Yesterday morning was chilly but the sun was coming out. I went down to the river with the intention of doing something shorter and quicker than what I've mostly been doing lately.
I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints. It was my first time in weeks doing these sprints, and they did feel a bit rusty, but not as bad as I was expecting.
I left the harbor and headed downriver toward the Harahan Bridge. I had a workout in mind that I thought might combine some higher-intensity paddling with some boat control. Starting in an eddy on the Arkansas bank upstream of the bridge, I paddled out into the river and looped around the nearest piling. Then I ferried back to the Arkansas bank and paddled back up to the eddy where I'd started. Sounds simple enough, but this lap took me around four and a half minutes and included navigating the boiling water below the bridge piling, doing a long ferry back to shore, and doing sort of an attainment move to complete it. I ended up calling it a "giant slalom" because it was something I might have done while training for slalom on smaller rivers scaled up by a pretty big factor. I did four laps with three minutes recovery in between. I treated it more as a "play" workout than as a serious on-the-clock sort of thing, but I was suitably tired by the time it was over.
Yesterday blossomed into a gorgeous sunny day, but by this morning some more rain had moved in. I went downtown this morning and paddled for 60 minutes in a fine mist that occasionally swelled into actual rainfall. I did another set of 8-strokers and then just paddled a comfortable pace the rest of the time.
I'm cautiously optimistic that the pain in my right arm and shoulder is healing. It had hurt badly for a solid week and I was starting to get concerned, but now it's feeling quite a bit better. It's not completely gone yet but I like the direction it's headed.
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