It's now just two weeks until I depart for South Africa. Once again the weather has turned unseasonably warm in Memphis and the Mid South, the Fahrenheit temperature rising into the 60s and even the 70s this week.
On Tuesday I paddled out onto the Mississippi, where I found some waves generated by a barge rig that had passed by downtown not long before. Even in the mild weather, I was cautious because of the cold water. I stayed fairly close to the Tennessee bank and threw in some short sprints to see what I could get from the small bumps.
Yesterday I did my workout on dry land. These days I'm doing twenty uphill sprints of some thirty or forty meters, and I believe this is the most taxing part of the routine. My goal here is to increase power in my lower body at a high rate of turnover.
My legs were tired last night and today, but I got in the boat and persuaded by body into another set of four bridge-to-bridge sprints, starting every 8th minute. My times were faster than in last week's workout, but I attribute a lot of that to a pretty strong tailwind that was blowing from the south. I clocked 2:06, 2:09, 2:09, and 2:10. I think that first one was faster because I paddled with quite a high stroke rate, whereas I reined it in a little for the remaining three. In the last sprint I paddled hard but I think my form was deteriorating somewhat. In the end, I think I achieved my main objective: to work on my cardiovascular fitness while paddling controlled at higher stroke rates.
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