Monday photo feature

A team from New Zealand competes in the Molokai Hoe outrigger canoe race, a crossing of the channel between the islands of Molokai and Oahu, in 2010.  Photo lifted from the website newswire.co.nz.

I don't know if I'll be paddling the high seas like this during my stay in Hawaii; frankly, I'll be happy if I can get a few workouts in and enjoy the sights on less-exposed bodies of water.  But you never know.

Availing myself of a lovely day

I paddled for 80 minutes this morning.  After warming up for the first 15 minutes, I did my three 8-stroke sprints.  I haven't said it lately, but I do these sprints at two-minute intervals; that's enough recovery time for me to go totally all-out on each sprint.

Sometimes these sprints feel as fluid and smooth as can be; other times, like today, they feel a bit forced and sloppy.  The goal is to do them with the same precise form I use while paddling at lower intensity, with legs, abs, shoulders, and arms all firing in unison.  My first sprint was the worst one this morning; I did a bit better on the second and third.

Today we're enjoying another mild sunny day in the Mid South, with the temperature expected to reach the high 50s Fahrenheit.  Of course, we've got a saying around here that goes "If you don't like the weather here, just wait a while," and in keeping with that it's going to be colder and grayer for the next several days.  That'll get me all the more ready for my trip to our nation's 50th state next Sunday.

This nice weather, combined with a river level (20.1 feet on the Memphis gauge) that has all the Corps of Engineers' wing dikes well under water, motivated me to ferry across the river and check out some of the lovely scenery on the Arkansas side.  The Loosahatchie Chute separates the Loosahatchie Bar from the mainland a couple of miles upstream of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and once I'm up above the bridge paddling north, all I see is water flowing between forested banks.  It's lush and green in the summertime, of course, but I like it in winter, too, when the leafless trees give off a bronze hue in the sunlight.

Power and paddling

It got cold midweek, but today we had a high in the 50s Fahrenheit with partly sunny skies.  I paddled Thursday in a brisk north wind, but today it was almost dead calm and I was plenty warm in the boat.  Today's 80-minute session took me down below the Frisco Bridge, back upriver along the Arkansas bank above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and then back to the harbor.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I paddled a quick cruising pace with several long surges.

Yesterday I did the February strength routine again, and I'm still getting used to the more complex movements, notably the "rolling squat burpee."  It takes quite a burst of power right at the beginning to get myself on my feet and over into the pushup position.  Because all the exercises, besides maybe the "super crunches," emphasize bursts of power, they are low-rep affairs.  Power isn't something you can build with endless repetition.

I hope that doing these exercises that involve exerting power while in awkward positions will translate into some paddling success: canoe and kayak racing, after all, requires the application of power on a paddle blade while balancing in a tippy race boat.  Many of the strength routines I've done included exercises that I could barely pull off at first but had much better command of by the end of the month, and that gives me some hope that I can improve what I do in the boat, too.

Of course, there are in-the-boat power-building drills one can do, and I'll talk more about that soon.

Mending body and spirit

Back on January 17 I mentioned some aches and pains.  Basically, the entire right side of my body seemed out of whack.  My right foot hurt up in the arch; my right hamstring was tight and sore; my right hip and the right side of my lower back ached; and my right shoulder, right in the front, felt weak and sore.

I had a strong suspicion that the hamstring and hip ailments were the result of limping around on my hurting foot.  I don't know how a bum foot would affect my shoulder, but who knows?  In any case, I finally decided it was time to seek professional help with the foot, and I made an appointment with an orthopedist last Friday, the 29th of January.

The doctor told me it looked like a textbook case of plantar fasciitis, and he prescribed his standard treatment regimen for this common overuse injury.  I would be taking an oral anti-inflammatory, doing a few specialized stretching and massage exercises, and wearing this splint while I slept at night:

I was a bit dubious about the splint as soon as I put it on.  It's not very tight-fitting, and I couldn't believe that wearing it overnight would make much difference.  But lo and behold, it did.  When I got out of bed the next morning, the pain was gone from the arch and replaced by some mild soreness in the lower calf and Achilles area.  This latter bit made sense to me, as plantar fasciitis comes about when lower calf tightness causes more of the burden of standing and walking to be shifted down into the arch area.  I knew I would have to keep stretching and massaging, but this simple splint was making most of the difference.

My foot has continued to feel much better in the week that has passed since my visit to the doctor, and perhaps as a result, the rest of my body is feeling better as well.  Feeling better after weeks of feeling crummy has renewed my enthusiasm for doing all the little things that help keep an athlete feeling good: hydration, thorough stretching and warmup, and plenty of rest and good nutrition between workouts to facilitate recovery.

February strength routine

It's time for a new strength routine, and since I'll be traveling for a big chunk of this month I'm doing all body-weight exercises that require no equipment.

Last month's routine included a lot of exercises from this video featuring extreme kayak racer Michele Ramazza.  This month I'm doing one exercise from this video: the "super crunches."




The rest of this month's routine comes from this video, posted on Face Book by slalom coach Ron Lugbill a few weeks ago:



The exercises here all focus on explosive movements to build power, and they are technically quite tricky.  I'm spending the first few days of this month just learning them: I watch an exercise in the video, then I get down on the floor and try it myself, I see where I'm having difficulty, and I watch the video footage again to see how this athlete handles it.  I hope that by the time I'm in Hawaii I'll have a good grasp on all of them.

In summary, here are the list of exercises I have chosen for this month:

1.  Power plank-ups

2.  Super crunches

3.  Pendulum planks

4.  Glute/ham single-leg plyo bridge

5.  Hannibal pushups

6.  Rolling squat burpee


Like last month's routine, this one keeps me in near-constant motion, and I like that.

Catching up

I apologize for the break in posting.  Sometimes life just gets in the way.  I've been busy in my workshop as well as tending to some pet care.  But fear not: the training continues.  I've been paddling my boat four times a week and closing out the month of January with the strength routine.

Here in Memphis it was cold, then it got warm (and windy and wild), and now it's cold again.  Such is winter in the Mid South.  After getting a pair of chilly-day paddles in with Joe last week, I arrived at the riverfront on Saturday and Sunday amid balmy temperatures and the strongest wind from the south that I've seen in quite a long time.  The water was still frigid, so in the interest of safety I stayed in the harbor both days.

On Saturday I paddled into the wind to the mouth (the south end) of the harbor, doing three 8-stroke sprints along the way.  Then, coming back north with the wind at my back, I did eight 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  The sprints were hard but felt fast and fun.

On Sunday the wind might have been even a bit stronger.  Once again I paddled to the harbor's mouth and then, with the wind at my back, I did some not-so-structured play.  The waves weren't quite big enough for true surfing, but I could get a little ride now and then for a few seconds at a time; when the wave gave out I would sprint ahead to the next wave.  The best action was between the Hernando DeSoto and monorail bridges, where the harbor gets constricted between a marina on one side and a steep bank on the other, and the wind sort of tunnels.

By the time Joe and I met again yesterday, a front was moving in but the air was still warm.  It was breezy and we got rained on a good bit, but the water wasn't really that rough.  We put in a good 80-minute distance session.

Monday photo feature

Joe Royer shot this photo of me back in 2003, I think.  The Greenbelt Park is covered in a lot more snow than we had here this past weekend.  I for one am perfectly happy to have been passed over by Old Man Winter this time around.

Coping with January

Roscoe Feild's funeral was scheduled for one o'clock on Thursday, so Joe and I got down to the river early to paddle for about 80 minutes.  The big news of the day was the approaching snowstorm, and as we paddled we could detect the intensifying wind out of the north.

