The heat is on

Monday was my first full day back home, and I got a break with the weather: I think the Fahrenheit temperature stayed below 90 degrees.

Tuesday was dedicated to getting my new central air conditioning system installed.  The crew showed up and got the job done with no complications.  I'm now a few dollars poorer, but at least I have a comfortable home again.  And it's not a moment too soon: by yesterday the temperature was back up in the 90s with a triple-digit heat index value.

I hadn't done any kind of gym work since March.  The reasons were a mixture of busy times in my non-athletic life and struggles with motivation, all of which I've documented in past posts here.  Yesterday I decided it was time to get a gym routine going again at last.  I'm keeping it simple for now: some bicep curls, some situps, and some tricep extensions.  I'd been shying away from any kind of arm exercises since the diagnosis of my spinal nerve impingements last year, but since I've been mostly feeling good in that area in recent months, I decided it was time to try some arm lifts again and see how those muscles respond.

Also yesterday I got in a good bike ride in the afternoon.  I did my ride out the Greater Memphis Greenline, around the lake in Shelby Farms, and back home.  I definitely needed to be mindful of hydration in the heat of the day.  Before leaving the house I packed as many ice cubes as I could fit into a water bottle, topped it off with refrigerated water, and put the bottle in the cage on my bike's frame.  By the time I got out to Shelby Farms the ice had melted and the water was already lukewarm.  I gulped it down and refilled the bottle at one of the park's water fountains for the trip back.  The nice thing about riding this time of year is the same thing I hate in cold weather: you generate your own wind chill.  So the heat didn't bother me too terribly.  It also helped that the Greenline is shaded by a tree canopy.  I finished the ride to cap off a solid day of exercise, and I hope that will set the tone for the coming weeks.

Bike riding is one thing I didn't do as much of on my trip as I would have liked because of the lousy weather.  Something I didn't do any of on the trip is paddling my whitewater boat.  I had it up on my truck's roof racks, and it never came off.  There was in fact some good whitewater to paddle in Minnesota, but the weather was poor during most of my visit to that state, and of course whitewater paddling has the logistical challenge of running a shuttle, something I don't have to fool with paddling a surfski on a lake.

I do want to start getting in the whitewater boat again soon.  I hope to do so once a week in the coming weeks just to do some drills and practice Eskimo rolls.  Then, in August, I have a trip to North Carolina planned for my camp's 100th anniversary, and I hope to incorporate some paddling on something like the Nantahala River or the Pigeon River or the Ocoee River.  I'll need to devote time next year to preparing for my trip through the Grand Canyon, and I figure now is the time to lay some groundwork for a whitewater routine.

This morning my muscles were surprisingly not that sore.  I went down and paddled on the Memphis riverfront for the first time since I got back home.  It definitely had the makings of a sizzling summer day: as I left the house a little after 9 o'clock, it was already in the high 80s.  A south breeze kept things bearable as I paddled to the mouth of the harbor and out onto the Mississippi.  Out there I found some barge traffic.  I tried surfing behind a downstream-moving rig, but it was moving too fast for me to find much I could ride.  I paddled down toward an upstream-moving rig and fell in behind it, and the first wave I got on was awesome.  I was able to surf it for close to a minute, and a few good paddle strokes got me onto several other good waves.  Once those rides had ended it was much harder to find any more because the waves were wandering back and forth across the river, as so many barge wakes tend to do.  But that first ride was worth it.

There was another barge rig coming upstream from below the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges, and I briefly considered hanging around to try some more surfing.  But I decided to head back for the harbor, and by the time I was re-entering that water body, I knew I'd made the right decision.  The sun was beating down, and with the breeze now at my back I had nothing to take the edge off the heat.  It normally takes me about 15 minutes to paddle from the mouth of the harbor back to the dock, and today it was a tough 15 minutes.  The season for practicing surfski remounts has arrived, and I did a couple to cool off as I moved along.

At last I reached the dock and drank deeply from the cold water I'd brought along in an insulated bottle.  And the season for taking a hose bath on the dock after I paddle has most definitely arrived.

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