Monday photo feature

In this photo I'm using an axe to shape a chair part during the class I took at the Maine Coast Craft School near Bristol, Maine, in 2023.

I'll be doing more of this kind of work this week here in Memphis.  The Pink Palace Crafts Fair is scheduled to take place this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and I'll be doing a chairmaking demonstration.

I continue to have some pain in my chest area from Friday's tablesaw mishap.  And I still don't feel completely over that illness I had.  I'm feeling weak and lightheaded and not very energetic.  Whatever that illness was, it's really knocked me flat for a long while.  All I can do right now is keep trying to rest and hope I'll be ready to go by Friday.

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From one ailment to the next

My illness continued well into this past week.  By Sunday evening I was developing a bad cough, and by Tuesday I knew it was time to see a doctor about it.  The doctor who examined me thought I probably had a respiratory infection, and he prescribed a short course of antibiotics.

After a couple of days of medication I was feeling somewhat less sick, but still very weak and low on energy.  On Friday morning I knew I wasn't ready for any hard physical exertion, but with my annual crafts fair coming up a week later, I decided I could at least go down into the shop and start gathering some tools together for the chairmaking demonstration I'll be doing.

The presentation I was planning included some small signs, and to make these signs I set up my tablesaw to cuts some small rectangles from some plywood scraps I had lying around.  A tablesaw is a machine that presents some dangers, and I do not take them lightly.  I think for the most part I have developed sound safety habits in terms of how and where I stand, keeping my center of gravity over my feet, and using accessory sticks to push the workpiece through the blade while keeping my hands and fingers out of danger.

But mistakes happen in the blink of an eye.  I think in this case I got a little distracted at the wrong instant.  I took the pressure off the push-stick before one of the plywood rectangles was entirely clear of the spinning blade, and the blade snagged it and sent it hurtling through the air like a frisbee, right into my chest.  It knocked the wind out of me and left a mark on my right pectoral muscle:

There may well be a cracked rib or two in there.  At the very least, I've got a deep bruise.  And the worst thing about it is that it's now very painful to cough, and I'm still coughing a lot.

If I do in fact have a fracture, then I'm done paddling for a good while.  I'll have a better idea in a week or so what the situation is.  But I didn't have much paddling planned for this week anyway because of the crafts fair.  I just hope my injury won't interfere too badly with my crafts fair duties.

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Monday photo feature

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the Gauley River in West Virginia is an annual destination for paddlers.  That's because every September the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers releases water into the Gauley to draw down the level of Summersville Reservoir.  Paddlers travel from all over to partake in the whitewater fun.

Not surprisingly, it's big business for the local tourism and hospitality industry, and especially raft companies.  And photographers have found their niche, too.  A company called West Virginia Sports Photography places people with cameras at notable rapids along the river to shoot everybody who comes by, hoping that some of those people will want to purchase mementos of their heroic moments.

They found a customer in me!  I shelled out some money for three of their photos.  That photo in last Thursday's post of me running Pillow Rock Rapid is one of them.  And the one above is another.  That's me running Koontz Flume on the lower Gauley back on Friday, September 6.  I was doing a lot of deep braces that day, trying my darnedest to keep the boat upright.

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🤢

I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was taking a few days off, and probably wouldn't paddle again until this weekend.  Well, my body has announced that it needs even more recovery than that.  I've come down with something--I felt it starting to come on Friday evening.  I don't really know what it is; so far there haven't been any cold or flu symptoms, just chills, body aches, and probably a mild fever.  My bladder has been very active, too: each of the last two nights I had to get up and use the bathroom four or five times.  And since last night I've been having trouble keeping food down.  All I felt like having for supper was some soup from a can, and I vomited some of that back up.  This morning I had some cereal and fruit for breakfast, and for a while I was unsure if I could keep that down, but ultimately I did.

I really don't get sick very often, and believe me, I'm grateful for that.  I certainly get plenty of exercise, I get a good sleep almost every night, and I think I do a reasonably good job of eating right.  It also doesn't hurt that I live and work alone, not breathing in other people's germs all the time.

I think this is just my body telling me to slow down.  I spent two of the last three weekends in the Appalachian Mountains re-starting my whitewater paddling career, and I've also had a lot going on in my non-athletic life.  I've had some things to deal with over at my rental property, I've had a lawyer helping me do some estate planning, I've got a woodworking project whose deadline is no time soon but I've been trying to knock it out anyway, and my annual crafts fair is coming up two weeks from now.  So I've had that feeling of being constantly on the go.

It's not the worst time to just hole up inside for a few days, as the weather has continued to be pretty gloomy.  By Friday morning the strong winds had abated, but it still rained for quite a bit of the day.  Rain has continued off and on yesterday and today, and we've seen no sunshine at all.  It sort of feels like what we sometimes have in December here in Memphis--not all that cold, really, but just wet and depressing.  It's sure not making these chills I'm having feel any better.

Anyway, I'm just trying to get a lot of rest and drink a lot of fluids, and I hope this will run its course soon.

EDITED TO ADD: I do not have covid.  I didn't think I did because I was able to taste my food without any trouble, but my mom thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to test for it, and she brought me a test kit this afternoon.  The test came back negative.  So that continues to be something I've avoided since the world was beset by a pandemic four years ago.

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Gaw-lee! I'd forgotten how big that water is

For those who haven't been paying close attention: I grew up paddling whitewater, but did very little of it in the last eight years or so while focusing more on flatwater racing and ocean-style surfski paddling.  In other words, while I haven't just been lying around in the last few years, I have been allowing those skills I'd always used to navigate whitewater to atrophy.  Now, with a trip through the Grand Canyon scheduled for a year from now, I'm venturing back onto some swift-flowing mountain streams.

Last week my quest to grind my whitewater-paddling gears back into motion led me to the state of West Virginia and the Gauley River.  This river was pioneered by adventurous paddlers in the 1960s and 70s, and back then it was considered the outer limit of navigability.  But with the improvement of paddling techniques and equipment, it's become an annual destination for capable paddlers all over the country and even the world.  Water is released into the river from Summersville Reservoir every Friday through Monday in the month of September.

It was my first visit to this river since 2014.  By Thursday evening I was camping with my friend Amelia, a paddler and raft guide who lives in Sevier County in east Tennessee, at the Summersville Dam campground.  Our plan was to meet Amelia's friends Nate and Dave Friday morning to run the Gauley's lower section from Woods Ferry to Swiss.