But Winter Storm Jonas let us off with little more than a dusting.  When I woke up Friday morning there was a thin coat of snow and ice on the streets outside, and with a daytime high of about 36 degrees Fahrenheit the streets were completely clear by the end of the day.

So getting down to the river yesterday was no problem at all.  But it still was not an especially nice day to paddle.  The north wind continued to blow over ten miles per hour, and even though sunshine  was predicted the sky was full of clouds at the time of day I was down there.  I paddled for 40 minutes, staying in the northern half of the harbor where the wooded banks offer some protection from the wind.  I did three 8-stroke sprints and some backpaddling, and otherwise tried to maintain a good strong tempo.

Today was much nicer: plenty of sun with a breeze from the south, and a Fahrenheit temperature that rose from the high 30s into the low 40s while I was down there.  The river was the calmest I've seen it in quite a while, and I was tempted to ferry over to the Arkansas side and check out the drainage channel from Dacus Lake, which should be flowing heartily now that the river has dropped some 20 feet in the last couple of weeks.  But on these winter days I try to stick a little closer to civilization in the interest of safety, and I resisted the impulse and paddled up to the mouth of the Wolf River instead.

I pushed the pace pretty hard up there, and my elapsed time from leaving the dock to arriving at the Wolf was about 47 minutes.  I think the fastest I've ever done it is a bit under 45 minutes, but anything under 50 isn't bad.  Wearing the same outfit I'd worn in colder temperatures all last week, I had worked up a major sweat by the time I got up there, paddling in the bright sunshine with the wind at my back.  Even though I'd had my normal consumption of water since getting out of bed this morning, I felt a bit dehydrated.  So I eased up on the intensity going back down to the harbor and up to the marina.

In memoriam

When somebody asks me how long I've been paddling, I usually reply that I started in 1981 as a 13-year-old summer camper.  The camp I attended in western North Carolina had a good-quality canoeing program that took us on beautiful Blue Ridge Mountain streams, and I became fascinated with the idea that I could move the boat anywhere I wanted with a simple repertoire of strokes in combination with the river's currents.

But it wouldn't really be wrong to trace my paddling history back some ten years earlier than that.  During my childhood my family took trips to Hardy, Arkansas, as guests of my parents' close friends Roscoe and Jane Feild, who owned a cabin on Wahpeton Hill overlooking the Spring River just across from the town.  In my first decade on this Earth there was no place more magical than Hardy.  The Frisco Railroad ran right through town, and at that age I loved trains (I still do, for that matter).  Traveling between the cabin and the town involved crossing a rusty old one-lane steel bridge that we kids thought would topple into the river at any moment (it finally did topple during a flood in December of 1980).  Wahpeton Hill, part of the Ozark Foothills, had many of the features of a sure-enough mountain, my favorite being a craggy outcropping a short walk from the cabin that offered a lovely view of the river.

And then there was the river and the canoe.

The Spring River has long been a popular summertime getaway for residents of the greater Memphis area... perhaps too popular.  Several canoe liveries put their customers on a section a few miles upstream of Hardy, and all manner of unruly behavior is common on the busiest summer weekends.  Down at Hardy, in the shadow of Wahpeton Hill, the river is a quieter, more family-friendly place, and it was there that our two families swam in the cool spring-fed water and soaked up the sun on a floating dock.  The canoeing we did usually involved the little kids like me sitting in the middle of the Feilds' aluminum Grumman while the grownups did the paddling.  About a mile upriver there was a little shoals where my sister and I and the Feild children loved to swim and wade, and the canoe was the vehicle that got us there.

One of my favorite stories concerning the elite athletes I know is that of siblings Davey and Cathy Hearn, both of whom were world champions and Olympians in careers that started in the 70s and lasted until the early 00s.  Canoeing was part of their lives when the two were little, but it was the same kind of unstructured play that I engaged in at Hardy.  They didn't give much thought to serious racing until one summer day in 1972, when the news came on the radio that a member of their DC-area canoe club, Jamie McEwan, had taken the bronze medal in whitewater slalom canoe at the Olympic Games in Germany.  Suddenly, their heads were alive with thoughts like, "We're just like Jamie.  We paddle in the same canoe club, and run the same rivers he's run.  Why couldn't we go and race in the Olympics, just like he's done?"

I didn't have a role model of Jamie McEwan's stature, and I've certainly never achieved the heights in the sport that Cathy and Davey have.  Fortunately, you don't have to be as good as they to share in the joy of paddling, and my transition from the little kid playing around on the Spring River to an adolescent and adult plying the craft with much greater skill was not really that much different from theirs.  Once I was a bit older and had shipped off to camp for the summer, I was able to look at the canoes on the lake there and believe I belonged in one.  Soon enough I saw the canoeing staff counselors, several of whom were quite accomplished as paddlers, as the coolest guys in camp and just the role models I needed.

Roscoe was not a great paddler, or even a good paddler, for that matter.  But when my age was measured in single digits, I didn't need a guru.  I just needed somebody to put me in a boat and let my imagination do the rest.  Roscoe and Jane and my parents probably never gave much thought to whether I would go on embrace paddlesports as a lifelong passion; they were simply doing what all people should do for the children in their lives, and providing me with an activity to pass the time on those long hot summer days.

Roscoe Feild passed away at the age of 84 this past Sunday.  You can view his obituary in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis here.  I humbly pay tribute to the man here for the role he played in making me a paddler.

Manning the stern, Roscoe Feild guides the canoe alongside the dock with a not-half-bad rudder stroke.  His wife Jane sits in front of him, with their son John (in the orange life vest) and me in the middle.  My older sister paddles in the bow.

Froze thru & thru

Just in case I hadn't been yearning adequately for my trip to Hawaii, some more January-like weather has moved in this week.  The last several days have been windy and overcast, and the temperature failed to exceed the freezing point Monday and yesterday.  It would have been very easy for me to skip paddling yesterday if I hadn't agreed to meet Joe down at the river, and I wouldn't be surprised if Joe was having similar thoughts.  But we had made a pact, so out into the cold we went.

Training in the wintertime is actually not so bad once you're in the boat paddling.  Standing on the dock changing clothes and readying your boat and gear is what hurts the worst.  We took care of those ancillary chores as fast as we could, and then hit the water for a 75-minute session that was reasonably comfortable aside from my chilled feet.  All my sit-inside boats are stored here at home; I suppose I could take one down to the dock for winter paddling, but, well... winter doesn't last that long here.

After paddling I came home, lit a fire in my workshop wood stove, and spent the rest of the day trying to warm back up.

Monday photo feature

Today's forecast for Memphis, Tennessee, calls for a high temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  That's an even zero on the Celsius thermometer.  Seems like a good time to look ahead to my Hawaii trip, which is now less than a month away.

Pictured here is Zsolt Szadovszki, the top surf ski racer in Hawaii.  Zsolt is a former flatwater sprint racer for the Hungarian national team, a top program in international competition for decades.  Now living in Honolulu, he's the regional distributer for Epic Kayaks and is kindly arranging a rental boat for me when I'm there next month.  Photo by Barbara Yendell.

Some pain and some drama to spice up the routine

I've spent the week doing my usual thing in and out of the boat.

I paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday, Thursday, yesterday, and today.  I was starting to feel lethargic in the boat, and I addressed that by doing three 8-stroke sprints at the beginning of each session.  My sprinting technique was rusty, but each time out I felt a little bit sharper and more enthusiastic about what I was doing.

