Rainy recovery

This morning I paddled in the harbor for 60 minutes.

I'm sure I've been over this before, but it seems like a good time to mention it again.  When you do a really hard workout like the one I did yesterday, you are in fact inflicting damage on your muscles.  During recovery, your body builds the muscles back stronger than they had been before, and this is where your strength and fitness level improve.  And so the recovery periods are crucial parts of training: without them, you'll just wind up worn out and injured rather than in good shape.

Plenty of rest, full nights of sleep, and good nutrition all play a role in the recovery process.  And then there is active recovery, which is what I was doing on the water this morning.  An easy, relaxed session in the boat gets the blood flowing in your paddling muscles, washing away lactic acid and repairing the damage done by the hard workout.

It was a rainy morning here in Memphis, with a line of heavy thunderstorms moving in around nine o'clock.  The heaviest showers had moved out by the time I got down to the riverfront, but I still found myself paddling in some steady rain.  I don't really consider rain a deterrent from paddling, especially from May through October, but my mind was ill at ease because the building I recently bought has no roof on it at the moment.  Contractors are currently at work replacing the fire-damaged roof with a new one, but as of yesterday afternoon they had gotten no further than the installation of new rafters.  So I expect that when I go by there later today the ground floor will be soaking wet from water that seeped down from the second floor.  It's probably nothing we can't clean up and fix up, but it's left me with a worried mind just the same.

Aside from the rain, the harbor was calm this morning.  So I went another round in the K1.  Getting comfortable in that boat is much like renovating a burned-out building or healing the hurt of a divorce: it is a process.

Lactic tolerance

Today I did two sets of the March strength routine and paddled for 60 minutes.

In the boat I did eight intervals of 75 seconds on, 45 seconds off.  A workout like this is what some people call a lactic tolerance workout, because the body produces lactic acid during the high-intensity pieces and it doesn't have time to dissipate during the short rest intervals.

For me, the main objective of a lactic tolerance workout is to maintain precise form and technique even when the muscles are in utter agony.  I felt myself starting to flail a bit by the fourth interval in today's workout, so I adjusted by lowering the stroke rate a little while still pulling as hard as I could on the paddle.

I try to get in two or three such workouts once I'm within a month or so of a big race.  I always forget what a killer they are.  Doing this one right on top of my strength routine didn't make it any easier; it took me a long time to recover once it was done.  I started it at 0:17 and finished at 0:33, so I still had 27 minutes of paddling to complete the hour I had planned for today, and I spent that long cool-down period just paddling steady and letting my blood flow wash the lactic acid from my muscles.

Monday photo feature

Here's one from 2006: I'm crossing the finish line after racing 13.2 miles in Blackwater Sound and Florida Bay off Key Largo. The event was the Bogey and Bacall, named for the lead actors in the film Key Largo.

A new low

This morning I did two sets of the May strength routine and paddled for 60 minutes.

Conditions were calm down at the river, so I got out the K1.  This time I lowered the seat a little: it was already on the second-lowest setting, and moving it to the lowest setting made a difference of no more than a centimeter, but I could immediately detect an improvement in stability.  The boat is still very tippy, mind you, but not as bad as it was.

It hadn't even occurred to me to adjust the seat height until I happened to read this blog post by Greg Barton right after the 2008 Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, in which he paddled his Legacy K1.

Sluggish

A busy morning pushed my training activities after lunch today.  My energy tends to flag in the mid afternoon, and it definitely was doing so today, but I fought through it.

I started with two sets of the May strength routine.  Then I went to the river and paddled for 60 minutes, doing eight intervals of 2 minutes on, 90 seconds off.  I managed to shake off the lethargy and feel strong in the boat.

Lower intensity but strong effort

Today I went to the river and paddled for 60 minutes.  Even though it was a recovery session after yesterday's workout, I still took good deliberate strokes and tried to get good solid blade pressure on each stroke.  I do not want to train myself to go slow.

Strength and endurance and high water

This morning I did two sets of the May strength routine and paddled for 80 minutes.

On the river I did eight intervals of three minutes on, three minutes off.  Two minutes of each "on" interval were at anaerobic threshold, and the third minute was at sub-maximal intensity--basically the same workout I did back on April 29.  My arms were pretty tired from the strength work, but I maintained good form throughout the workout.