The lower Gauley is quite a bit tamer than the upper section, and I was happy to be easing into my weekend of paddling.  I mentioned here that I was feeling rusty when I ran the Nantahala and Ocoee Rivers a couple of weeks ago, and that rust was still present as we paddled down the lower Gauley on Friday.  I'd forgotten just how edgy my Atom C1 is, and I was flipping often and constantly having one edge or the other grabbed by swirly cross currents.  But in all I managed to enjoy myself: I think it was only the second time I'd run the lower Gauley, the first time being way back in 1994, and I'd forgotten what a pretty place it is.  It was a lovely sunny day, too, with an afternoon temperature in the mid 80s Fahrenheit.

That evening two more friends of Amelia's, Anna and Brent, joined us at our campsite.  I'd paddled with Anna on the Pigeon River in July of 2023.  While I'd never met Brent before, he would turn out to be an excellent paddling companion: this visit to the Gauley marked his 35th consecutive year of paddling there, so he was intimately familiar with the river, and even more important was that he was a wellspring of positive energy and an utterly pleasant guy to be around.  As the weekend went on I found that there was no more popular person on the river: every couple of minutes, it seemed, somebody was paddling by us shouting "Brent!  How you doin'?"

The size of the whitewater on the lower Gauley had been a step up from the Ocoee, and I knew that the water on the upper Gauley would be a step higher than that.  So I definitely had some jangling nerves as I got ready to put on the upper section on Saturday.  We'd had some light rain overnight and the temperature was almost 20 degrees cooler than it had been Friday, and that added to the tension.  The first couple of miles of river offered similar stuff to what I'd paddled on Friday, and that gave me a nice warmup.  Then came the first significant rapid, called, ironically enough, Insignificant.  Since Anna had never been to the Gauley before, Brent was leading her through the cleanest, most reliable lines, and I followed along after them.  I had no trouble with Insignificant, but since I hadn't run any whitewater that big since my last trip to the Gauley ten years ago, it got my attention.

We paddled through a few of the lesser rapids (many of which are as big as anything on the lower Gauley), and arrived at Pillow Rock Rapid, one of the truly memorable whitewater landmarks in this country.  The riverbed constricts down to maybe a third of its normal width, and the entire flow slams into an enormous rock that juts out from the river-left bank.  The water comes back on itself to form the eponymous "pillow," and flows off to the right onto a boulder known as "Volkswagen Rock" because it's shaped like one of those classic Beetle cars.  The good news about Pillow Rock Rapid is that it's pretty forgiving: it doesn't have the sort of nasty undercut rocks or boulder sieves that are common elsewhere on the Gauley, and if you come out of your boat, you're most likely to wash into the calmer water below Volkswagen Rock.  Still, Pillow Rock is one of the more impressive pieces of whitewater that people willingly paddle into, and I don't think it's possible to sit in your boat at the top of it without feeling at least a little bit nervous.

I was in fact very nervous as I watched Brent and Anna paddle their entrance route into the rapid.  But they were wasting no time, so I didn't have to stew over it for long.  I followed Brent's line, and once I was past the monster hole on the river-right bank, I felt like I'd cleared the most formidable hurdle.  I started to work my way right so I would miss the pillow, but I was swept into it anyway, and flipped.

It was not the first time I'd flipped in this rapid, and past experience had taught me to hang out upside down for a bit until my boat gets washed down below Volkswagen Rock where a roll will be easier.  This time, however, I'd managed to inhale a mouthful of water while going over, and I couldn't hold out underwater for long.  My paddle blade had been sucked deep, and I struggled to move it into position for a roll.  Once I'd done so I was thinking (hoping) that I was in smooth enough water, but right as I attempted to roll I got slammed into the froth on the left side of VW.  By this time I didn't think I could wait any longer, and I popped my skirt and swam out.  Amelia was nearby and she helped me swim my boat into an eddy on the left bank.  I'd thrown my paddle toward that bank, and another guy kindly grabbed it and delivered it to me.

No paddler wants to swim, but it happens to pretty much everybody sooner or later.  Regaining your composure after a swim is always a challenge.  For starters, there's the physical impact: even if you don't get banged up (and I did not, fortunately), being submerged in cold water for at least a couple of minutes lowers your core temperature into the shivering zone.  And unless you have the unflappability of a world-class athlete, some self-doubt will start to creep in as you face the whitewater that's still to come.

That's the state I was in as I dumped the water from my boat, gathered up my gear, and tried to get warm as our group took a break on a rock in the middle of the river.  I was suddenly dreading the rest of the day, and that was totally an overreaction, I know, as my swim was nowhere near the worst I'd ever experienced.  But my confidence was already fragile.

Of course, I had no choice but to get back in the boat and continue.  I paddled along timidly and was getting flipped by the silliest little wave-holes.  Soon enough the Meadow River came in from the left, signaling the next major rapid, Lost Paddle.  I took out on a sandy beach at the mouth of the Meadow to drain some water from my boat and get myself focused for the long, constricted rapid that features three or four drops of big, fast water.

I ran the first couple of drops without incident.  But sitting in an eddy about halfway through, I sensed that there was a lot of water in my boat, and that made no sense because I'd just dumped it out.  It had to be my imagination, I thought, unless... could I have broken my boat somewhere?  That didn't make sense, either.

My companions were moving swiftly through the rapid, so I put those thoughts aside and kept going.  But in the final set of waves and holes, I had no control over my boat.  I got spun backward, and my corrective strokes were ineffective because the boat was basically a submarine.  The only thought in my head at that moment was "What in the Wide World of Sports is going on here!?" or some variation of that.

I managed to stay upright as I washed through the final meters of Lost Paddle and into the pool below.  But I was completely demoralized by my inability to control my craft.  "What on Earth is wrong with me?" I wondered.  "Do I even still belong out here?"

I knew I had to get out of the boat and dump it, and as I paddled toward the bank, I got a peek back at my stern.  Only then did I discover the actual problem: when I'd drained out water up at the mouth of the Meadow, I'd forgotten to put my boat's drain plug back in.

It's about the dumbest mistake a person can make, but at that moment I was relieved simply to have an explanation for all my struggles in Lost Paddle.  Suddenly, I felt a renewal of confidence with just two big rapids left to go.

The first of these was Iron Ring, and I had about the cleanest, driest line through that rapid I'd ever had.  Brent and Anna were at the bottom watching me come down, and they were very complimentary of how I looked in the big drop.  A little while later we reached Sweet's Falls, and I had a similarly good run there.  We paddled a mile or so farther to the takeout at Mason's Branch, and I felt I'd achieved a positive ending to a sort-of-tough return to the upper Gauley.  Lest you think I was all gloom and doom on Saturday, here’s a photo in which I managed a smile:

From left to right, that's Anna, Brent, yours truly, and Amelia.