I'm also still doing the January strength routine three times a week.  Strength work has always been my least favorite part of training, but I'm feeling pretty good about how this month's routine is going. Each time I stretch and warm up thoroughly, and then move quickly from one exercise to the next.  I certainly hope this work will enhance my performance in the boat, but I also it helps my general fitness as I inch ever closer to the golden anniversary of my birth.  All over town I notice older people, and occasionally even people my age, struggling mightily with everyday movements that I take for granted: climbing stairs or moderate inclines, standing up and sitting down, lifting objects and moving them around... stuff like that.  A big goal of mine for the later stages of my life is to continue to do these basic things comfortably, and I think moving my body every day is the key ("use it or lose it," in other words).

For a couple of weeks I've had some fairly intense soreness in my lower back and all around my hip area.  I've addressed it with some stretching exercises as well as some sessions of backpaddling in the boat to work opposing muscles.  The condition has finally eased up a bit just in the last couple of days.

More worrisome is something that doesn't affect my paddling but definitely affects my overall quality of life: my right foot has been aching right in the arch area for a couple of months, and it seems to be getting worse.  So far I've just been living with it, hoping it'll get better, but if this keeps up I might have to give in and see a doctor.

Meanwhile, our sport got a bit of unwanted media attention on Friday.  For me, it started in the late morning when a friend called me on the telephone and asked me if I was okay.

"I think so," I replied.  "Should I not be?"

It turned out that somebody in an office building overlooking the river downtown had reported an "overturned kayaker," and several emergency response agencies were searching all up and down the riverfront for the hapless victim.  All the local TV news outlets, hungry for something sensational, were on the scene covering the brouhaha for their noon broadcasts, and there was also a story on the website of our daily newspaper, The Commercial Appeal.  That latter story said something about a "white two-person kayak," and I happen to have a friend with just such a boat, so now I was a bit concerned as I left that friend a voice-mail message to call me back.

A short while later my friend did call me back, and explained that the whole affair was nothing more than a false alarm.  He was in fact on the river in his white tandem boat with a friend of his, and for some reason the person up in the office building got the impression that they were in distress even though they were nothing of the sort.  A police harbor patrol boat met them as they returned to the harbor from the main river, and once they had reassured the cops that they were fine, they retired to the marina.  By late afternoon the story had disappeared from The Commercial Appeal's website, and the TV stations mentioned nothing about it in their six o'clock newscasts.

I have no idea what the person up in the office building thought he saw, and I don't want to sneer at a concerned citizen who was trying to do the right thing.  But the incident provides an example of how our general population views the Mississippi River and the idea of getting out on it in a human-powered craft.

Monday photo feature

As the Mississippi River at Memphis begins to recede, I share here a striking contrast between low water and high water.

The railroad trestle pictured here crosses the Wolf River about two miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.  I took the top photo on May 5, 2012, on which day the Mississippi was at 8.2 feet on the Memphis gauge; much lower and it would have been difficult to paddle this far up the Wolf because of shallow water.

I took the second photo yesterday, when the Memphis gauge reading was 39.4 feet.  At least in rough terms, a foot on the Memphis gauge corresponds to a vertical foot of elevation of the river's surface throughout this region, so it's fairly safe to say that the water is some 30 feet higher in the second photo than in the first.

I'll just add that during the 2011 flood, when the river rose just over 48 feet on the Memphis gauge, the water was up to the top of the rails on the train tracks.  I took a couple of pictures back then, but sadly I can't find them anywhere.

Fun (sort of) in the wildwater boat

Today I felt like doing something different, so I did something different.

I got my wildwater boat down from where it's been stored up under the deck behind my place, put it on the car, and drove to the mouth of the Wolf River.  Then I paddled some four miles or so up the Wolf and back.

Yesterday's rain had given way to a blast of cold air; when I arrived at the river the display in my car's dashboard said it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit.  An icy wind was blowing out of the northwest, and I was glad to be sitting down inside the wildwater boat rather than sitting on top of a surf ski.  On the other hand, the wind made the rudderless boat difficult to steer, and I grimaced as I leaned the boat left and right with my sore hips and lower back.

In any case, putting in at the mouth of the Wolf gave me a chance to explore a good bit of its flooded lower miles without having to paddle all the way up the Mississippi from the marina.  With the Mississippi registering 39.4 feet, the Wolf was flooded well beyond the section I managed to paddle (I made it as far up as the Watkins Street bridge before turning around).

Those lovely gray skies

The Mississippi crested yesterday at 39.59 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That huge mass of water that fell as rain two weeks ago is now moving on downriver and causing high-water events at places like Greeneville, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.  The river here will be dropping slowly for a few days, then more rapidly after that.  When I got down there this morning the level was about 39.5.  I suppose I could keep on posting pictures here, but surely by now everybody gets the idea.  If you want to know what the marina area looks like as the river drops, just look at the photos I've posted here in reverse order.

My midsection continues to be quite sore, and I've been doing all the stretches and warmup exercises I know of to bring about improvement.  Today I did another relatively easy session, spending 40 minutes in the boat.

It was a rainy day here in the Mid South, with intermittent showers, some of them quite heavy, moving through.  One semi-heavy shower fell on me while I was paddling, but it didn't last long.  I'll repeat something I've noted in the past: some of the most beautiful moments I've spent on the river have occurred on rainy days.  Today the sky was full of billowing clouds in many shades of gray, with an occasional ray of sunshine peeking through, and I felt fortunate to witness it all.  It's easy to get outside on warm sunny days, but it can be surprisingly rewarding to get oneself out on the supposedly not-so-nice days.

It'll be cresting soon

The Mississippi River level this morning was 39.3 feet on the Memphis gauge--just 1.2 feet higher than Tuesday's level.  The rise is slowing down, and the level might not even hit 40 feet.  I don't think I'll be parking my car much higher up the hill than this:

The prevailing wind had shifted to the southeast, blowing more garbage to the water's edge on this side of the harbor.  Here's how it looked from the marina today:

I've been feeling quite sore in my lower back and hip area this week, and I have a feeling it's partly because I've ramped up my paddling volume a bit out of a desire to get out there and check out the high water.  So today I took it easier, paddling for just 60 minutes and staying in the harbor except for a brief jaunt out onto the river at the harbor's mouth.

"38 Feet High and Risin'"

Back to the river I went this morning to see how Great Flood 2016 is coming along.  I drove my truck today because I had to run an errand along the way that involved moving something.  Even the mightiest truck must defer to the whims of the mighty Mississippi River:

What we see here is a water level that measured 38.1 feet on the Memphis gauge.  Forecasters are predicting a crest of 40.5 feet this Friday, so the water should rise only a couple of feet higher than this.  I believe this particular apocalypse will be more heckish than hellish.  Here's the view from that spot on the marina:

Once in the boat I paddled for 90 minutes, heading out of the harbor and upriver, through the flooded Greenbelt Park, and a half mile or so up the Wolf River before turning around and coming back.  It was another nice January day, though not quite as lovely as Sunday was: a breeze from the east was putting quite a chill on things.  But it was still not bad for the dead of winter.

Monday photo feature

It sort of looks like Jesus Christ left His truck parked on the Memphis riverfront back in May of 2011.  I took this photo as the water was approaching its crest level of 48.03 feet on the Memphis gauge that month.  The highest level we see in most years is lower than 40 feet, and this landscape, a parking lot on Mud Island just south of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, is high and dry.

Right now we're watching the river rise again, with the current forecast calling for a crest of 41 feet at the end of this week.  You won't have to be the Messiah to park here at that level.

Where'd that guard rail go?

