Prepping to race despite ailments

My week began with some dry-needling treatment at the chiropractor's office.  The chiropractor warned that I would probably feel worse before feeling better, and that's been the case as my muscles react to being stuck with those needles.  I've been living with this pain in the right side of my neck for close to six weeks now, and it's making my whole body feel out of whack.  Like I've said before, it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, but the discomfort is pretty severe nevertheless... it makes me feel like I'm not paddling well even when I probably am.  I've got an almost OCD-caliber desire for balance and symmetry in all my affairs, and I'm feeling anything but balanced and symmetrical these days.

Meanwhile, I'm signed up to race down at Ocean Springs this Sunday, and I'm trying to go through my pre-race motions this week.  It was cold and miserable outside on Monday and Tuesday, so I took those two days off.  The forecast for Wednesday was a high temperature around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still in the low 50s when I went down to the river that morning, and a fierce south wind made it seem colder than that.  I paddled into the teeth of that wind toward the mouth of the harbor, and then turned around to do a few 12-stroke sprints with the wind at my back.  I did ten of them at two-minute intervals, and at some point I managed to tweak a muscle in my right lower back.  Wasn't that just all I needed...

Yesterday morning I did some back stretch exercises that I think eased the lower back pain.  I went back to the river and got in the boat, and this time I did eight of those 12-stroke sprints.  The wind wasn't blowing nearly as hard and that helped me feel more comfortable, though the neck pain was quite an annoyance.  It's hard to feel like I'm ready to go out and compete with an ailment like that nagging at me.

By this morning the back pain was about gone, I think.  I went downtown and did six 12-stroke sprints.  When I got back home I tried putting some ice on my sore neck muscle.  It hadn't occurred to me to do so until last night when I got to a part of a book I'm currently reading where the narrator, a doctor, talks about putting ice on a trauma victim's edema.  I figured it couldn't hurt to try it on my neck.  So far I've done it just once, and maybe it's helped a little... hard to tell.  I'll do it once more this evening and again tomorrow, because why not... right?

The plan for tomorrow is to do several more of those sprints in the harbor, and then load up the boat and embark on the six-hour drive down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

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Monday photo feature

It's 2017, and that's me on the right, locked in a tight contest on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Pushing me hard is Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi.

When I return to Ocean Springs to race this coming weekend, Jeb would likely be my stiffest competition.  Sadly, he was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and will probably not be racing (though I know better than to count him out entirely).

The bright side is that Jeb has many friends and they are rallying to his cause.  If you'd like to chip in to a fundraising effort for his medical expenses, you can do so here.

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Never a dull moment in the aches-and-pains department

My neck continues to be a source of misery.  The chiropractor adjusted it again last Monday, and for the next couple of days I could tell that the discomfort had eased, but by the end of the week it was feeling as bad as ever.  When I return to the chiropractor's office tomorrow, she's going to perform some dry needling in hopes of stimulating a more lasting healing process.

After paddling just an easy 40 minutes yesterday, I planned to do something more substantial today: a lap around the Loosahatchie Bar.  Right now the Mississippi River, at 21.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, is high enough to do it for the first time in at least six months.  (The bare minimum for doing it is around 16 feet, but at that level there's a big sandbar at the north end of the Bar that you have to paddle around, and even then you're either scraping the bottom or getting out and portaging.)

Yep, that was my plan.  But the weather had other ideas.  Today there's a fierce south wind blowing, with some strong thunderstorms and maybe even a tornado or two moving through this evening.  On top of my neck woes, that made it seem unwise for me to be out all alone on the big river.  Paddling around the Bar is something I feel like I ought to do at least once a year, but the year is young, and surely this isn't the only time in 2026 that the river will be high enough for me to do it.

Instead, I paddled for 70 minutes, mostly in the harbor.  I pushed the pace at times, especially while coming back north with the wind at my back.  I did an impromptu bridge-to-bridge sprint for time, and clocked 2:11.  One might think that with such a strong tailwind I should be much faster than that, but it's been my experience that there are limits to that advantage.  When the wind is dead calm I have a smooth surface to paddle on, while with the wind blowing like it is today the surface is very bumpy, and I think those bumps slow the boat down just like bumpy dry-land terrain slows down a car or a bike or a similar vehicle.