Still, I hadn't completely moved past the day's difficulties.  Besides my swim, I had flipped many times and struggled a bit in the big-water conditions, and I spent Saturday evening wondering if I would have better control when we ran the upper Gauley again on Sunday.

There was also the philosophical question of just how badly I want to revisit the whitewater experiences of my past.  Even when I was running stuff that's quite a bit steeper and more challenging than the upper Gauley, the sport was never really about adrenaline for me.  Most of my satisfaction came from a sense of accomplishment of attaining the skill level that was necessary to run a given river or a given rapid.  In the last decade or so I've been finding that sense of accomplishment on open water, riding downwind swells and stuff like that.  It's every bit as challenging as navigating big rapids, but I'm not getting slammed into rocks.

Now here I was back at the Gauley, and I was wondering if, at age 57, I still had it in me to run this caliber of whitewater.  I'd already decided I don't need to go and do steep creeks and Class V water anymore, but was the Gauley now beyond my reach too?

Sunday morning I shared my misgivings with Brent.  He reminded me that everybody swims once in a while, and he said "Man, the whole rest of the run you looked solid!  I wasn't worried about you at all.  And then you went and styled Iron Ring!  You're fine, man... just go out and enjoy yourself."

It was what I needed to hear.  Once I was in my boat just a while later, I felt quite a bit more sure of myself.  I wasn't flipping a lot like I'd done the previous two days.  I was still following Brent's lines through early rapids like Insignificant, but I was paddling more aggressively and reading the whitewater more confidently on my own.

Of course, I wouldn't truly feel better until I'd redeemed myself at Pillow Rock.  I entered the rapid in the same spot Brent did, just to make sure I was on the right line to miss the nasty river-right hole, and once I was past that I took a couple of strong strokes to propel myself to the right, away from the worst of the pillow.  I hit the bottom-most bit of the pillow, but I was able to surf it to continue my rightward momentum all the way to the right side of Volkswagen Rock.  A photographer from West Virginia Sports Photography got several shots of my descent, including this one:

I'm thoroughly buried in white froth, but I'm still upright!

With a certain monkey off my back, I was able to savor the rest of the river for real.  I remembered to keep my drain plug in and had a delightful run of Lost Paddle.  I think this rapid might be the most beautiful spot on the river: the riverbed constricts between two steep slopes, and boulders are strewn everywhere, and the whitewater is big and interesting and pretty.  Lost Paddle is not too gnarly, but it's challenging enough to get your attention as you avoid several deadly undercut spots.

I got to the bottom of Lost Paddle with a smile on my face.  I tried to repeat my perfect run of Iron Ring, and though I didn't succeed entirely, my run was plenty good enough.  I flipped at the bottom of Sweet's Falls, but I hit my roll, so hey... it was a serviceable effort.  I got to the takeout feeling happy about my run--not just because I didn't swim and didn't flip much and stuff like that, but because I felt like I was starting to hit my stride, to rediscover a comfort zone on this classic river.

I should note that on Sunday I had the pleasure of paddling with a couple of the people who will be part of my Grand Canyon trip next year: Jessica ("Sparkles") and Brian.  Amelia went out and recruited them for me.

The obvious next step would have been for me to get one more run in on Monday to solidify my feelings of confidence.  Alas, I was planning to visit a cousin in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Monday evening, and I really wanted to get a good visit with him and his family.  I wouldn't be able to do that if I arrived late in the evening.  Everybody I knew with whom I was comfortable paddling was planning a late-morning putin, too late for me to paddle the river and get to Oak Ridge at a reasonable hour.  So I skipped paddling on Monday and hit the road.

I enjoyed seeing my relatives Monday evening, and I got back to Memphis in the late afternoon on Tuesday.  Since then I've just been recovering physically.  Three long days of whitewater definitely left me with some aches and pains.  The weather here at home has turned foul, too: the remnants of Hurricane Francine have been hammering us all day today.  In the last couple of years we've had several bouts of hurricane remnants passing through here, and this storm is by far the worst of them.  I'm definitely not eager to be in a boat on the Mississippi River in this weather.  Maybe by the weekend I'll venture down there.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

I'm off to the mountains again

Yesterday afternoon I went downtown and did a short paddle in the surfski.  Then I carried the whitewater boat up the ramp and put it on my car.  At least one river awaits in the mountains of West Virginia.

Today I plan to leave home in the mid afternoon and spend tonight in Nashville.  From there I'll set my course for the putin of the Gauley River near Summersville, West Virginia, tomorrow.

If you're a regular reader, (a) I'm grateful, and (b) I wouldn't expect any new blogging here until the middle of next week.  I kind of liked being entirely offline when I went to North Carolina two weekends ago, and I'm looking forward to doing that again.  With any luck, I'll see you on the other side.

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Monday photo feature

One of the things I did when I visited camp the weekend before last was go by the site of the photo I posted here two weeks ago.

Back when that first photo was taken, around 1989 or '90, this dock was the home base for the canoeing program.  That's not the case anymore, since a new area for the activity has been established off to the left of this photo.

The house in the right-hand portion of the photo has been added onto a bit in the last 35 years, and the infirmary is no longer located there.  I think one branch of the family of owners currently lives there.

The biggest difference is a greater abundance of flora.  You can't see the dining hall up on the hill anymore because several pine trees have grown tall to block the view.  Also not visible from here anymore is the barn: that cluster of trees on the bank in the left half of the photo had just been planted when the first photo was taken.

Also new in this photo are those silly inflatable lake toys that I used to sneer at other camps for having.  Now my camp has them too.  Oy.

At least the central face of the two photos hasn't changed.  The guy in this new photo is the same guy as that guy wearing the green shirt and red shorts in the old photo, and he hasn't changed one bit.

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Sort of a ho-hum weekend

This weekend we've had some thundershowers in the area that have kept the temperature down a bit, but not the humidity.  It was as muggy as could be when I got to the river yesterday morning.

The Mississippi River is dropping to its low levels of late summer.  It was at 5.7 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge yesterday.  I have a feeling that by mid October the lower Mississippi will be making the national news for its low water for the third year in a row.

My sluggish feelings have continued this weekend, and yesterday I was hoping to find some surfing opportunities out on the river to help me snap out of them.  The reason I think such activity would help is something I've heard Dawid Mocke talk about during my two trips to South Africa.  Riding big swells on a downwind run, says Dawid, prompts the body to produce both endorphins and adrenaline.  The endorphins are produced because of all the hard sprinting one must do to catch runs, while adrenaline production is the body's instinctive reaction when the brain perceives a physical threat to one's person (i.e., a spectacular wipeout).