I went down to the riverfront this morning and found a level of 35.1 feet on the Memphis gauge--five feet higher than what it was on Thursday when I last went down there.  I had to park my car higher up the hill today:

Here's the view from that same spot on the marina pier:

The National Weather Service continues to revise its forecast downward.  The latest I've heard is that they're predicting a crest of 41 feet (a foot lower than before) on January 8 (a day sooner than before).  As fun as it is to take these pictures of high water, I consider that good news.  Hopefully we can get by with just a small fraction of the damage the Saint Louis area experienced.  I also hope we can avoid the national media circus that we saw during the big flood of 2011, when the river rose to 48.03 feet on the Memphis gauge.

The yellow building in the second photo is the Maria Montessori School, and it was the site of one of the more absurd moments on the national news in 2011.  The little amphitheater that you can see at the right side of the photo was completely under water, and an NBC reporter decided to don chest waders and appear on camera while standing on a step of the amphitheater with water up to his chest.  The resulting footage earned the derision of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show: "The water is NIPPLE HIGH, ladies and gentlemen!"

On a more important note, I had a good paddle in absolutely gorgeous weather.  The sun shone, and the Fahrenheit temperature was in the mid to high 40s with only a light breeze... an ideal January day.  I paddled for 80 minutes, going out onto the river and up the inundated Greenbelt Park.  I paddled a pretty strong pace with several long surges.  As I paddled back to the dock I ran into my friend Joe on his way out, and I was glad not to be the only one enjoying this lovely paddling weather.

Beginning to take some photos

Yesterday I did another round of the January strength routine.  It's beginning to flow now as I've gotten used to the exercises, although that one-foot lift still feels a bit awkward to me.

I paddled with Joe in the harbor for 80 minutes this morning.  The Memphis gauge reading was about 30.1 feet--still not an outrageously high level.  But more water is on its way.  The National Weather Service has revised its crest-level prediction downward a bit--42 feet, rather than the 43.5 feet it was saying the other day--but that's still higher than all but three crests on record.

Mostly just for fun, I'm trying to snap a photo or two each time I go down to the riverfront over the next couple of weeks.  I took this one Tuesday, when the Memphis gauge reading was 27.3 feet.  I'm standing on Harbortown Marina looking over at the Montessori school on the bank.  That's my car parked over in the left side of the picture:

This morning I took this photo from the same vantage point.  The water level is almost three feet higher.  I reckon I'll have to park my car a bit farther up the hill next time I'm down there:

I took this shot today of my car from another angle.  You can see the water coming just past the guard rail in the right side of the picture:

So... check this blog every couple of days for the next couple of weeks, and we'll experience this high-water event together.

Some people are already flooded

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I send positive thoughts upriver to folks in Saint Louis and much of the rest of Missouri, where the flooding reports sound bad.  I think the greater Saint Louis region, where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meet, has a lot more residents in low-lying areas than we have here at Memphis.  Right now it sounds like they're re-living the nightmare of the 1993 flood.

Yesterday I heard on the radio that West Alton, Missouri--just a few miles up the river from Saint Louis--was experiencing some pretty bad flooding.  I went to a race there last August, and I believe it.  It was not high ground.

Meanwhile, here at Memphis things are just fine at the moment.  The Memphis gauge reading is 28.5 feet, just 1.2 feet higher than this time yesterday.  Like I said yesterday, it's a rather high level, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Lotsa water

I paddled my boat today for the first time in twelve days.  The layoff had been caused by both the little virus I had last week and some holiday travel to visit family.  The unfortunate thing about it is that I missed some balmy weather to paddle in: the Memphis area saw Fahrenheit highs in the 70s for most of last week, but today it was a much more seasonable mid-40s while I was on the water.

I paddled for 60 minutes, and concentrated hard on rotating fully and using my legs.  Generally I felt pretty good, although my right shoulder, the same one that was bothering me back in the spring, has been feeling a bit weak and sore.  I might have tweaked it while moving some heavy hickory lumber around in my workshop yesterday.  I probably should re-start the little rubber band exercises that helped it last time.

The big news in Memphis right now is some impending flooding on the Mississippi, the result of the huge storm system that moved across the Midwest Sunday and yesterday.  The current forecast says the river will crest at 43.5 feet on the Memphis gauge on January 9.  I'm hoping that figure will be revised downward a bit over the next few days, to minimize the impact on the lives and homes of people in our community.  Mind you, most Memphians will not be affected in that way: the city sits up on a bluff, beyond the reach of anything shy of a truly biblical flood.  So those thoughtful people who are concerned for my safety should rest assured that I don't foresee any problems whatsoever.  But there are some vulnerable areas, especially in the basins of the tributary streams.  The Mississippi backs up into those basins when it's in flood.

Today's level was 27.3 feet.  That's fairly high, but nothing we don't see practically every year.  The official flood stage on the Memphis gauge is 34 feet, and the river is expected to exceed that by New Year's Day.

Monday photo feature

A guy paddles a slalom K1 in the streets of York, England.  The photo, taken by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images, showed up on The Weather Channel's website.

It seems like it's been wet all over the globe in the last several days.  I've heard of flooding in South America, and right now things are getting pretty soggy from Texas up into Indiana and Ohio.  I spent yesterday looking at my Internet radar, transfixed by an incredibly slow-moving system that was parked over a large region that included parts of six states, with Fort Smith, Arkansas, right in the middle.  That system is only just now moving into the Memphis area this morning.

January strength routine

I started up a new strength routine this past week.  I plan to carry it through the month of January.  It's been a while since I've done any of the exercises in the Michele Ramazza video (embedded at the bottom of this post), so I've picked out a few and put together a circuit:

1.  Pushups
2.  Air squats and squats with a barbell
3.  Butterfly crunches
4.  Pullups
5.  Leg kicks and leg kicks swim
6.  One-foot lift (much harder than it looks!)
7.  Lateral abdominals
8.  Pullups
9.  Plank crunches
10.  Leg swing

So far I've been doing the exercises slowly as I get familiar with the movements and memorize the routine.  My plan is to work it into an aerobic circuit by making two rapid trips through it.

Mele Kalikimaka!

I've been laying low with a pretty bad cold the last few days.  All my life my rule has been that if I'm not running a fever, then I'm not really sick, and in keeping with that I'm trying to do at least a minimum of activity--namely, some stretching and stuff around the house.  But my energy level has been incredibly low.

Anyway... in the spirit of the season, and in honor of what I hope will be a happy and healthy trip to Hawaii in a couple of months, here's the Memphis Ukulele Band.

Monday photo feature

Jim Priest of Wenatchee, Washington, surfs a wave on Idaho's Lochsa River in 1996.

Gathering some of my favorite videos in one place

Nobody has ever accused me of being particularly savvy with computers and web design.  But I am pleased to announce that I have acquired a new skill in the last few days: I now know how to embed stuff in my blog posts!  My last post has a Google map embedded in it, and I've figured out how to embed You Tube videos as well.

As time goes on, I'd like to share all kinds of videos, particularly of exercises I incorporate into my strength routines: I always feel bad when I talk about exercises here without some way to show my readers what these exercises look like.  I might even shoot some video of myself doing some exercises if I can ever get myself organized to do so.

For now, I share here several strength-exercise videos that I have referred to many times in the last several years:

Core strength is an asset for paddlers of all disciplines.  Here's Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li demonstrating some simple core exercises one can do with a stability ball:




I love exercises that require little or no equipment.  In this video, slalom kayak world and Olympic champion Daniele Molmenti of Italy shows us some "backpacker" exercises, so named because they're easy to do anyplace on the planet you might find yourself:




The guy in this video, Michele Ramazza, has excelled in "extreme" or "freeride" racing--downriver kayaking in pretty gnarly whitewater:

 


Happy viewing!  And like I said, I'll try to jazz up this blog with some video more in the future.