After that sprint I got a good full recovery while paddling easy, and then I timed myself over the second half of the bridge-to-bridge course (the approximate halfway point is noted in the video).  In my workouts this winter I've been covering this distance in 64-65 seconds, but this time I wanted to see if I could do it at or below 60 seconds.  I pushed the stroke rate up over a hundred per minute, and reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge right at 60 seconds.

After that I paddled mostly steady for the rest of the 70 minutes.  My neck ailment, while not directly impeding the act of paddling, continued to make me blue.  I really hope tomorrow's dry-needling session will help me turn a corner on that.

I do have one bit of more positive health news.  If you've read this blog's posts from last fall, then you know I came down with a case of shingles shortly after my return from the Grand Canyon.  I haven't mentioned it here in a long time, and that's because the symptoms were pretty much gone by mid November.  But I could still see remnants of the rash for a long time after that.  Just in the last week, however, it occurred to me that the rash is now all gone.  Well, almost, anyway--there are still faint traces of it.  But I doubt anybody who doesn't know I had shingles could look at it and tell there was ever anything there.

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I'll be racing again before long

We've had a good bit of rain lately, and that rain has moved across the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio River watersheds, so it's translating into higher levels on the Mississippi River.  When I did a steady 60-minute paddle Tuesday morning, the river was flowing at 15.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  When I got back on the water for a workout today, it had risen to just over 19 feet.  As of this writing the river is forecast to crest at 21.8 feet next Monday or Tuesday.

I paddled in the afternoon today because of some nuisance stuff I had to deal with in the morning.  With just ten days to go before my race down at Ocean Springs, it was about my last chance to do a workout that's likely to have any bearing on my race-day fitness.  I did four bridge-to-bridge sprints, starting every 8th minute, and clocked 2:14, 2:15, 2:15, and 2:15.  My times were a bit slower than when I did the same workout two weeks ago, and I think the main reason was a light headwind today as opposed to almost no wind then.  I didn't use my cadence sensor two weeks ago, but today I used it and tried to keep things under control by targeting a stroke rate of 90 spm.  I think that helped me stay consistent over all four sprints.

The afternoon's effort has me feeling pleasantly tired this evening.  Knowing that I can cut back the volume a bit between now and race day has me feeling upbeat as well.

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Sometimes life is a pain in the neck

That nerve/muscle pain in the right side of my neck is a real adventure, and not an enjoyable one.  My chiropractor has adjusted it twice now, last Monday and the Monday before that, and she's scheduled to do it again tomorrow.  Each time I thought I could detect some relief, but as the week wore on the area seemed to settle back into a painful state.  On any given day it's typically felt better in the morning and worse in the evening, probably because I manage to relax while I'm asleep at night but get stressed and tense during the day.

I guess the good news is that I can still paddle; the neck pain makes my general existence unpleasant but doesn't interfere specifically with what I do in the boat.  This past week I got in steady sessions with lots of stroke practice on Monday, Thursday, and today, and performed workouts Tuesday and yesterday.  On Tuesday I did three 8-minute pieces at anaerobic threshold, with 4 minutes recovery.  Yesterday I paddled for 80 minutes total, and for the hour from 0:10 to 1:10, I did five-minute intervals in which I paddled two minutes at 64 strokes per minute, two minutes at 72 spm, and one minute at 80 spm.  In both workouts I was feeling it in my muscles by the end, but my lungs handled the load just fine.

The unseasonably warm weather has continued over the last week; by late in the week we were flirting with record highs for the date.  When I checked the Internet radar yesterday morning, I could see that heavy rain was on the way, so I got myself down to the river early and was in the boat by a few minutes after 8 o'clock.  I got drizzled on a little, but the serious rain didn't move in until just after I'd gotten back home.  The water level, which has been very low for the last five or six months, has been coming up in recent weeks in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way.  Yesterday morning the Mississippi River was at 4.8 feet on the Memphis gauge, and today it was up to 8.2 feet.  The rain that fell yesterday was part of a large system that moved across the upstream watershed, and by next weekend the river is expected to rise to over 21 feet.