So that's what I was hoping for yesterday.  But when I reached the mouth of the harbor, I found the river utterly devoid of barge traffic that would produce some fun surfing waves.  So I just paddled a big loop, going down to the old bridges downstream of downtown and back up along the Arkansas bank before ferrying back over to the harbor entrance.  I pushed the pace hard on this ferry, and while it was good to burn some energy, it had the opposite effect of endorphins an adrenaline.  I got back to the dock feeling worn down, and continued feeling that way the rest of the day.

This morning I wandered out into another muggy, overcast day.  The river had dropped to -6.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  I got back in the surfski and paddled to the harbor's mouth once again, and this time I did find a barge rig out on the river, but it was a small one--just a couple of barges wide and a couple of barges deep.  So it wasn't churning up big waves.  I ferried out and did what tiny bit of surfing I could, and returned to the harbor and paddled back to the dock.  I got in the whitewater boat and did some drills, but no rolls, because the recent thunderstorms in this area had made the water look nasty.  I'd just heard on the radio about the postponement of the Paralympic triathlon at Paris because thunderstorms had elevated the bacteria levels in the Seine River, so I decided there was no reason to try my luck here on the Memphis riverfront.

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Traveling to the mountains where the water runs white

I'm back home from my short trip to east Tennessee and western North Carolina.  Last weekend I attended the centennial celebration at the camp I went to as a kid.  It was the first time I'd been by there in some five or six years, and it was fun to be back for a short while.  I enjoyed seeing old friends and acquaintances, and just as important is that none of the people I didn't like (i.e., bullies) showed up.

For the first time in nearly 40 years, I shot targets at both the archery range and the rifle range--those were among my favorite activities way back when.  My targets weren't very good: it was a reminder of how truly athletic these pursuits are.  While different from, say, gymnastics or basketball, shooting sports require a similar degree of calm control.

I also spent some time on the lake paddling my whitewater boat, doing the same kind of drills I'd been doing in the harbor here at home.  Then, once the festivities concluded Sunday morning, it was time to go run a whitewater river.  A couple of hours west of the camp property is the Nantahala River, a clear dam-controlled stream that played a big role in my paddling education in the 1980s.  It was an advanced run for campers because of its cold water that flowed more swiftly than the entry-level streams we ran, and back then I couldn't imagine a more formidable gauntlet of whitewater rapids.  Of course there are many rivers that are much more difficult than the Class II-III Nantahala, and in due course I moved on to some of them.  Now, for me, the Nantahala is just a pleasant, relaxing place to work on some skills.  And that's what I did Sunday afternoon.

One not-so-pleasant part of Sunday was navigating the chaos around the Nantahala Outdoor Center.  When I took my first canoe trips to the Nantahala in the early 1980s, the N.O.C. was still in its salad days. Pretty much everybody who worked there, from the raft guides and canoe & kayak instructors to the person ringing the cash register in the store, was a paddler.  A number of the employees were slalom racers earning some money while they pursued their dreams of making the U.S. whitewater team.  The store carried a little bit of non-paddling-related stuff; the Appalachian Trail passes right through the area, so it always made sense to have some hiking and camping gear, for instance.  But the main focus of the place was excellence in paddling, and those early visits to the N.O.C. were a big part of my catching the paddling bug.  Sadly, the place now more closely resembles the maw of a tourist vortex, especially on summer weekend days.  The traffic congestion is horrendous at times and finding a place to park is no small feat.  The crowds of people milling about the N.O.C. campus are much more interested in buying a tee shirt in the store or having a drink at the outdoor bar than giving the slightest thought to running a whitewater rapid skillfully and gracefully.  The company now offers many activities that have nothing to do with paddling.  I think they host a lot of corporate-team-building events with their ropes courses and zip lines and stuff.  Once upon a time the cashier in the store would have been a seasoned river rat or even a world-ranked racer, but nowadays that person is more likely to be just some college kid working a summer job, and if you ask about his or her paddling experience, you'll probably get an answer like "Well, I haven't been kayaking yet, but I'm hoping I'll get to go before the end of the summer."

Look, I get it that it's a business, and it has to evolve and grow and compete for a slice of that ever-fickle consumer market.  I'm just looking back wistfully on simpler times, that's all.  The N.O.C. property is the takeout for paddlers on the Nantahala, and by the end of the day, after I'd sat in the traffic on the two-lane highway and searched for a place to park my car and weaved through the throngs of tourists and all, I was more than ready to move on.

Move on I did.  I continued west, back into Tennessee, and made camp at a Forest Service campground on the bank of the Ocoee River.  I got up Monday morning and put my boat on the Ocoee for the first time in maybe a decade.  The Ocoee is a step up from the Nantahala: more of a Class III-IV run.  It's kind of the summertime staple for whitewater paddlers in the Southeast because of its reliable dam-released flows.  And it was here on Monday that I realized just how rusty my whitewater skills are.  If you're familiar with the Ocoee, then you know all the fun little moves you can do: the elevator move above Broken Nose; the ferry-into-an-ender move at Slice & Dice; flat spins at Moon Chute; the various eddies at Tablesaw.  Once upon a time I had those moves dialed, but on Monday I couldn't do any of that stuff.  Whitewater play is pretty much a matter of leaning the right way and taking the right stroke at the right instant, and right now my timing and my confidence in my balance are gone.  So I had some frustrating moments while running the Ocoee.

What else should I have expected?  To be good on whitewater you have to do whitewater, and I'd barely paddled whitewater at all in the last eight years.  Even if I were twenty years younger I couldn't reasonably expect to pick right up where I'd left off after so much time away.  Here in late middle age I might have to lower my expectations to simply being competent on the river.  And that's the problem: I don't want to be just competent.  I wanna be stylin' it out there!

In about a week I'm planning to join a friend on the Gauley River up in West Virginia, and the Gauley is quite a bit more challenging than the Ocoee.  At the very least I need to get down it in one piece, and I'm not too worried about that, seeing as how I've watched a lot of people far less skilled than I presently am run that river.  I just hope I can re-adjust to a serious whitewater environment and recover at least a little bit of my old mojo.  That's the minimum of what I hope to accomplish as I work to get ready for two weeks in the Grand Canyon a year from now.

When I finished my Ocoee run I loaded up the car and headed back home.  The weather had been delightful over there in the southern Appalachians: sunny, a high temperature not much above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, overnight lows in the 50s.  I was sorry to leave that behind.  By the time I was in middle Tennessee the dashboard temperature display in my car had risen into three digits.  The temperature here in Memphis has been around 100 degrees for the last couple of days.  I've spent that time just recovering.  I've been sore in my shoulders, lats, traps, lower back, quads... all over.  All those flatwater drills I'd done in my whitewater boat were fairly intense, but there's just no way to prepare for all the stresses of whitewater without paddling some whitewater.

