Monday photo feature

Here's a picture I poached from the social media of my friend Nancy McDonald.  She and her husband Chris have been traveling the Southwest, and she took some pretty stunning photos during their time in Grand Canyon National Park.  Five months from now I'll be paddling my boat somewhere down in the bottom of that canyon.

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Physical struggles

I did a bike ride Friday morning.  The rides I've been doing in recent weeks have been a little over an hour, and not terribly intense.  I've always thought of riding a bike as a fairly relaxing activity.  And yet... it seems like I've felt awful the day after a bike ride lately.  That was definitely the case yesterday: I woke up feeling tight and vaguely sore from head to toe.  I did some full-body stretching, and that was an utter ordeal.  I felt about as flexible as a kiln-dried 8/4 persimmon plank.  Then I went down to the river and paddled pretty easy for 60 minutes.  Once I got warmed up I felt reasonably okay in the boat, but had some soreness in my midsection.

I woke up feeling a good bit better this morning, though I was still tired and a bit sluggish.  One development of late is that my weight has been down in the last several months--closer to 150 pounds than 160.  Long-time readers might recall that I had a period of weight decline back in 2021-22, and that seemed to correspond with some low energy and listlessness.  My doctor's office tested things like thyroid and testosterone levels and found nothing conclusive.  Back around 2016-19, when I was racing especially well, my weight was up closer to 160 pounds.

I paddled for another 60 minutes this morning, and felt better than yesterday, but still lacked power and enthusiasm.  A strong south wind was blowing down on the riverfront and I mostly just played around in the chop out on the Mississippi before returning to the harbor where I worked on paddling relaxed in beam conditions.  Once I'd put in my time I went back to the dock and changed into dry clothes and drove home where some of my favorite non-athletic activities awaited.

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Feeling a bit rudderless, but paddling just the same

Well, a month has passed since my last post here.  I'd like to say that I've just been busy, but over the years I've almost always managed to get something posted even when I'm busy.

Since my last post it's sort of felt as though training activities have slowed to a crawl.  That's not entirely true, but some little pitfalls have dampened my mood about it all.  After some injury-free months during which I felt energetic and enthusiastic about the things I was doing, some aches and pains have now set in.  They started with a lot of soreness in my hips and pelvic area, and then I started feeling a lot of tightness in my left hamstring muscle that got really bad about two weeks ago.  I rode my bike for the first time in a long time, and then the next day I was driving my pickup truck, which, unlike my little sedan that I drive most of the time, has a manual transmission.  At one point I had just shifted gears and let up on the clutch with my left foot, and a wave of pain shot through my hamstring that was so bad that I thought I was going to have to pull over and get out and walk it off.  Fortunately the pain eased after a few seconds, and since then the muscle has just kept on feeling tight.

So, yes, my body hasn't been entirely cooperative lately.  And then there's the fact that I never really know anymore what I'm training for.  As I've been noting here for the last several years, the racing scene in my part of the country has almost completely disappeared.  The earliest event I might attend is over in Chattanooga, some five and a half hours away, on May 3; but I haven't yet decided just how badly I want to make that trip.  Like so many events nowadays, this one features two different races--a 6.7-miler and a 10.9-miler--and I've long considered that an utterly dumb idea.  Our sport is simply not big enough to be splitting its participants up into more than one category, and there always seems to be this unspoken expectation that the most accomplished racers are supposed to do the longer race, whatever the distances might be.  If I do find the gumption to drive over to Chattanooga and enter this event, I will do the 6.7-mile race, because decades of experience tell me that I am better suited to that kind of distance than one of ten miles or more.  But I think it's a safe bet that almost all the athletes who are at or above my competitive level will be racing 10.9 miles.  So I'll probably have little competition in the 6.7-mile race, and that's why I'm lukewarm about making the trip in the first place.

Meanwhile, my biggest event of the year, the one I'm most excited about, has nothing to do with competition.  My expedition through the Grand Canyon, scheduled to launch August 27, is slowly taking shape.  Having that on the calendar is good motivation to be fit, but I don't really need to be more than fit--it's not like I have to average 5 minutes per kilometer or anything like that.  I just need some solid stamina to negotiate the rapids and withstand the long days in the elements of the desert Southwest.

So... that's what's going through my head these days.  I'm doing very little racing, and honestly, I'm not feeling all that motivated to do a lot of racing.  My priorities have changed, I guess.  It's not that I'm not enjoying paddling as much as ever, but after being a gung-ho racer for decades, I'm now inclined to ease up a bit and enjoy the "adventure" side of the sport a bit more.  That includes my Grand Canyon trip, and I hope to get back to South Africa sooner or later, and I want to go paddle in Alaska one day... there's plenty to do.  And strength and fitness will still be required, especially for downwinding in South Africa and stuff like that.