Let me tell you about our harbor here at Memphis

I'm always fascinated with other racers' home training sites.  When I get to know a racer from another city or town, I tend to ask myself, "What kind of water does this person paddle on?  What does he or she see while out paddling?"  And whenever I visit another place, I always imagine what it might be like to live there and paddle there day in and day out.

Perhaps it's about time I told you more about where I paddle.  If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have seen me mention "the harbor" here many, many times.  "The harbor" is where I keep my boat, and it's the site of a very large percentage of my training.

Here's an interactive map of the Memphis riverfront:



The harbor is the sliver of water that separates Mud Island River Park from the rest of the city to the east.  Known as Wolf River Harbor because it was the bed of the Wolf River before an engineering project redirected the Wolf (you can see where the Wolf now enters the Mississippi by scrolling the map to the north a short distance), it is not quite five kilometers in length from its northern end to its junction with the Mississippi (marked as "Joe Curtis Point" on this map).  It is between a hundred and two hundred meters wide, on average.  It is largely protected from the wind, and it has no current, just like a lake, and that makes it ideal for practicing technique and speed without the distractions of rough conditions.  It also affords the paddler a safer alternative to the mighty Mississippi on very cold winter days and times like that.

Three bridges span Wolf River Harbor.  The northernmost is the A.W. Willis Avenue (formerly Auction Avenue) bridge, which links downtown Memphis with the Harbortown residential development.  The next bridge to the south is the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which carries Interstate 40 over the Mississippi River.  The southernmost bridge is an access way to Mud Island River Park by both foot traffic and a monorail tram.

This photo, taken by a Daily Memphian photographer, offers a panoramic view looking south from about halfway up Mud Island.  That's the harbor on the left, with the main channel of the Mississippi River on the right.  You can see Harbortown Marina where I keep my boat, with the A.W. Willis Bridge just beyond it.

Many racers know Wolf River Harbor as the site of the last kilometer or so of the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, which takes place the day before Father's Day each June.  The finish line is next to Mississippi River Park, just south of the monorail bridge.

I keep my boat at Harbortown Marina.  If you zoom in on the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge, you'll see Harbortown Marina represented by two rectangles just to the north.  The marina is owned privately by its slip owners, like a condominium, and it is equipped with racks where kayakers and canoeists and rowers may store their craft for $100 a quarter ($400 a year).  The marina is approximately halfway between the harbor's northern end and its southern end.  It's maybe a couple hundred meters closer to the southern end; I know this because at my normal cruising pace, I typically take about fifteen minutes to paddle from the marina to the mouth of the harbor, and about 17 or 18 minutes to paddle from the marina to the harbor's north end.

Public access to the harbor can be found on its east side, using a boat ramp directly beneath the A.W. Willis bridge.  There is room to park during both high- and low-water periods.

In the many years I have been training in the harbor, I have established baseline times on several courses defined by permanent objects.  For instance, a good time for me from the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the southern edge of the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge is around three minutes.  From the southern edge of the monorail bridge to the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, it's around two minutes.  The A.W. Willis bridge has two sets of pilings in the water, and I've broken 30 seconds a couple of times sprinting across the harbor from one of them to the other.

Joe Royer took this photo of me as we paddled north from the mouth of the harbor.  That's the monorail bridge in the distance.

In each of the last several years, I have timed myself over one full lap of the harbor.  I've done it in mid-March, a couple of weeks before my first race of the year, as a test of my early-season fitness.  My "starting gate" is between two trees at the north end of the harbor; you can actually see these trees if you switch the map to satellite view and zoom in up there.  I paddle all the way to the mouth of the harbor, where, lacking a turnaround buoy, I make sure to cross the center-line of Beale Street before turning around.  Then I return to the north end of the harbor and finish between the same two trees that marked my starting line.  My best time on this course is a little over 50 minutes.

So, you could call Wolf River Harbor my gym... my dojo.  It's where I get myself ready for the races I do each spring, summer, and fall.  Needless to say, I have spent untold hours there.  And there is no question I have developed a relationship with the place.

As in any relationship, there are negatives as well as positives.  The harbor has a fairly serious litter problem.  After a heavy rain, especially when the water level is low, the harbor is choked with floatable trash that has washed in from the storm drains. The city has attempted to remedy the problem by installing a boom at the mouth of Bayou Gayoso (for some reason it's called Quincy Bayou on this map), but the litter continues to come in from other sources.  There's also some evidence of a broken sewer line (i.e., condoms), and I know the problem has been reported, but so far the city has been in no hurry to fix it.

The harbor's industrial denizens have not always been the best stewards, either.  Though I enjoy the vibrancy of the barge traffic that comes in and out of the harbor serving the LaFarge, Bunge, and Cargill plants, I bristle at the sloppy practices at the loading facilities that allow grain, Portland cement, and who knows what else to escape into the air and the water.  Some stricter enforcement by our city and county authorities is definitely in order.

To put it simply, I sense that these authorities don't consider the environmental health of the Memphis riverfront to be a great priority.  I detect an attitude that the Mississippi River is strictly a commercial and industrial waterway and has no recreational value.  Certainly, a few more recreational users to demonstrate a contrary argument would be nice--besides my friend Joe and me, I can think of maybe a half-dozen other paddlers who are down there on any kind of regular basis--but the folks with the power in our town could reap some benefit in the long run if they would embrace us rather than shrug us off as a mild annoyance.  When I look at southern cities of similar size--Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Chattanooga, Nashville--I see cities that have lovingly brought back their once-decrepit waterfronts and made them destinations for citizens (all of them, not just the ones with money to spend) to enjoy the outdoors on or around the water however they please.  In this way as in so many others, my hometown seems to be several decades behind the times.

Well... I love our harbor anyway, no matter how few other people do.  I love the turtles that sun themselves on logs along the banks, and file off into the water when they see me coming.  I love the beavers that slap the water smartly with their tails.  I love the willows that stand in the shallow water up in the north end.  I love the birds--blue and green herons, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, geese, ducks, gulls, purple martens, eagles--that call the harbor home for at least part of each year.  I love the alligator gar that lurk near the surface in the summertime, diving deeper when my boat passes over them.  I love the high-water periods, when I can paddle among the trees, and the low-water periods, when I am surrounded by sloping muddy banks.  I love paddling from the harbor's relatively clear water onto the silty brown water of the Mississippi River, and back again.

I hope that paddlers visiting Memphis will find this information useful, and that they will value paddling on my home water as much as I do paddling on theirs.

Monday photo feature

Today's photo feature is a satellite image of the island of Oahu.  Why have I posted such a thing?  Because I am going there myself in a couple of months!  I'll be sharing more information about this trip as the date draws nearer.

What's been going on lately

My training activity has been light in recent weeks, and as a result the blogging here has been light as well.  I apologize to anybody who's been looking in vain here for new thoughts from me.

Since my last race in mid-October, I've been paddling twice a week, usually with Joe on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Typically we do a lap of the harbor (paddling easy, it takes us 70 to 80 minutes) and talk about every topic under the sun.  In terms of training value, I look at these sessions as a way to maintain muscle memory and practice stroke technique while giving my body a break from the intensity of being in race form.

For the last three weeks I've been doing four simple core exercises three times a week.  Two of them can be found in this video featuring Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li that I've shared here many times in the past.  Another one is an exercise I learned years ago at a slalom training camp where U.S. world champion and Olympian Rebecca Giddens shared some yoga-inspired exercises she'd been doing.  The fourth is a static position I think most people can visualize.

