The first half of this week has been crazy, with all kinds of things to deal with in both my athletic and non-athletic lives.
I spent most of Monday putting out a (figurative) fire that a tenant of one of my rental properties was experiencing. At the same time, I found myself with a couple of new woodworking projects to do for clients. And, the opportunity opened up for me to have that M.R.I. done on Tuesday afternoon. Remember that? I haven't talked much about it lately. If you were thinking that all my ailments had magically disappeared, don't worry. They haven't.
With all these things suddenly heaped on my plate, I could have been forgiven for putting the canoe & kayak training on the back burner for a while. But Tuesday morning I knew I needed some time to myself amid all the other stuff going on. I remember my high school cross country coach urging my teammates and me to put the schoolwork and other teenage worries aside for the 90 minutes or so we spent in practice, and now, decades later, athletic pursuits continue to be my time to do that.
I started with a short run and a gym session at home. Then I went down to the river and got in the boat. With all the other stuff going on I hadn't really planned what I would do, and I had to make it up on the fly. I ended up doing ten 30-second sprints starting every 3rd minute. This is a good aerobic workout while also providing some practice at a higher stroke rate. It was fairly taxing, and I thought of another thing my high school coach used to say. Whenever we did an interval workout he urged us to focus hard on the next-to-last interval because mentally it was the toughest; the last interval was always easier to push hard on, he said, because of the knowledge that the workout would be over when it was finished.
I left the river feeling good about what I had done. Just doing some hard physical work relieved a lot of the stress I'd built up in the previous day. In the afternoon I went and had my M.R.I. done, and while I didn't enjoy the mild claustrophobia in that tube, I was glad to be making this step toward what I hope will be some relief.
Yesterday was a day off from training but was plenty busy nevertheless. I spent the day tying up the last loose end of the rental property emergency and picking up some logs for one of those woodworking projects.
There's one other thing that happened on Monday that I haven't mentioned yet. As I announced in this post seven years ago, my good old go-to whitewater boat got stolen from behind my building, and for a long time I lacked the motivation to replace it and simply didn't do much whitewater in the years since. But just several months ago I came across a Mr. William Ashton on social media who was selling that same model of boat at a reasonable price. I'd always liked that boat of mine that was stolen, so I got in touch with William and we worked out a deal. William lives in western North Carolina and I didn't know when I could make it over there, but he told me that if I could wait until late May he would be passing through Memphis on his way out to the Rockies, and he would bring it to me. And it turned out Monday was that day. He came through in the early afternoon, and I now have a whitewater boat again!
That brings me to this morning's session on the water, in which I took the new whitewater boat out in the harbor and did some stroke drills to see how my body would respond. I was pleasantly surprised by how well my arm muscles handled the open-blade draws and compound reverse strokes and stuff like that. My plan for the coming weeks is to paddle this boat once a week, and I hope that by the time I head out on my trip up the East Coast I'll be ready to paddle some easy whitewater along the way.
I'll just add that I spent the afternoon splitting those logs I picked up yesterday. If you're looking for back-breaking labor, you can't go wrong with some logging.
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