I did this workout while paddling down below the I-55 and old railroad bridges and back up the Arkansas side.  At today's Memphis gauge level of 33.8 feet, the farmland on the Arkansas side was underwater, but it looked a little too shallow for paddling.

Monday photo feature

The Mississippi River has crested at 34.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  It's apparently going to hang out at that level for several days.

34 feet is the official flood stage here at Memphis, and it does seem pretty high after the low-water year we had last year, but almost exactly two years ago the river was some 14 feet higher.  Any residents on Mud Island who are concerned about the current river level should be reminded of the big 2011 flood, when the river was still a good four or five vertical feet shy of the houses in this photo.

Out of whack

I paddled the K1 in the harbor for 60 minutes yesterday.  I guess I had a few comfortable stretches again, but mostly what I remember is felling like every other stroke was a brace.  I guess there will be days like that, where I seem to have taken a step backward.

My body is not the same on left and right.  I guess that should be no surprise for a non-ambidextrous person like me, but I think it's more than just right-handed versus left-handed.  For a long time now I have felt a vague tightness or soreness in the oblique abdominal muscles on my right side that isn't there on my left side.  It hasn't really affected my paddling in the surf ski and other more stable boats, but in the K1 it's impossible to ignore.  I often find myself sitting on braces on my left side and shying away from full rotation on my right.  The times I've flipped in the K1, it's been to the right.

I'm not sure what's going on in my body.  Maybe I have a muscle imbalance, or a mild injury, or a chiropractic misalignment.  Like I said, it hasn't bothered me much in my other boats, so I've sort of been ignoring it, but I wonder if it will continue to be an issue in the K1.

Mild flooding

Today I did two sets of the May strength routine and paddled for 70 minutes.  On the water I did a "pyramid" workout: pieces of 1', 2', 3', 4', 5', 4', 3', 2', 1' with 2 minutes recovery.  With 24 minutes total "on" time to 14 minutes "off" time, it was a pretty taxing workout.  But I felt pretty good as far as paddling hard while maintaining good technique.

The river is supposedly cresting today.  The Memphis gauge reading this afternoon is about 33.8 feet.  That's high enough to put the lower tier of the Greenbelt Park underwater.  I always enjoy paddling among the trees there.

I have an ouchie

I had a little accident in the workshop yesterday afternoon--cut my left thumb pretty badly:

The offending tool, a biscuit joiner, gouged right through the thumbnail.  It's not a tool I often associate with accidents, but I was sort of in a hurry and being careless, and that's how accidents usually happen in a woodworking shop.  I'm just glad it isn't any worse.

I arguably should have gone and had the thing stitched up, but for now I've decided to see how it heals on its own.  After the initial gush, it hasn't bled too badly, so I'm hoping it'll be okay.  Of course, avoiding infection is a concern, and I'm doing my best to keep it clean.  I was worried that it might hinder paddling, but it didn't really bother me at all in the boat this morning.

I paddled my K1 for 70 minutes.  I think the issue of getting comfortable in the K1 is almost entirely psychological for me.  I continue to have stretches where I'm able to relax and let the boat do its thing, only to suddenly start thinking too much and tense up.  But it seems like with each session the good stretches get a little longer.  I'm actually looking forward to a summer of paddling the K1 and just having fun with it.

I'll conclude this post with a not-so-gory photo:

One of the simple pleasures of this time of year is having the purple martens in our marina's birdhouses for a couple of weeks.

Trying to get serious about May

I've been a little slow getting it going, but I've worked up a strength routine for the month of May:

1.  Dips
2.  The core exercise that Daniele Molmenti demonstrates at 3:45 of this video
3.  Pullups
4.  Another core exercise: hanging from the pullup bar and raising my legs straight out in front of me
5.  Power cleans with a cinder block

This is a pretty short workout; I can get two sets of it done in under 20 minutes.  I try to put the highest-quality effort into it as I can: I concentrate on good form and technique and try to explode through the three dynamic exercises.

And as I mentioned in last Saturday's post, that's how I want my in-the-boat workouts to be this month, too: short but high-quality.  After two sets of the strength routine this morning, I went to the river and paddled for 60 minutes, doing eight intervals of two minutes on, 90 seconds off.  It's the same workout I've done a couple of times previously this season, but with a shorter rest interval.  It didn't really feel any more taxing than the previous workouts.