I woke up this morning feeling not so sore anymore, but still tired and sluggish.  I got myself down to the river to see what I could do.  I paddled the surfski to the mouth of the harbor hoping to find some wake-surfing opportunities out on the Mississippi, but there was no barge traffic in sight.  So I headed back to the dock.  Another sizzling hot day was taking shape, and while a south breeze kept me cool when I headed south, coming back north toward the dock I was as hot as could be.  I practiced a couple of remounts by way of cooling off.

Back at the dock I hopped in the whitewater boat.  I'd just received a brand-new sprayskirt I'd ordered from the River Elf company of Florence, Alabama, and I set about the process of breaking it in before my Gauley trip.  My old skirt had been leaking like a sieve, and I could tell already how much drier my boat was as I did a number of rolls.  One of the things my recent river runs reminded me of is how rarefied a flatwater environment is: making the boat glide and spin is so much easier when you don't have all the various opposing currents that rivers like the Nantahala and Ocoee and Gauley have.

Getting good and wet in the whitewater boat, and then taking a hose bath on the dock, felt good on a very hot summer day.  I hope for cooler weather in West Virginia next week.

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Leaving town a bit later than planned

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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Monday photo feature

Mike Davis shot this photo on the canoe dock at Camp Carolina for Boys just outside Brevard, North Carolina, around 1990.  I attended this camp from age ten in 1978 to age 24 in 1992.

This lake, along with some of the rivers in the surrounding region, was where it all started for me.  Each day I would spend some time in boats on the water, and take my meals in the dining hall up on that hill above my head.  If I got sick or needed first aid, I would visit the infirmary in the house on the right.  In the O.D. House, that little shed you can see above and to the right of my head, there was a pay telephone that people could use in the rare event that communication with the outside world was necessary.  The barn to the left was a lodge for small gatherings.

There were, of course, many other camp activities, but canoeing was my favorite, and those other activities took place outside the scope of this photo.

In the late 1980s I served as the head of the canoeing program, and this little dock was my fiefdom.  I was determined to convince campers to become paddlers just like I had done.  Not every one of them complied, but it was an important exercise in my own paddling education to explain to others what I had learned in previous summers.

The camp has been in operation since 1924.  Do the arithmetic!  It's time for a centennial celebration.  And that's just what will be happening this coming weekend: I'll be attending an event at the camp along with other camp alumni.  I don't know who will show up, or how many people, but I hope it will be well-attended by folks who value their camp experience as much as I do.

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Post-Olympic letdown

Since the Olympics ended a week ago I hardly know what to write about here.

Basically it was another week of the same stuff I've been doing all summer.  I did gym sessions on Tuesday an Friday; I did a bike ride Friday; and I paddled my surfski and/or my whitewater boat Tuesday, Thursday, yesterday, and today.

It's gotten hot again after that nice break we had last weekend.  And I've also felt really tired all week.  Maybe those two phenomena are related, and maybe they're not.  Either way, it's had a negative impact on my motivation.  I'd planned to do another gym session before going to the river this morning, but I just couldn't find the gumption.  Down at the river all I did today was paddle the whitewater boat for 40 minutes, and I went much lighter than usual on the drills, instead just paddling around semi-aimlessly.  I did do lots of rolls.

In several days I'll be heading east.  I'll be visiting my old summer camp at Brevard, North Carolina, and I also plan to paddle some whitewater in western North Carolina and east Tennessee.  I hope this change of scenery will have a re-energizing effect.

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Monday photo feature

Yuliya Trushkina, a member of the Individual Neutral Athletes delegation at the Paris Olympics, awaits the start of the women's 200-meter C1 "Final A" on Saturday.

That canoe she's in has all the stability of a floating telephone pole.  Some 20 years ago I got the chance to paddle a boat like that.  Even though I had paddled whitewater canoes for many years, and was also able to handle a fairly tippy surfski, I was unable to paddle that boat more than six or eight strokes before I went for a swim.

Athletes who are able to race canoes like this one at a world-class level, bringing to bear all the power in their arms, shoulders, torsos, and legs, have the same kind of balance that elite-level gymnasts have.  Once in a while somebody wants to tell me that paddling a canoe doesn't require the same degree of skill as "real" sports like basketball and football and so on, and I want to tell that person to get in a boat like the one pictured above and just stay upright for five seconds; forget propelling the thing forward at 4+ meters per second for up to a kilometer.

We saw elite-level balance among the whitewater paddlers in Paris, too.  Check out the move at 0:47 of this video.  Keep watching and see other athletes do the same move.  Most of them make it look easy, but that move is hard.  I know because I've tried, and usually failed, to do moves just like that one.

The fact is, top canoe and kayak racers are elite-level athletes.  Just as elite-level as LeBron James.  Just as elite-level as Simone Biles.  Just as elite-level as Novak Djokovic.  Just as elite-level as Scottie Sheffler.

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Loving the Olympics and hating them, too

Yesterday was the final day of the Olympic flatwater sprint regatta at Vaires-sur-Marne on the east side of Paris.  Men won medals in the 1000-meter single kayak event, and women raced finals in 500-meter single kayak and 200-meter single canoe.

Lisa Carrington of New Zealand cemented her status as one of the greatest sprint kayakers ever with her win in 500-meter K1.  It was her third gold medal of these Games, and with eight Olympic golds in her career, she is now tied for the record with Birgit Fischer of Germany.

The women's 200-meter C1 final was the last of the regatta, and it could not have been more dramatic.  Nevin Harrison of Seattle, Washington, came in as the defending Olympic champion, but it was clear that she had her work cut out for her when she finished second in her semifinal to Canadian paddler Katie Vincent.  Seven of the eight finalists broke 46 seconds in the semifinal round, including reigning world champion Yarisleidis Cirilo Duboys of Cuba.

Harrison got a good start in the final and led by maybe half a meter at the halfway point, and in a race so short I thought that might be enough for her to take it.  But Vincent put on a tremendous second-half surge, and the two women broke the finish line like this:

You can see who the three medalists are--from top to bottom, they're Vincent, Cirilo Duboys, and Harrison.  But did Vincent break the line first, or did Harrison?  Honestly, I don't know how you determine a winner in such a situation.  Apparently the officials had the necessary technology, and in the end Vincent was declared the winner.  Her official margin of victory was one one-hundredth of a second, 44.12 to 44.13, but in reality I think the margin was just a few thousandths.  44.12 is also the fastest time ever recorded in this event, a "world best" (the sport does not recognize "world records," because no two venues are alike and there are too many variables that impact a boat's hull speed).

