For the second straight Friday, nuisance circumstances forced me to truncate my bike ride. While the nuisance had been just some rain on the previous Friday, this past Friday I had a greater menace to deal with: my house's central air conditioning unit had died on Thursday, and I had to spend much of Friday shepherding technicians from a couple of companies through so they could take a look at the equipment and work up their quotes for its replacement.
I wasn't really counting on riding at all Friday, but I still had some afternoon left once the contractors had cleared out, so I went out and rode for an hour. It felt good to do something physical and take my mind off the tribulations of home ownership for a bit.
I will be living without air conditioning until sometime this coming week. It's quite a bummer, yes, but at least it's not the worst time for this to happen. Even though it's starting to get hot here in the Mid South, with daily highs up around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, we haven't yet had the sort of sweltering humidity that July and August always bring here. I've got the windows open and all the ceiling fans running, along with a couple of extra fans, and that's kept things bearable. When I attended summer camp from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, I lived in open-air cabins with no AC, and I survived. Yes, my camp was in the North Carolina mountains where the summers aren't nearly as brutal as they are here in the Mid South, but the hottest days there were about like what I'm experiencing right now.
Yesterday morning I went to the river and paddled for 70 minutes. There was a wake boat making some nice waves in the harbor as I paddled out toward the river, and I did some brief surfing there. All was quiet out on the river. I was feeling sort of tired and sluggish, and after doing a small loop on the river I returned to the harbor hoping that some more surfing behind that wake boat might snap me out of my doldrums. But by this time the boat was on a trailer on one of the boat ramps, so that ship had, quite literally, sailed.
This morning I went down to the river to do a workout. Yes, a workout. If you've paid close attention to my posts the last couple of months, then you know that I haven't really been doing those lately. Not "serious" ones, anyway. I've been getting in the boat and having all kinds of fun, surfing barge wakes and stuff like that, and I've engaged all my various gears and energy systems in the process. But I haven't worked those things in a more organized, focused way. I haven't even switched on my G.P.S. device during this period.
The truth is that the motivation just hasn't been there. I'm enjoying paddling as much as ever these days, but making myself the fittest, strongest, fastest paddling machine I can be hasn't been a priority. There's a complex web of reasons, but chief among them is the aging process: it seems that I've finally reached an age where I'm unable to do things I could do twenty, ten, or even just five years ago. It's hard to get excited about training myself to average 5:30 per kilometer over 5 to 10 kilometers when not that long ago I was averaging 5:00 per kilometer. And then there's just the fact that I've been doing this a long, long time, training pretty hard year after year to attain whatever non-elite level might be within my reach.
Maybe the motivation will return by and by. Maybe it won't. All I know is that for now I'm more interested in paddling for the general exercise and the time outdoors.
But I do have this race coming up in two weeks up at Suttons Bay, Michigan. And so for today I decided to do a fairly intense long-sprint workout to grease up my higher gears a little more, or at least to get some clearer idea of my current fitness level. I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then did four bridge-to-bridge sprints, starting every 8th minute. Conditions weren't good for fast times: there was a north breeze blowing not that hard, but hard enough to lift the flags that were flying from boats on the harbor. It was a little demoralizing when I got the first sprint underway and couldn't manage much more than 12 kilometers per hour--that's 5 minutes per kilometer, which as I said above is a pace I could handle for a 5- to 10-kilometer race just a few years ago. I had to make myself not pay attention to my speed or elapsed time, because it's not a good idea to do that during a workout like this anyway.
What I did want to monitor was my stroke rate: I aimed for no more than 90 strokes per minute because I thought that would allow me to stay under control and produce a good consistent effort over all four sprints. And that's what I did: my times were 2:15, 2:15, 2:17, 2:16. Once again, it's hard not to compare myself to my younger versions; according to this post I was doing all four sprints under two minutes just six years ago. I shouldn't care, because Lord knows nobody else does, but it's hard to watch my powers slip away like that.
Oh well... I plan to do a similar workout later this coming week, and maybe it'll go better. Other than that I need to get my air conditioning back in service, along with the more normal tying of loose ends before I leave town a week from today.
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