Monday photo feature

I've taken a little training break to make the twenty-hour round trip to Lincolnton, North Carolina, where my nephew, Joel, was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout over the weekend.  Becoming an Eagle Scout is a daunting challenge, and a low percentage of Boy Scouts realize the achievement.

Central among the requirements is a substantial community project.  Joel's was to conduct interviews with the surviving World War II veterans in Lincoln County.  The recorded interviews and their transcripts are now archived in the county library.  Four of these veterans made it to Joel's Court of Honor this weekend, and considering that nearly all WWII vets are in their nineties, that's not bad.

Joel is maturing into quite the man.  It doesn't seem so long ago that he was this little kid soaking up the awards ceremony after racing with me in Wolf River Harbor in 2007:

2013 has not been a very good year for me up to now.  But my life will never be a lost cause as long as I have Joel and his equally-awesome brother and sisters.  Here they all are when Joel was several years older--2010 or '11, I think:

That's Ben and Rachel in the front, getting hugged by Ada, with Joel standing.  Thank you for humoring me during this sentimental indulgence.  I promise to be back on topic within the next two days.

Contemplating the month of May

I spent all yesterday driving, and now I sit in the charming North Carolina Piedmont town of Lincolnton.  My mission: to see my nephew become and Eagle Scout tomorrow.  My mother and I plan to visit for several days and then come home Tuesday.

I'm out of the boat for this period, so I guess it's a good time to consider my training plan from  now until my two big races next month.  On June 1 there's a race at Little Rock of some 9 kilometers in distance, and two weeks after that we have the big Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race here at Memphis, a 5-kilometer dash down the Mississippi.  Both events will feature very good competition.

So I've got some work to do to get ready, but that's not all.  Just this past Monday I completed my purchase of a two-story building in which I plan to relocate my workshop downstairs and my domicile upstairs.  It sounds great, and it is great, but like everything else in my life, it's not that simple.  In January a fire ravaged a large percentage of the upstairs, and so the place is not exactly move-in ready.  I'll be paying contractors to do as much of the work as I can afford, and since that sum is all too finite, I'll be doing a lot of the work myself.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to function in my vocation as if all were normal.  Right now I'm midway through a bookcase/cabinet project for a valued client, and I want to keep that moving along as steadily as possible.

So I'm one busy guy these days, and I need to get the most I can from what training time I have.  In past years at this point in the season, I've often done my higher-intensity workouts in the middle of paddling sessions that were rather long overall: for instance, I might paddle steady for 45 minutes, then do a set of intervals that takes a half-hour or so, and then paddle steady for another 45 minutes for two hours or so in the boat.  This season I think I'm going to do all the workouts I usually do, but not paddle for so long before and after.

And this might not be a bad plan.  As Ron Lugbill has pointed out in several recent posts on his blog, modern-day research is challenging the conventional wisdom that high-volume low-intensity training is necessary, even for long-distance endurance sports.  So to some extent I'll be testing that out for myself this coming month... although I should point out that I have put in a fair amount of volume earlier this season.

Cats and dogs

It was an afternoon paddling session for me again today, and there was no "soft spring shower" this time.  I had steady rain for my first stroke, steady rain for my last stroke, and steady rain for every stroke in between.

But hey... it is a water sport, right?  Once I got going, the rain warn't no thing.  I did eight intervals of two minutes on, two minutes off.  I felt stronger throughout the workout than in similar workouts I've done this season.  Total paddling time for today: 60 minutes.

K1 paddling today

I didn't make it down to the river until this afternoon.  I've got a huge bunch of things going on that I'll talk about more when I have more time.

It was raining when I got down there, but otherwise calm (i.e., it was a "soft spring shower").  So I pulled out the K1 for the first time in several months.  The rain stopped some twenty minutes in.

I paddled for an hour, and kept the boat upright, though I felt awfully unstable much of the time.  Even so, I had stretches where I was able to relax and rotate fully and let the boat do its thing.  I do think confidence and competence will come with time in that boat, and it sounds like a good use of a hot Memphis summer.

Degrees of hard

The results for Saturday's race are now posted here.