Yesterday's 200-meter C1 semifinal results are posted here, and the final results are here.  You can watch NBC's coverage of the race here.

All told, I’d say my nation’s team had its most successful regatta in quite a few years.  Certainly, having an athlete the caliber of Nevin Harrison helps, but I'm encouraged by how the other two U.S. athletes, Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker, did as well.

What I really hope is that in the future the U.S. will be able to take something closer to a full team to the Olympics--C2s, K4s, everything.  I think the meager U.S. contingents we've seen in recent Games is partly the result of the national governing body not having its act together, but most of the blame should be directed straight at the I.O.C., which has stubbornly limited the number of Olympic paddlers (slalom and flatwater combined) to a very modest figure.  Women's canoe classes made their debut at Tokyo three years ago, and I think that's absolutely a good thing, but rather than add them to the mix to make a great sport even better, the I.O.C. insisted on making cuts elsewhere, eliminating men's slalom C2, to preserve their precious athlete quota.  The cuts got even more draconian with the addition this summer of something called "kayak cross."  In the flatwater sprint regatta at Paris there was just one distance available to each boat class.  Men's K1 paddlers raced only 1000 meters; no more 200 or 500.  The women's C1s raced only the 200-meter distance.  The men's K2s raced only the 500-meter distance.  And so on.  In track and field there are distances for the full range of athletic abilities, from sprinting to middle-distance running to long-distance running.  But if you're a female K1 racer and 500 meters is not the distance to which you're best suited... too bad.

I get it that there needs to be some kind of cap on the number of athletes in each sport.  Just housing and feeding those people requires tremendous resources.  But what gets under my skin is that while the I.O.C. won't budge on athlete quotas for sports like ours, they go and let in sports that I think are a joke (I'm looking at you, break dancing).  What's more, the Olympic programme includes sports for which an Olympic gold medal is not the ultimate achievement.  The level of play in the Olympic men's basketball tournament is not as high as it is in the N.B.A. playoffs, and I doubt it ever will be.  And so in my view, basketball does not belong in the Olympics.

Yes, these are the issues I get all worked up about every four years.  But, well... big world-class events like the Olympic Games are important an all, but to me, going out and paddling my own boat here at home is every bit as important.  And that's what I did yesterday morning once I'd digested the results from Paris.  It was another two-boat session--about 40 minutes in the surfski an 20 minutes in the whitewater boat.  The weather was just plain delightful: the high temperature yesterday was around 84 degrees Fahrenheit with a pleasant north breeze.  We complain about our hot summers around here, but we do get some breaks between heat waves, and the break we're having now is about as nice a one as I can ever remember in August.

Today is Sunday, and Sunday is Funday!  I started it off with a gym session, and that's not what I consider the most fun thing to do, but then I went down to the river in search of fun, and it looked like I would get it when I reached the mouth of the harbor: heading upstream from below the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges was a big old barge rig with a nice-looking wake behind it.  I paddled out to do about the most fun thing you can do in a kayak or canoe--surf some big waves.  The ones in the main wave train behind the towboat were very large and very steep and moving very fast, and I could never quite get the boat up to speed to catch them.  As I fell farther back the waves quickly flattened out, and I feared I had missed out on my Sunday Funday fun.  But as I kept paddling against the river's current I started finding all kinds of residual waves that had linkable patterns.  Each time I caught a wave and gained some speed, I worked to take that speed onto another wave.  It wasn't exactly epic surfing--I had to sprint so hard and so often that before long my arms, already tired from the gym session, were screaming. But it was fun to get out and challenge myself and work on some skills, not to mention my lactic acid system.

The Olympics are wrapping up today, but you can bet I'll keep doing my thing, and sharing it here.

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The beat goes on at home; U.S. Olympians make a final

We're having a break from oppressive heat here in the Mid South.  For the last couple of days the Fahrenheit temperature has been in the high 80s and low 90s, as opposed to the high-90s readings we'd been having.  According to the forecast we've got several more pretty nice days coming up.  The most notable thing is that it's getting down into the low 70s an even high 60s overnight.  During the worst of the dog days of summer, it sometimes doesn't drop below 80 degrees at night.

I got pretty good and sweaty on my bike ride Wednesday, just the same.  My ride out to Shelby Farms and back takes me around 90 minutes on average; some days I get all motivated to push the pace, and other days I'm happy just cruising.  On Wednesday I pushed the pace and did the ride in about 87 minutes.

Yesterday I was back on the riverfront to do some paddling.  If you've been reading this blog lately, then you know I've been paddling the surfski to the mouth of the harbor to check the Mississippi River for barge traffic; if there's traffic I go out and try my luck with some wake-surfing, and if there's not I go back to the dock and get in the whitewater boat.  Yesterday the river was deserted, so back to the dock I went.  In the whitewater boat I did some rolls (as a rule I do ten on the left and ten on the right), some forward paddling drills, some backpaddling drills, and some spin drills.  In less than two weeks I plan to do a river run or two in east Tennessee and/or western North Carolina, and I'm looking forward to that.

At the world-class level, U.S. canoeist Nevin Harrison opened her Olympic competition yesterday in the 200-meter C1 event.  She made quick work of it, winning her first-round heat and thereby bypassing the quarterfinal round straight to the semifinal.  Her time of 45.70 seconds was the fastest of all the first-round heats; you can see the results of those heats here.  Her semifinal heat is scheduled for the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Early this morning the tandem kayak team of Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker were back in action in the 500-meter K2 event.  The top four finishers in each semifinal heat would advance to "Final A" (the heat in which medals would be awarded), and the bottom four would move to "Final B" (sort of like a consolation bracket).  Small and Ecker finished fourth in their semifinal, becoming the first U.S. kayakers to make an Olympic "Final A" in 24 years.

The eight boats in "Final A" raced later today, and Small and Ecker finished eighth.  I don't think they performed poorly; their time, while not their fastest, was consistent with what they've been doing throughout this regatta.  There simply were other boats in the final that were capable of going faster.  Small is 23 years old, and Ecker is 21, so I hope we haven't seen the last of these two in elite-level competition.  The semifinal results are posted here, and the final results here.  And you can watch the video footage of "Final A" here.

Back here in my humble dojo I did a gym session today, and contemplated how I might enjoy some paddling in the milder weather this weekend.