Specifically, my exercise routine is as follows:

1.  Static exercise shown at 1:03 of the Jing Jing Li video.

2.  A plank exercise that involved lying face-down on the floor and lifting the head and the legs in a "Superman" pose.  This is the exercise I learned from Rebecca Giddens.  I hold the position for 20 seconds, then rest for 20 seconds, and so on until I've done a set of five.

3.  Exercise shown at 2:55 of the Jing Jing Li video.  This exercise always hurts bad the first time and leaves me wicked sore for several days, so I always ease into it.  When I first did it several weeks ago I did sets of ten reps; since then I have worked up to 20 reps in a set.

4.  An exercise where I hang from my gymnast's rings and raise my legs up to horizontal in front of me (i.e., my body is in an "L" shape).  Each time I count "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi" and so on until I reach Twenty, and I do this two twice per set.



So, there you go.  This is how I'm spending my break from training this offseason.  Some of the aches and pains I was dealing with in the late summer have had a chance to subside while I carry on a minimum level of stuff in and out of the boat.  I'll probably continue this laid-back routine until after Christmas, and then I'll start putting on a more serious face for the 2016 season.

Recovery time

This morning Joe and I paddled for 80 minutes in the rain.  Even though it was the misty variety that sort of oozes out of the sky, the rain was quite heavy at times, and we got drenched.  Fortunately it wasn't that cold, and it actually made for a beautiful scene.

A couple of easy paddles like this each week is what I'm planning for the next few weeks.  I also want to try to keep up some "active recovery" activities--stretching, soaking in the tub, stuff like that.  I'm hoping that the aches and pains that have dogged me for much of this long season will have a chance to subside for good as a result.

I'm taking a little time off from strength work, but I'll start that back up before long.

Monday photo feature

Normally he's my training partner, but at this moment he's my nemesis: Joe Royer is hot on my heels as we make a buoy turn at the 2006 "Bacall" race at Key Largo, Florida.

Thoughts on the last race, and on the season

I closed my 2015 season with a brief immersion into a more surf-ski-centric world, and that gave me all kinds of things to think about.  I've spent the past week trying to organize the jumble of ideas in my head.

In every sport I've ever tried, I've been fascinated with the things that separate the elite athletes from everybody else.  There are surely more such things than I'll be getting into here, but I can think of one thing that's relevant in both slalom racing and surf ski racing.  There's no question the elite athletes are strong and speedy: when I was racing slalom C1 in the 1990s, I expect nearly every last one of the top C1 guys could have beaten me easily in a 50-meter sprint in our C1s across flatwater, and I expect every elite-caliber surf ski athlete could beat me easily in the same sprint in our surf skis.  But of course, slalom races take place on whitewater, and surf ski races take place in rough open-water conditions, and in both cases there's more to making a boat move than just speed and strength.  The elite athletes in these disciplines have an incredible degree of balance and control.  Where I would be throwing down a brace to avoid a flip, a top athlete would have the body control to plant just as good a forward stroke as he would on flatwater.  I got schooled in this area many times in my slalom days, and I was schooled again at the North Shore Cup last Saturday.

Mind you, I haven't exactly ignored these issues in my own training.  I believe the winner of any competition at any level is the person who does the little things better than anybody else, and several times this year I was that person.  And each time, I felt as though I'd earned the right to be that person, having done all kinds of stroke drills and balance drills and strength work that my competitors either hadn't done or hadn't mastered quite as well as I had.

But that brings up another theme of this trip: I got a healthy reminder that being a "big fish" in one part of the country does not mean there aren't many people just as good or better in other parts.  Going into the North Shore Cup I knew enough about guys like Austin Kieffer and Reid Hyle and Jesse Lischuk to know that I would not figure into the race up front.  But then there were another dozen or so guys and gals I didn't know much about, and I honestly didn't know if I would be the fourth-best guy or the twentieth-best guy in the field.  It turned out a fair number of racers were quite a bit better than I, at least on Saturday.

My guess is that these folks are in their boats a few days a week like I am, and work assiduously on their skills just like I do.  That they are faster in their boats than I might be because they train more than I do.  Maybe they have better training groups than I do, competing with one another and sharing ideas and collectively raising their performance to a higher level.  Maybe some of them have coaches to keep an eye on what they're doing and help them improve faster than they would coaching themselves.  Or maybe they're just better athletes than I am--stronger, speedier, more powerful, more agile.

And so, I come back around to the question that I ask myself all the time, and am occasionally asked by others: why do I do this?  "To win" is ultimately not the answer, even though I do feel a lot of satisfaction when I win.  Fascination with the process is what really keeps me going--the hours spent in my boat on the water in the outdoors, working on one skill one day, another skill another day, sometimes enjoying the company of a friend or two, sometimes relishing the solitude.  Eventually, once I've taken a little break and recovered from the wear and tear of this past season, I'll start preparing for another, and I will incorporate whatever lessons I've gleaned on this most recent trip.  I don't know that my future competitive results will be any better than they have been in the past; at age 48, I should probably be happy if I can just keep them close to what they've been in the past.

I'll conclude this post with one last encouraging thought.  I have a friend who is a career musician and music teacher, and he told me recently that as a teenager and young adult he was obsessed with perfection, really beating himself up every time he made even the smallest mistake.  Then, at some point in his life, he came around to accept the fact that he would never be perfect, and that he should relish the things he was doing well rather than dwell on the mistakes he was making.  Once he adopted that attitude, he found that his performances became much more consistently good, and as a teacher he has consciously focused on the good work of his students rather than trying to hammer out their mistakes.

Our sport requires such a variety of skills and techniques that nobody can possibly master every single one of them.  Even at the elite level, the winner is usually the person who has mastered the set of skills that most closely suits the conditions on the course that day.  There's no question I am good at some things, so-so at some other things, and terrible at some other things; in the interest of my overall happiness I'll try my best to enjoy the things I do well while taking those other things one or two at a time.

Surfing Carolina style

After breakfast yesterday morning, Rick and I headed for the Isle of Palms.  We left my car at the Fort Moultrie beach access, drove north and picked up Eric Mims at his house, and parked Rick's truck at the 57th Street beach access.

The wind was blowing slightly offshore but was creating some nice waves.  Eric, as both the local and the person with by far the most ocean-paddling experience of the three of us, offered his advice on launching through the shore break and maintaining a safe distance from the shore as we rode the downwind southward toward my parked car.  And off we went.

My confidence was shaky after Saturday's epic struggle, and it took me several tries to get myself going through the shore break.  I was also wicked sore in my midsection, and I winced each time I sprinted to catch a wave.  But soon enough I was getting a decent ride, and I began to relax a little.

Eric, who has become an outstanding downwind paddler since moving to the Charleston area several years ago, glided off into the distance ahead of us, and for the rest of the session it was Rick and me toiling for those all-too-elusive rides.  The conditions were somewhat confused and every ride we got took a fair amount of work.  Adding to my difficulty was my lack of a surfing rudder: the shorter rudder on my boat is wonderful for the mostly-flat conditions I encounter in the Mid South, but here in the Atlantic I found myself rudderless each time I was on the crest of a wave, sprinting to catch the sweet spot.

But somehow, I held my own.  Having surfed a few towboat wakes on the Mississippi late this summer, I was working on an experience level that wasn't absolute zero.  All told, I think I got perhaps three long, sweet rides and a lot of little two-second boosts.  I would catch something and glide past Rick, and then he would catch something and glide past me.  On and on it went until we brought it home in the protected waters of Fort Moultrie.

