My travel plans have changed. My uncle died sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning, and the funeral is tomorrow afternoon up near Jackson, Tennessee. So now my plan is to attend the funeral and then drive the seven hours or so from there to camp.
I'll miss supper and the Friday evening festivities at camp, but at least I'll be there for the heart of the weekend. The main thing I'm giving up is a couple of days of whitewater paddling, and I'm disappointed about that, but there will be other days to paddle.
On Tuesday I went down to the riverfront and did some pushups and situps on the dock before paddling for 60 minutes. I got to the mouth of the harbor to find a big barge rig out on the Mississippi, but it was heading upstream beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, too far away for me to chase down in a 60-70 minute paddling session. But I did find some decent residual waves within my reach. There were some small linkable runs, and I got a nice little workout working them.
By yesterday morning it was clear I would not yet be hitting the road, so I got on the bike and rode out to Shelby Farms and back. I'd ridden pretty hard the previous couple of weeks, but yesterday I mostly stayed at a relaxed cruising pace.
This morning I went back downtown and again did some pushups and situps before getting in the boat. There was no barge traffic in sight out on the river, so I just paddled around for an hour.
I'm still feeling stuck in the doldrums these days. It's funny how the mood of an athlete constantly ebbs and flows. On a typical hot summer day several weeks ago I would do a gym session at home and then down at the river I would do some hard surfing or some whitewater drills or both, and then take a hose bath, and leave the dock feeling tired, but at the same time... exhilarated. But in the last ten days I've been leaving the dock feeling just plain beat down. Like I said before, I hope this trip to the mountains of east Tennessee and western North Carolina will be just the thing to help me snap out of it. I'll still get in some easy whitewater paddling on my way back west--probably on the Nantahala and Ocoee Rivers
A heads up for readers: the next post here might not go up until the middle of next week. I'm not counting on having wifi access in most of the places I plan to go on this trip. And if a break from the normal grind at home is going to do me good, then maybe a break from blogging will, too.
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