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Many hot (as in world-class) athletes in France, one hot (as in hot) athlete here at home

The Fahrenheit temperature reached the high 90s here in the Mid South Monday, and yesterday morning I could tell another hot one was shaping up.  I did a gym session at home and headed down to the river.  Doing gym work before paddling means I have to get myself moving bright and early, but the upside is I feel good and warmed up once it's time to paddle.

Down on the riverfront it was another two-boat session.  I paddled the surfski to the mouth of the harbor, saw little of interest out on the Mississippi, and returned to the dock and got in the whitewater boat.  I did some drills and rolls, and took a hose bath on the dock when I was finished.

I wasn't the only one paddling yesterday.  At Vaires-sur-Marne on the east side of Paris, a bunch of world-class athletes were opening their Olympic competition in flatwater sprint racing.  U.S. athletes Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker got in their tandem kayak (K2) for their opening 500-meter heat.  The top two finishers in each opening-round heat would advance directly to Friday's semifinal round.  Small and Ecker didn't manage that, so they had to race a second heat, the quarterfinal round, yesterday.  In the quarterfinal they bettered their opening-round time by more than three seconds and qualified for the semifinal.  So they're all set to be back in the K2 this Friday.

Today Small and Ecker hopped in their single kayaks for some 1000-meter racing.  The format was the same as yesterday's: the top two in each preliminary heat would advance straight to the semifinal, while everybody else would have to come back and race a quarterfinal round.  Again the two U.S. paddlers were in that "everybody else" category and had to race a second time today.  Sadly, there were no miracles in the quarterfinal as both were eliminated.  The 1000-meter K1 semifinal round will take place Saturday with no U.S. athletes on the starting line.  Small and Ecker will now focus all their attention on Friday's K2 semifinal.

The United States has one other athlete in the flatwater sprint regatta.  Tokyo gold medalist Nevin Harrison will open competition in the women's 200-meter single canoe (C1) event tomorrow.

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Monday photo feature

The Olympic Games in Paris is now in its second week, and that means it's time for some flatwater sprint canoe and kayak racing.  Flatwater paddlers race in lanes from a starting line to a finish line--similar to swimming, except you can actually see the athletes and tell them apart from one another.  The distance between the starting line and the finish line might be 200 meters, or it might be 500 meters, or it might be 1000 meters.

The U.S. flatwater sprint team has not enjoyed much Olympic success in the last 30 years.  In recent Games, the U.S. program has had great difficulty just qualifying to enter athletes.  In Beijing 2008, K1 racers Rami Zur and Carrie Johnson were the only Team USA paddlers in the regatta.  There were only two U.S. flatwater paddlers in the London Games of 2012, too: Carrie Johnson and Tim Hornsby.  In 2016 only one athlete from the U.S., kayaker Maggie Hogan, qualified to compete in the regatta at Rio.  Three years ago in Tokyo the U.S. flatwater team again was just one person, canoeist Nevin Harrison.

So it feels like an embarrassment of riches to have three (three!!!) U.S. athletes getting ready to race flatwater this week in Paris.  The good news is that they're all pretty solid.  Nevin Harrison, in fact, comes in as the defending Olympic champion in the women's 200-meter C1 event at Tokyo; she also claimed world titles in that event in 2019 and 2022.  Competition in her class begins with first-round heats on Thursday.

Meanwhile, newcomers Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker are an intriguing pair.  They'll be teaming up to race 500 meters in a K2, and while I can't really say they're a legitimate medal contender, they could possibly make the "A" final (there will be three heats in the final round, with medals being awarded in the "A" final) with good performances in their rounds of heats.  They're scheduled to race their first heat on Tuesday.  Both athletes will also race the 1000-meter K1 event, for which the first heat is on Wednesday.  Ecker was the 1000-meter K1 champion at the under-23 world championships just a couple of weeks ago, so it's not farfetched to think he could make the "A" final.

The Pan American championships at Sarasota, Florida, back in April was the last chance for athletes from the Americas to secure a berth in Paris, and that's where Small and Ecker punched their ticket with a victory in the 500-meter K2 class.  The image above is a screen-grab from some video footage in which newly-minted Olympians Small (left) and Ecker share their thoughts with an interviewer from one of the local TV stations.

All three of the U.S. flatwater Oympians hail from the state of Washington.  Harrison and Small are from Seattle, Ecker from Bellingham.

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A pretty good weekend workload

It was a new month, so I started up a new gym routine on Friday.  This one consists of pushups, backups on the stability ball, and bent-over rows with a dumbbell.  Pushups are something that's seemed much more difficult since the onset of my nerve impingement problem.  I'm starting with 2 x (5 sets of ten at one-minute intervals).  We'll see how that goes.

Yesterday morning I woke up sore in my pecs and lats.  I guess that's to be expected after starting up some pushups and rows.  I went down to the river and paddled for 70 minutes.  I did some surfing behind a barge rig down near the Harahan and Frisco an Memphis-Arkansas Bridges, and it wasn't as much fun as it should have been because several times the pilot idled the towboat's engines.  This happens occasionally: some pilots don't seem to like the idea of kayakers and canoeists surfing their wakes, and their response is to throttle down their engines like this one did, or to blast their horn at me, or to get on their P.A. system and and tell me to get lost.  Maybe they think what I'm doing is unsafe, or maybe they just have no patience for such tomfool shenanigans.  Whatever the case, my response to their objection goes something like this: (1) As long as a paddler is reasonably fit and has mastered a certain set of prerequisite skills, I believe that it is not particularly unsafe to go out and surf barge wakes; and (2) The Mississippi belongs to me just as much as it belongs to the commercial shipping companies, and if it's okay for them to churn up waves on our river, then it's okay for me to go out and surf those waves.

Because of those surfing interruptions I didn't make much progress back upstream, so I had to ferry over to the bank and slog back up to the harbor.  I could feel the soreness in the semicircular area of muscle beneath each armpit, and was suitably taxed by the time I was back at the dock.  The temperature continues to be above 90 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend, but the wind has shifted to the north, bringing in some not-so-humid air, so the heat wasn't as oppressive as it could have been.

I was still sore this morning, so I did an abbreviated version of the gym routine.  Then I went back to the riverfront and got in the boat.  I paddled to the mouth of the harbor and saw another barge rig coming upriver just above those same bridges, so I paddled out to try some surfing once again.  This time the pilot didn't mind what I was doing, or if he did, he made no indication.  And the waves were SWEET!!!!  I spent a good ten minutes getting one nice long surf after another.  By the time the best waves had pulled away from me I'd surfed most of the way back up to the harbor's mouth.  Saving myself that extra paddling during the dog days of summer is something I'm always grateful for.

Lately Monday has been the day of the week I've taken off from athletic stuff, and I'm looking forward to some recovery time tomorrow.