And with that, I plan to start heading back west today.  I still have many thoughts about this weekend of intense surf ski action that I have yet to process fully and articulate here.  I will try my best to say more about it in the next couple of days.

Monday photo feature

Reid Hyle of Rockledge, Florida, fends off the challenge of Jesse Lischuk of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to win the 2014 North Shore Cup.  The 2014 edition took place in November, and the temperature at race time was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit.  Jesse armed himself with pogies and a ski cap, while Reid settled for three or four layers of shirts.  Photo by Vadim Lischuk; stolen from the North Shore Cup web page.

The 2015 North Shore Cup took place this past weekend--about a month earlier than last year--and the weather was cool and breezy but nearly 40 degrees warmer.  I was thankful for that because I got very wet during the course of the race.

Results are up; I'm still digesting it all

The results of the 2015 North Shore Cup are now posted here.

It turns out I was the 13th fastest overall finisher.  I was 11th among the men; the women had a separate start and so I wasn't racing them head-to-head, but two of them posted faster times than mine.  One of them was Alex McLain of Byfield, Massachussetts, a 26-year-old flatwater sprint racer who did yesterday's race in an ICF K1 (a Legacy).  I'm very impressed that she was able to keep that boat upright at all, let alone cover the course five minutes and two seconds faster than I did.

Memphian Kata Dismukes finished third among the women, and was only nineteen seconds slower than I was.

I spent last night in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, at the home of Rick Carter's girlfriend Wyndy.  Today we're hoping to do some downwind paddling in the Atlantic if conditions are right.  It's time to start loosening up my sore muscles.

Feeling sort of defeated

The 12-mile North Shore Cup took place this morning on Lake Marion near Summerton, South Carolina.  I am now exhausted and haven't had a chance to process my post-race thoughts; I have only glanced at the results and they are not yet posted on the Internet.  But I'll just say it was quite a different event from any other I've entered this year.

First, there was a high-caliber field, featuring arguably the three best racers in the U.S. right now in Austin Kieffer, Reid Hyle, and Jesse Lischuk.  It was my first race this year in which I wasn't expecting to be in the hunt for a podium finish and I had to formulate a different kind of strategy.

Second, there was the course that would take us across the heart of a large lake, and the northeast breeze that would make the conditions rough in a way I haven't encountered in a race in a long time.

The first several miles went well enough: though I was farther back in the field than I'd hoped, I figured at least some of the guys in front of me had gone out too hard and I told myself to relax and use the middle part of the race to start reeling some of them in.  Three miles into the race we reached a buoy turn that would send us into the crossing across the heart of the lake.  For the next mile or so after the turn, I felt good about my competitive chances because there were a lot of little waves that I was able to catch and ride for several seconds without paddling.  This was the closest I came to having some pure, unadulterated fun in this entire race.

Alas, as I advanced deeper into the middle of the reservoir, those waves disappeared and were gradually replaced by right-to-left beam waves seasoned with a mess of confused haystacks.  As time went on, I thought less and less about running down this guy or that guy and more and more about simply keeping myself upright.  I was soon expending an alarming amount of energy on things other than the forward propulsion of my boat.

In the distance sat a buoy marking a turn in the course to follow along the Interstate 95 bridge.  As it drew nearer with infuriating indolence, I kept my eyes on it in the hope that the water conditions in the next section of the course would be better than I was in now.

Finally I reached the buoy, and the conditions beyond it were indeed better, but I was so exhausted from fighting the water in the previous section that my motor control was practically nil.  Several dozen meters after the turn, over I went.  I climbed back on my ski, took a few more strokes, and flipped again.

During the long crossing I had managed to overtake several racers.  One of them was Ted Burnell of Chattanooga, whom I had narrowly beaten at Baton Rouge back in August.  I had somehow achieved a fairly commanding lead on him, but my flips threw the door right back open for him.  Soon enough, he and another guy overtook me, and it was clear he had a lot more left than I did because my attempt to hop on his stern wake proved feeble and futile.

By now there was less than two miles left to the finish, and I spent it watching Ted and the other guy pull away from me and trying to keep my own boat moving as efficiently as possible.  I ambled across the line an hour and 48 minutes and a few seconds after I had started.

I will post a link to the results once they are posted.  All I know at the moment is that I was the fourteenth fastest paddler in the field.  That, and the results of the race up front: Austin Kieffer of Asheville, North Carolina, claimed a convincing victory over Reid Hyle of Rockledge, Florida, and Jesse Lischuk of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

In the Palmetto State

I must be fairly far from home, because all the rivers are flowing to the Atlantic Ocean rather than the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm in the South Carolina low country, and I've made camp in Santee State Park on the western shore of Lake Marion, a vast reservoir created by a dam across the Santee River.  It's late afternoon, and I've just paddled for 40 minutes on the lake near the campground.  I did another set of 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

The base of operations for tomorrow's North Shore Cup race is across the lake in Summerton.  I will head over there shortly to check the place out and see what I can find out about the course.

I resurface

I apologize for the radio silence of the last ten days.  Although I did manage to paddle a loop of the harbor with Joe on both Tuesday and Thursday, last week was focused on non-paddling activities as I was involved in the annual Pink Palace Crafts Fair here in Memphis.  I was out of the boat from Friday through Monday, and I'm not sure that was such a bad thing.  Here in the waning moments of the race season I've been feeling weary and ready for a break, and shifting my thoughts to something else for a few days was helpful.  I don't think I lost any of the aerobic fitness I'll need for a 12-mile race this Saturday.

And now, here I am on my way to South Carolina for the North Shore Cup on Saturday.  I left Tuesday afternoon and spent the night with a friend in Nashville.  Yesterday I continued east to the Charlotte-Gastonia area, where my sister's family lives.  I stopped along the way for 40 minutes of paddling on Center Hill Lake, a reservoir on the Caney Fork River on the Cumberland Plateau.  I did six 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals, and felt sharper than I'd expected.

Today I am hanging out visiting family.  I hope to get an early start tomorrow for Lake Marion, where I'll make camp and do a few more sprints and try to be ready to compete.

There's work and then there's play

I went down to the river on a beautiful sunny morning today.  I think the temperature had warmed above 70 degrees Fahrenheit by the time I was on the water.

Last week I didn't do any 8-stroke sprints until Saturday because of all my annoying little ailments.  I did three of them on Saturday before starting my workout, but they didn't feel sharp at all.  Today I did another set of three, and they felt much sharper.  Then, as I headed out of the harbor and onto the river, I saw a big Corps of Engineers rig churning upriver and producing some good looking waves.  So out I went and threw in another set of sprints and managed to catch several nice rides.  And just like that, I got a good "just for fun" workout today, as opposed to Saturday's more formal workout.

Monday photo feature

Lee Sanders competes in the spring slalom race on Alabama's Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River in 1997.

Back to work

Yesterday I did a set of eight 2-minute pieces with two minutes recovery in between.  Just like in the workout I did last weekend, I shot for a pace at or slightly above what I hope to maintain in the 12-mile North Shore Cup in two weeks.

My body was doing better by yesterday.  I still had a small bit of hip discomfort, but otherwise I felt pretty good in the boat.

We're just several days into October, but yesterday could have passed for a November day.  It was overcast and breezy and about 58 degrees Fahrenheit outside--not quite the Arctic, but nevertheless an abrupt change from the weather we'd been having.  I had to dig out some cooler-weather clothing that I had put away back in May.