The race down at Ocean Springs is now just two weeks away.  My plan is to continue my preparation and keep trying to find some relief for my neck pain.

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Monday photo feature

It was brought to my attention on social media that on this day seven years ago, the Mississippi River was flowing at 40.8 feet on the Memphis gauge.  At this very high level, thousands of acres of real estate over in the state of Arkansas are flooded and accessible to paddlers.  In this photo I'm paddling over the Big River Trail, a bike-pedestrian path directly across the river from downtown Memphis.

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Another video from South Africa

I made this video almost two weeks ago, but I'm only just getting around to sharing it here.  It covers a session we did over on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula.

It was Day 2 of our camp, and we were hopeful for some good downwind conditions, but the south-southwest wind we'd hoped for didn't materialize until after we'd finished paddling.  The groundswell, meanwhile, was quite impressive to this guy who lives hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.  But a Go Pro camera isn't very good at capturing the scale of such phenomena.  So it's hard to tell in this video that we're doing anything that special.  At least the scenery was lovely.

The music is an a cappella version of the Mothers of Invention classic "Any Way The Wind Blows," performed by the Persuasions.  It's an allusion to the fact that we went ahead and paddled even though the wind wasn't blowing the way we'd hoped.

Anyway... here you go.  I hope you enjoy watching this, and if you don't, at least I warned you.

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All has not been easy, but I'm still moving

It's been nearly three weeks since I've posted something here.  In the early part of that three-week period I was slow to recover from the trip home from South Africa: when I flew over there I had activities right from the get-go, and that helped me get over the jet lag quickly, but when I got back home I had nothing pressing to engage my attention, and so I sort of just sat around the house and had trouble re-adjusting to Central Standard Time here in North America.  On top of that, I found myself dealing with some health struggles.  On Monday the 9th of February, I went and got the second of two shingles vaccine shots, and just like the first one last November, it triggered a severe reaction from my immune system.  I spent all day Tuesday feeling pretty sick--headaches, body aches, and intense chills.  I was mostly feeling better by Wednesday morning, but there was lingering pain and tightness in the muscles on the right side of my neck.  It's a condition I'd had numerous times before, and I figured it would loosen up and work itself out over the next several days, but it didn't.  I suffered with it for the next couple of weeks, and eventually accepted that it wasn't going to go away on its own.  I scheduled my first appointment with my chiropractor since before an MRI revealed my impinged nerves back in 2023.

The chiropractor saw me this past Tuesday, and while she didn't have any miracle cures, she did make an adjustment that I'm hopeful has put me on a road to relief.  As of this writing there's still a fair amount of pain in the area, but it's somewhat less severe than it had been.  I'm scheduled to be back in the chiropractor's office tomorrow morning, and I'm hoping for another positive step.

Meanwhile, there's a race coming up in three weeks down at Ocean Springs, Mississippi--it's the annual Battle On The Bayou canoe and kayak race.  I missed it last year, but before that I'd participated in every installment of it since its inception in 2010.  Amid all the discomfort I've been dealing with in the last several weeks, I've been trying to do some decent training in the boat.  This has included a lot of work on stroke mechanics, tempo sessions near aerobic maximum, and some interval work.  This past Thursday I revisited a workout I did several times before my trip to South Africa: bridge-to-bridge sprints.  I did a set of four, starting every 8th minute, and clocked 2:11, 2:11, 2:11, and 2:17.  As you can see, I sort of fell apart on the last one after three very consistent efforts.  The weather was sunny with very little wind, and the water was almost dead flat.

I was back in the boat yesterday morning, paddling a loop out on the Mississippi in unseasonably warm weather.  The current forecast indicates a continuation of warmer weather than we're used to in the first week of March.

Ordinarily I'd have paddled again this morning, but today I had to go perform with the handbell group I play with.  I'll make it up later.

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