This morning I did two sets of the April strength routine and paddled for 70 minutes.  In the boat I did eight intervals of three minutes on, three minutes off, paddling at anaerobic threshold for the first two minutes of each "on" interval and at sub-maximal intensity for the third minute.  One thing I've learned over many years of racing at there are many degrees of "hard" paddling: there's "easy" hard and "all-out" hard and everything in between.  One thing I try to do in my training is get my body to recognize those "easier" degrees of hard as an opportunity for recovery.  During the course of any race there are periods where I'm pushing the pace, doing something close to "all-out" hard, but there are also periods where I'm hanging back, maybe sitting on another paddler's wake for a while, and if I'm in good shape it feels like I'm taking a breather.

Having just done a long race on Saturday, I normally might have waited another day before doing a workout.  But tomorrow I'll be spending the day visiting with some family up in Jackson, Tennessee, and later this week my mother and I are driving to North Carolina to see my nephew get his Eagle Scout award, so I want to get a couple of quality sessions in before these forced layoffs.

Monday photo feature

Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, sets a new course record with his first-place finish at the Bluz Cruz Marathon race on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg this past Saturday.  I swiped this photo from the Face Book page of Phil Capel, the bowman in the second-place tandem kayak.  My guess is that Phil's lovely wife Robbie snapped the picture.

Up and at 'em

I woke up this morning pretty sore from yesterday's racing.  I might have been tempted to spend the entire morning in my motel room drinking coffee and doing nothing in particular.  But a student I tutor in math had called me and asked if I could meet with her late this afternoon, so I got busy having breakfast and getting moving so that I could get back to Memphis with time to spare.

By 8:45 AM CDT I was down on the Vicksburg Front, where the race had finished yesterday, putting my boat in the water for a recovery paddle.  I paddled down the Yazoo to the Mississippi and continued south below the Interstate 20 bridge, then made my way back upriver along the Louisiana side.  I paddled a nice relaxed pace, trying to get a full range of motion in my strokes to work out the soreness, and enjoyed the scenery.  I think the riverfront at Vicksburg is just as beautiful as the one at Memphis, maybe even more so.

I could see dark clouds moving in from the northwest, so I decided to ferry back across the river before any lightning appeared.  As I paddled back up the Yazoo toward the Vicksburg Front it began to drizzle, and it was quickly becoming a torrential downpour by the time I was taking my boat out of the water after 90 minutes of paddling.  I owe my student thanks for getting me moving early and not ending up in the thick of that mess.

The ninth annual Bluz Cruz Marathon: a record-breaking performance, but not by me

Well, we had another successful Bluz Cruz Marathon canoe and kayak race on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg today.  It was great to see friends both old and new.  My Training Blog By Elmore extends its deepest gratitude to the race organizers and all the volunteers who made the event possible.

Up at the start, at a place on the Louisiana side of the river called Madison Parish Port, it was clear that the river was up (today's Vicksburg gauge reading was 38 feet).  And once the race got started, it was clear that the wind would be a factor.  It was largely a beam wind coming from our right, and it had me doing all kinds of little gymnastic moves to keep the boat balanced and moving forward.

The conditions kept my attention and consumed my energy the entire way down.  At one point about midway through I very nearly flipped during a half-second lapse in concentration.  Nevertheless, as I neared the mouth of the Yazoo River, up which I would paddle the last mile or so to the finish, I saw that I had a shot at bettering the course-record time I set two years ago.  With the wind finally at my back on the Yazoo, I paddled as hard and efficiently as I could... and I just missed the record with my time of one hour, 56 minutes, 49 seconds--fifteen seconds slower than the 1:56:34 I clocked two years ago.

But it's silly to get too upset over it.  For one thing, I doubt the starting line and finish line are in precisely the same locations year in and year out, and for another, I'm pretty sure the wind conditions were more challenging this year than they were two years ago.  This actually might be the best I've ever done in this race.

And it wouldn't have really mattered if I had beaten the course record anyway, for the record was obliterated by Mr. Mike Herbert, who was participating in this race for the first time.  Herbert, a three-time Olympian and a three-time medalist at the world championships of flatwater sprint kayaking, came in today under one hour and 52 minutes.  I took second, about five minutes back.  It was the first time in five tries that I had failed to win the Bluz Cruz race, but anybody who is disappointed over a loss to Mike Herbert is either very, very good or very, very full of himself.

No disappointment here... just elation from having competed well.  You can see it on my face in this photo that Joe took of me afterward: