Friday began with heavy rain in the Mid South, followed by strong winds and a falling temperature. The only training activity I had planned for the day was an indoor gym session, and I was happy about that.
Once again, the storm system moved north and east into higher areas of the Mississippi River watershed, and soon enough all that water will be flowing past the city of Memphis. The current forecast says that the river will rise above 30 feet on the Memphis gauge around the end of this coming week. It's hard to believe that we saw our lowest level ever recorded (10.86 feet below zero) less than five months ago.
The weather had calmed down by yesterday morning. It was cool--a little over 50 degrees Fahrenheit--but the sun was coming out and the afternoon high was expected to be in the low 60s. I went downtown and got in the boat, and after warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did four bridge-to-bridge sprints starting every 8th minute. My times were 2:14, 2:13, 2:16, and 2:16--quite a bit slower than my best, but I think the headwind had a lot to do with that. It wasn't a strong headwind, but I've learned over the years that it doesn't take much of a headwind to slow you down quite a bit. So I'm not too disappointed in my times. I aimed for a stroke rate in the 90-95 strokes per minute range, though at times I had to make myself ease up a little just to keep it under 100. All told, the workout was plenty tough, just as I'd expected.
I went out this morning for my Sunday long paddle, and I had a gorgeous day to do it. The sun was shining, and the temperature when I got down to the dock was 60 degrees and rising fast. With the river flowing at 20.2 feet, I had enough water to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar for the first time in close to a year. I continued to suffer nagging pain in my left forearm and biceps muscles, but otherwise I felt good in the boat. As I paddled down the chute on the west side of the Loosahatchie Bar, out of view of any vestiges of civilization, I could have been in the remotest wilderness on Earth for all I knew.
I paddled for just over 122 minutes. Long-time readers know that I like to break two hours for this circuit, but today I had a reasonable excuse for not doing so: while paddling up the Mississippi along the Tennessee side I had to go between a parked barge and the bank, and found this passage blocked by a big floating tree branch. I ended up having to portage over it, and that cost me several minutes. Also, some of the sand bar at the north end of the Loosahatchie Bar was exposed at the 20.2-foot river level, making the course maybe a couple of hundred meters longer than it is at higher water. As I rounded the north end of the exposed sand I hit the bottom with my paddle several times but didn't drag my rudder.
In any case, today's paddle completed a good substantial weekend of work, and that's a nice feeling with just under three weeks to go before my first race.
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