No paddling took place last weekend, as I was fulfilling my annual commitment to demonstrate wooden bowl carving at the Pink Palace Crafts Fair here in Memphis. All in all it wasn't a bad weekend, even though I was using muscles I hadn't used in quite a while since I've spent this year toiling at my rental property a lot more than working in my shop. I also had to be careful moving heavy logs around, given my recent back woes. The biggest bummer was the weather: for the first couple of hours on Friday we had true "chamber of commerce" conditions of sunshine and blue skies, but then it abruptly clouded over and the rest of the weekend was chilly and rainy.
We got more rain on Monday, and then a cold front moved in with a steep drop in temperatures. When I finally made it back to the river Tuesday morning for my weekly loop of the harbor with Joe, it was gray and drizzly and the temperature barely exceeded 50 degrees Fahrenheit. For the first time I wore long pants and long sleeves in the boat. I stubbornly refused to break out the pogies so soon. Standing on the dock was chilly indeed, but once I was in the boat paddling I felt just fine, even when paddling into the north wind. I reminded myself that by February I'll be savoring this kind of weather.
I plan to paddle just once or twice a week for the next little while, to give myself a mental break and catch up on some things I've been neglecting lately. I've been slacking off on the strength work, and I'll probably give myself until the start of next month before I get that going again. Actually, my latest project in the shop involves milling some massive oak planks the client provided, so it's not like my muscles are lying around unused.
Yes, for me the offseason has begun, and I guess this is where I'm supposed to offer some kind of profound observation in summary of the season that's just concluded. Certainly the big event that distinguished this season from previous ones was the long trip out to the Pacific Northwest in July for the Gorge Downwind race. In terms of how I finished it was by far my worst race of the year: according to the posted results (which were initially, and may still be, full of errors), I was 332nd out of 489 racers. But there are many other metrics for evaluation. Fitness was not the problem: I felt fresh as a daisy within a half-hour after the finish. Where I found myself struggling was with the technical aspects, many of which I was experiencing for the first time even though I've been paddling all kinds of water for more than three and a half decades. I'm now pondering ways to be better prepared for next year's race even though true downwind conditions are hard to come by where I live. It feels like when I was training for whitewater slalom in a part of the country with no whitewater.
Elsewhere in my season, I was reminded that I'm a shorter-distance athlete. When I was dealing with two-hour-plus distances, I had some trouble. I bonked in both the 19-mile Kentucky River race in May and the 14-mile Big South Fork race two weeks ago (in the latter race there was less than a mile to go when I bonked, but I was limping across the finish line just the same). I was the overall winner in another two-hour race, on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg in April, but the competition there was less formidable and I had the luxury of pacing myself on my own terms.
I think my single best performance of the year was at the six-mile race on Fontana Reservoir over in western North Carolina. Sadly, my hometown event, a delightful sub-20-minute dash down the Mississippi River at Memphis, had to be canceled this year. And the races I'd planned to attend in September, all of which were in the less-than-one-hour category, were called off as well. So I had few opportunities to race over distances to which I'm best suited. Not coincidentally, the season was lacking in moments where I crossed the finish line feeling like I could pump my fist and say "Yes! I nailed it!!"
But that's no reason to write the season off as a disappointment. On the contrary, I achieved a high level of fitness and ventured pretty far outside my comfort zone. I participated in three events for the first time and encountered athletes I'd never raced before. And as always, even during moments when my non-athletic life seemed barely under control, my boat was waiting for me down at the dock, my regular paddling routine insuring that there was at least one thing going on that I could feel good about.
So there you go. The season might not have been something nice and neat and tied up with a bow, but it sure wasn't boring. I'm grateful for all the readers who took the journey with me. All I can do now is see about doing it all over again in 2019.
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