wednesday. Then I'll stop the strength work until after the June 17 race. My paddling will be relaxed over the weekend, and then I'll do one more hard workout in the middle of next week before I begin my taper. In between those activities, I'll be looking to recover from them with rest, some stretching, good nutrition, and good hydration.
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