Yesterday's workout might be the last substantial session I have before the race.  Next weekend I'm involved in the Pink Palace Crafts Fair and will be out of the boat Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Bleah

I'm happy to say that the aches and pains I complained about earlier in the week have abated.  I'm not so happy to say that some new discomfort has presented itself almost every day this week.  The latest has been one of those neck cricks that I think result from sleeping in some weird position; I seem to have had an inordinate number of those in recent weeks.  I've also been hurting in my hip area, where it feels like something is out of joint.  It's all stuff I've had before and that's worked itself out in two or three days, but right now I'm yearning for even just one day free of pain.

I've paddled pretty easy both Tuesday and yesterday.  I'm hoping to get in some kind of workout this weekend if my body feels up to it.

Monday photo feature

I took trips down to Key Largo, Florida, in 2004, '05, and '06.  Each time I made sure to visit the mangrove tunnels in Florida Bay just inside the boundary of Everglades National Park.

It's makin' me achin'

In last Wednesday's post I mentioned that my lat and shoulder woes had eased.  But in the second half of last week I found myself with a new problem: back pain and stiffness from my neck down to my waist.  My back has mostly felt good all this year, and I really hope I'm not slipping back into the problems I dealt with for much of the previous decade.  In my life I've had all different kinds of injuries: sprained ankles, iliotibial band syndrome, and knee tendinitis from running; cut fingers in the workshop that were bad enough to send me to the emergency room; and shoulder pain and wrist tendinitis from paddling.  But none of that is as bad as discomfort in my back.  Back pain and stiffness has a way of making my very existence seem like an ordeal--a bummer, even--every minute of the day.

The problems weren't that bad yet when I paddled on Thursday, and I went out and had a good, satisfying workout.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did six two-minute pieces with three minutes recovery in between.  My goal pace for each piece was at or slightly above what I think my pace should be in the North Shore Cup next month.

By Saturday morning I felt terrible, and I kept the paddling brief and easy.  I paddled for 40 minutes mostly in the harbor, venturing out on the river near the harbor's mouth for just a few minutes.

When I woke up yesterday morning the condition had eased to just a little bit of soreness up near the base of my neck.  I went downtown to paddle and ended up feeling good in the boat.  I paddled for 80 minutes at a good strong pace with a few surges thrown in.

Back here at home I'm just trying to do all the things I've learned to do in many years of dealing with back aches.  I sure hope I can work myself out of this sooner rather than later.

Balancing technique practice and fitness training

I'm pleased to say that my upper back and lat-muscle area is feeling better.  Yesterday I paddled a moderate pace in the harbor with Joe for about 70 minutes.  Joe has been away at trade shows for several weeks--a periodic part of his life as the co-owner and president of Outdoors, Inc.--so it was nice to catch up with him and have some company on the water for the first time in a while.

This morning I read this interesting article about the science-based training program of a top college middle distance runner.  For the last couple of years I've been emphasizing technical practice over physiological principles in my own training, but that doesn't mean the physiological stuff isn't important, and I'm already kicking around a couple of new ideas in my head after reading this article. The nice thing is that you can always practice technique no matter what the main focus of a workout is.

Monday photo feature

Tinsley Taylor snapped this photo of me just after I'd crossed the finish line at Saturday's Gator Bait race outside Jackson, Mississippi.  I think the look on my face says it all.

Recovery day

This morning I went downtown and paddled easy for 50 minutes.  I'm still having this soreness in my lat muscles, and the only thing I can think of that might have caused it is the bent-over row exercise that I'm doing as part of my strength routine this month.  I suppose it could also have happened during my surf session last Tuesday, when I was paddling while off-balance and probably using my arms and shoulders too much; but in my experience most of my injuries have occurred out of the boat, not in it.

But I don't know if I would even call this an injury, as it's not really disrupting anything.  In the meantime, I'm just trying to give the area plenty of love--thorough warmup and stretching, stuff like that.

Escaping the gators

When I woke up this morning I was still feeling some discomfort in my right lat muscle.  I had breakfast and did some stretching in my motel room before heading to the race site.

Fortunately I felt good in the boat as I paddled around for a warmup.  As the 9:30 AM start time approached I found myself a spot on the starting line and waited.

The course had been about 8800 meters (5.5 miles) long in previous years, but today it had to be modified a bit because of low water, and the result was a circuit some 1000 meters shorter (4.75 miles or so).

The gun fired, and paddlers set off across an expanse of open water.  To my right Joseph DiChiacchio of Rising Fawn, Georgia, grabbed the early lead, flowed closely by Shane Kleynhans of Brandon, Mississippi.  I sensed the presence behind me of Rick Carter of Eutawville, South Carolina, and Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi.

Over to the left I saw the Pellerin triplets (Conrad, Carson, and Peyton) looking strong.  I've been seeing these kids at races down along the Gulf Coast for a few years now (they are from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana) and now, at the ripe old age of 13, they are showing some real progress.  The boys were in one of those hybrid team boats you see in ultra-distance races like the Texas Water Safari and the Tour du Teche, and were paddling it as a K3.  As we approached the entrance to the narrow channel that would take us behind a couple of islands and into the dreaded lily pads, it was apparent to me that they were setting the pace to beat, so I sprinted hard to get on their stern wake right at the end of the open-water crossing.

Knowing I would need energy for a strong finish later on, I sat on the triplets' wake throughout this "back stretch" portion of the course.  By this time we had opened a lead on the rest of the field, but as we entered the lily-pad-infested area that stood between us and the return to open water, I could see a paddler out of the corner of my eye, working hard to join our lead pack (it was Rick Carter, I would learn later).

Work crews had cut a decent channel through the lily pads for us to follow, but there were plenty of stray plants here and there, and I hoped the weed guard just fore of my rudder would be equal to the challenge.  The water was also quite shallow here as a result of the low lake level, subjecting us to a brutal bottom-drag effect.

Finally we emerged from the mess and crossed open water toward a buoy.  After rounding this buoy we would have a final approach to the finish line of maybe 2000 meters.  I held my position on the triplets' stern wake in the meantime, with Rick Carter hanging in there some ten meters back.

As we made the right turn around the buoy I took advantage of the slower turning ability of the triplets' long boat to move up onto their starboard-side wake.  The race was on in earnest now.  It was a long finishing stretch and I didn't want to move too soon, but finally I threw in a surge... and the triplets responded immediately.  I had heard they had spent a lot of time in the boat together this summer, and it was showing now as all three brains were on the same page.

I dropped back onto their side wake to regroup.  I tried a couple more surges, and the triplets hung tough each time.  Finally, with about 600 meters to go, I knew I would have to take control for good or (figuratively) die trying.  I began to surge, and this time I refused to stop, even as my internal tachometer soared into the red zone.  The triplets responded again, but little by little I continued to gain.  By the time I entered the cove where the finish line was, they had disappeared from my peripheral vision, and I crossed the line to claim one of the more satisfying victories I've had in a while.

Experience beat youth this time around, but of course youths don't stay youthful forever, and I think I'd better savor every day I'm still able to beat these kids because those days are probably numbered.

Now, at the end of the day, I'm back home in Memphis.  My right lat muscle still feels sore, but no worse than before.  I believe an easy recovery paddle is in order for tomorrow.

My time was 42 minutes, 32.1 seconds.  The triplets were eight seconds back.  Rick Carter took third place overall, followed by Jeb Berry in fourth.  Myrlene Marsa of Rising Fawn, Georgia, was the top female finisher with a time of 50:05.6.  The complete results are posted here.  The triplets' boat is listed as a K2 under the name Carson Pellerin, but it was in fact all three of them paddling that boat.

Race director Michelle Blair and her crew of volunteers deserve props for a well-organized and thoroughly enjoyable event.  I hope the Gator Bait race will remain a fixture on the calendar for many years to come.