I got up at 5 AM CDT yesterday and was on the road by six. According to my car's in-dash temperature display it was 63 degrees Fahrenheit at that hour, but the voices in the car's radio were talking about a front heading toward Memphis that would send the temperature plummeting into the 40s by the mid-afternoon. That same front would eventually reach Chattanooga, where I was headed, but I hoped it wouldn't get over there until well after my stroke clinic.
I arrived in 'Nooga around one o'clock eastern time and parked in Coolidge Park, the announced site of the clinic, on the river-right side of the Tennessee River. The clinic was scheduled to start at 2:00, and I started getting worried when nobody had shown up by 1:45. Two o'clock came and went, and it was clear to me that some change had occurred for which I had been out of the loop. (No, I was not able to check my e-mail on my phone. I am about a decade behind the times in the hand-held technology department.)
In a state of panic, I ended up paddling across the river to Ross's Landing Park, and there I finally found the clinic in progress. Morgan House, the instructor, was very apologetic about the communication failure and promised to give me a refund, but I replied that we should just get on with the clinic and worry about that later.
In the end, I got more than my fifty bucks' worth and the refund talk was put to rest. I had just missed the dry-land lecture but was able to get up to speed quickly as we put our boats in the water. My eight or so fellow students included familiar faces Ted Burnell of Chattanooga; Joseph DiChiacchio of nearby Rising Fawn, Georgia; Lauren Drummond of Gulfport, Mississippi; and Myrlene Marsa of Rising Fawn. The temperature was balmy (low 70s) but it was quite windy, and we paddled upstream to find some calmer water on the river-left side of MacLellan Island.
Morgan had been watching our strokes during the paddle up there and he had pointers for each of us once we were gathered back together. His critique of my stroke centered around my exit: I was bringing my blade out of the water too far out from the boat. He told me to bring my stroke-side hand up closer to my head: said hand would now be the top hand for my next stroke, and with it closer to my head I would be set up for a more vertical next stroke. The way I had been exiting, he explained, was setting me up with a more horizontal shaft on my next stroke, and the result would be more of a forward sweep than a pure forward stroke.
Since I first tried using a wing paddle about 20 years ago, I have understood that the blade is supposed to move away from the boat during the course of a stroke, and I guess I had developed a stroke that overdid that detail. Morgan said that while a wing blade is in fact supposed to move away from the boat, it doesn't have to do so as much as mine was doing. My objective, he said, should be to put as much of my effort into the "straight-back" motion of the blade as possible, and keep the away-from-the-boat drift to a minimum.
Another point of emphasis for Morgan was to hesitate between strokes, and allow the boat to glide for that half-second or so. He said we should strive to get all the boat movement we can out of each stroke, and go faster with a lower stroke rate.
After an hour of working on these things, I felt as though I'd entirely forgotten how to paddle, and a day later I'm a bit sore from movements that my middle-aged body hadn't been used to. But that's normal. Every time I've made even a minor change to my mechanics in the past, it's been a tiring process that required much effort and concentration to get used to. And that's what's in store for me now as I head into this offseason. There are definitely some stroke drills in my future. Morgan showed us a few good ones, including the "one-two-three-four-FIVE" drill where you take four easy, relaxed strokes and then take the fifth one as hard as you can; a one-sided paddling drill, something I've done many times before, except that Morgan's version has a more specific focus; and drills that isolate each discrete component of the stroke, such as the catch and the exit.
There's a little uneasiness here, as I wonder whether I'm truly capable of internalizing Morgan's advice and emerging with a stroke that's better than ever. But mostly I'm excited to have a "mission" for this offseason as opposed to just putting my time in on the water.
With things to do back here in Memphis this morning, I started heading back west shortly after the clinic's conclusion. The temperature remained in the 70s all the way to Murfreesboro; then, once I'd turned onto Interstate 840 that bypasses Nashville to the southwest, it began to drop quickly. It took less than a half-hour to sink into the 40s, and soon I was driving through some heavy rain that the front brought with it. By the time I reached Jackson I was out of the rain, and back here at home we're in for a few partly-sunny and cooler-than-normal days. I'll be bundling up a bit when I get back in the boat to start working on my stroke.
No comments:
Post a Comment