After another week filled with out-of-the-boat distractions it feels as though I've accomplished nothing as a paddler. But that's not really true. I paddled my usual number of times (four) last week and I got a couple of pretty good workouts in. I also did two rounds of the current strength routine. What's been missing is the spare time to process these activities in my mind and share my thoughts with you here.
I paddled with Joe on Wednesday and planned to attend "Thursday evening sprints" the next day, but something came up to prevent me from doing that. So I went down to the river on Friday intending to paddle hard. At this time of year, when I've got a pretty good base under me from the winter and spring, I do a lot more short fast pieces; but on Friday I decided to take the opportunity for some pace work. I did three one-mile pieces with five minutes recovery in between. My target pace was 7.0 miles per hour; I ended up averaging a little over that--7.1 or 7.2. My time for each mile was about 8 minutes, 26 seconds.
Yesterday I went back out and paddled for 70 minutes. After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I paddled out onto the Mississippi and surfed the waves behind an upstream-bound barge rig. Surfing demands some hard paddling, but it seems a lot more fun than when I'm doing a timed piece, probably because there's no pressure to achieve a certain time or pace.
Today I joined five other local paddlers for another trip around the Loosahatchie Bar. The upstream leg of our journey had the feel of a group training session, with exchanging of wake rides and stuff like that. Once we had "summited" the north end of the Bar it was more of a relaxing Sunday float. As we crossed the Mississippi back toward the mouth of the harbor there was another barge rig coming upstream, and I managed to get several brief surfs on its waves. So today's trip had a little of everything.
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