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A U.S. paddler medals in Paris

The United States has its first whitewater slalom Olympic medalist in 20 years.  Evy Leibfarth of Bryson City, North Carolina, finished third in the women's canoe class yesterday at the venue in Vaires-sur-Marne, France.  Evy joins Jamie McEwan (men's single canoe bronze 1972), Scott Strasbaugh and Joe Jacobi (men's double canoe gold 1992), Dana Chladek (women's kayak bronze 1992 and women's kayak silver 1996), and Rebecca Giddens (women's kayak silver 2004) on the list of U.S. team members who have medaled at the Olympics.

Twelve paddlers advanced from the semifinal to the final, and because Evy finished 12th in the semi, she was the first athlete on the course in the final.  Once her run was finished, she had to stand and watch while the other eleven finalists took their runs.  Her score withstood challenges from four paddlers, but then Elena Lilik of Germany bettered it by more than six seconds.  Another four paddlers tried and failed to beat Evy's run.  Then came Jessica Fox.  As I mentioned in my post on Monday, there was already little doubt that the Australian is the dominant slalom athlete of the modern era and one of the greatest ever, but she reaffirmed her status with a run that was nearly two and a half seconds faster than Lilik's.  Fox now owns more Olympic medals than any other whitewater slalom racer in history: three golds, a silver, and two bronzes.  She is also the first slalom racer to win two golds at the same Olympics, though I should note that this is only the fourth Olympics in which an athlete has been allowed to enter more than one class in slalom, and only the second Games in which more than one class has been available to women.  Regardless, it's been a history-making week for Jessica Fox.

You can watch TV coverage of the women's canoe class, including the complete final runs of Leibfarth, Lilik, and Fox, here, here, and here.

Back here in good old Memphis, Tennessee, it was just plain hot yesterday.  I rode my bike out to Shelby Farms and back and got plenty sweaty.  I finished the ride just before lunch, and felt I'd earned the right to spend the rest of the day in the air-conditioned indoors.

It was another hot one today: the temperature was rapidly approaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit when I got down to the river around 9:20 this morning.  I was in the mood to do some wake surfing out on the mighty Mississippi, but I found the river deserted when I got to the mouth of the harbor.  So I returned to the dock and hopped in the whitewater boat.  Lots of Eskimo rolls to cool off made for a good consolation prize.  I've generally been feeling really good in this boat, though I doubt I'm paddling nearly as well as any of the 41 male and female C1 racers who just competed in Paris.

While I was doing my own paddling this morning, the one remaining Olympic slalom class had its semifinal and final.  There would be no medalist from the U.S. in men's kayak because the U.S. did not qualify to enter an athlete.  Other than that, it was a pretty typical men's K1 field: several racers had had success over the last decade, including Jiri Prskavec of the Czech Republic, Joe Clarke of Great Britain, and Peter Kauzer of Slovenia; but there were also a whole bunch of hot new guys.  In women's canoe yesterday there was a gap of more than eight seconds separating first place from third, but the podium positions would almost certainly be tighter today.

And indeed they were.  The winner was Giovanni de Gennaro of Italy; just two tenths of a second back was Titouan Castryck of France.  Both had clean runs in the final.  The bronze medalist, Pau Echaniz of Spain, had the fastest raw time of all the finalists, but a two-second gate-touch penalty knocked him back to third place, 0.65 second behind de Gennaro.

When I watch the world-class slalom K1 racers, I can never get over the all-out speed of these guys, and the risks they take to shave tenths of seconds.  I encourage folks to watch this video footage with that in mind.

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Many paddle strokes here in my city and in that city overseas

This morning I did a gym session before heading down to the river.  Oppressive heat has returned to Memphis and the Mid South, and the temperature was pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit when I got downtown.  Once again I spent 30 minutes in the surfski and 30 minutes in the whitewater boat.  There was a robust south breeze that kept me cool as I paddled the ski down to the mouth of the harbor, but when I came back toward the dock with the wind at my back the heat bore down.  I also had bad stinging in my eyes: with the wind at my back the sweat on my face doesn't evaporate before it runs into my eyes.  Back at the dock I hopped in the whitewater boat and did all kinds of drills, including plenty of Eskimo rolls.  The water felt great out in that heat.  I took a cool hose bath once I'd finished, and came home feeling pretty good.  I'm enjoying these variety-filled paddling sessions.

At the Olympic Games over there in Paris, the whitewater slalom men's canoe class had its semifinal and final on Monday.  French paddler Nicolas Gestin won the gold medal, and whereas Jessica Fox had saved her best run for last in women's kayak, Gestin posted the fastest times in the preliminary round, the semifinal, and the final.  His final run was a remarkable 5.48 seconds faster than that of silver medalist Adam Burgess of Great Britain.  Matej Benus of Slovakia claimed the bronze, 0.19 second behind Burgess.

NBC was so kind as to post this footage on You Tube of the final runs for Burgess and Gestin, and Gestin's run is truly a thing of beauty.  It reminds me of moments I had while racing slalom (not at the world class level, of course) when it felt like everything was going right, like all the skills I knew I had were right at my fingertips.  I've had similar moments in downwind paddling more than two decades later.  Such moments are elusive, but when you have them it makes all the many hours of work you put in feel worthwhile.

The Olympics came to an end in the rudest of ways for U.S. C1 paddler Casey Eichfeld, for whom I shared some backstory in this post three months ago.  He received a 50-second penalty for missing a gate that knocked him back to last place in the semifinal round.  As of this writing I have not seen video footage of Casey's run, but I would guess that the penalty resulted from a blink-of-an-eye error that Casey is now wishing he could have back.

That is very much the nature of this supremely unforgiving paddlesport discipline.  A major league baseball player can make a fielding error, or an N.B.A. basketball player can commit a turnover, and there are still chances for their teams to come back and win.  When you make a similar mistake in elite-level whitewater slalom, that's it.  You lose.  This is almost certainly Casey's last Olympics and I'm really sorry it had to end in such a way.  Over his long career Casey has been a lot of fun to watch and has been an exemplary citizen in the international athletic community, and I hope that in the fullness of time he'll be able to look back on all that and be satisfied.

The action in Paris has now moved on to the other two classes.  In today's preliminary round, the women's canoe field got trimmed from 21 athletes to 18 and the men's kayak field from 23 to 20.  Among the 16 female canoeists who will line up in tomorrow's semifinal is Evy Leibfarth of Bryson City, North Carolina, who finished 11th today.  The male kayakers will have their semis and finals Thursday.  The U.S. did not qualify to enter an athlete in that class for these Games.

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