We've crossed the vernal equinox and the weather is getting ever more friendly for paddling.  There's still a chilly day here and there, but the balance is tipping in favor of warmer ones.  That means I'm getting in the boat more and doing less dry-land stuff.  Since I might go to that race on May 3, I'm working in some formal workouts along with the usual mileage and work on stroke mechanics.  So while I may or may not bring home any race hardware this year, I'm moving a boat around with a paddle as always.

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Monday photo feature

It's the "Battle On The Bayou" race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in March of 2021.  Here we have the front pack led by Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas.  Currently in second place is a double surfski paddled by Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi, and Nick Kinderman of Ocean Springs.  Roy Roberts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, holds third place, and that's me hanging out in fourth.  It was one of the more heated battles I can remember in that race.

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Jury duty was quick

When I got down to the riverfront Monday it was 31 degrees Fahrenheit, but sunny.  I paddled for 60 minutes in the northern half of the harbor, where I could find at least some protection from the north wind.  The breeze wasn't especially strong, but when the temperature is below freezing any wind at all is unwelcome.

One thing I didn't mention in my last post is that I had a very strenuous project in my woodworking shop that stretched through last weekend.  I had to weave a chair seat with over 400 feet of 5/16-inch cord, and pulling all that material through at the end of each pass was hard on my arms and shoulders and especially my hands.  I don't normally count such "non-athletic" activities as part of "training," but it's worth pointing out that I was feeling especially tired and beat-up by the time I was in the boat on Monday.

By the time I was driving home from the river Monday, it had warmed up to about 37 degrees on its way to a high in the low 40s.  And that was about the nicest weather we would have all week.  On Tuesday it was overcast and blustery with a high in the 30s.  And then the real Arctic blast descended.  There was a mixture of snow and freezing rain overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, and then we had several days where the temperature didn't rise above freezing and dropped down to about 10 degrees at night.

Certainly, it was looking like a good week to sit indoors and discharge some civic duty.  At 8 AM sharp on Tuesday I finally reported to U.S. District Court in the Odell Horton Federal Building downtown.  I was whisked, along with everybody else in the jury pool, into an assembly room from which subsets of us would presumably be called into the courtroom to undergo the jury selection process.  We sat in there for an hour, then another hour, then another... at 12:30 they were so kind as to let us have an hour to go out for lunch.  Upon our return we sat there for another hour, then another... and finally, at 3:45, the presiding judge appeared.  He announced that as the trial was about to begin, some issues arose--a flurry of last-minute motions, stuff like that--that were more complicated than anybody had expected.  As a result, he had decided to delay the trial, and was dismissing us all.  We were now free from jury service until 2027 at the earliest.  (In federal court you can be summoned every two years, as opposed to every ten years in state courts.  Since the Western District of Tennessee includes pretty much all of the state's counties this side of the Tennessee River, the probability that I'll be called again anytime soon is pretty low.)

It was a pretty anticlimactic conclusion to this round of jury service, after I'd worked hard to finish a couple of workshop projects and fit in as many workouts as possible before I was called in.  After all my talk about it here, I'm sorry I can't share anything more consequential from my experience in our judicial system.

But... life goes on, one way or another.  Since I was already counting on a forced training break, and since the weather was so miserable, I stayed in and rested for the rest of the week.  At the same time, I took the opportunity to work on a project in the shop that I'd been wanting to do for the last year and a half or so, but never could get to because life kept getting in the way.  It was nice to attend to a part of my life that too often gets neglected, and in the overall scheme of things, I think that's just as important as getting my workouts in.  Sure, I felt a little antsy about the down time, but as I've noted here before, any race I'm likely to do is still months away.  I could take another week off, and it still wouldn't be hard for me to pick up where I'd left off.

The weather finally started warming a bit yesterday, and I went downtown and got in the boat once more.  I paddled for just 40 minutes because I was expecting an important phone call in the late morning and I wanted to be back home in time for that so I could give it my full attention.

I returned to the river today and did a higher-intensity session--four pieces of varying distances at anaerobic threshold.  Basically I just picked out some courses defined by objects in the harbor: from the end of the Beale Street Landing dock to one of the boats in the Memphis Queen Line flotilla (I clocked right at 2 minutes); from the monorail bridge to the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge (6:11); from the northeast corner of my marina to the southernmost mooring pylon at the old LaFarge facility (3:16); and from the southernmost mooring pylon at the Bunge plant to the northernmost pylon at the LaFarge facility (2:00).

Both yesterday and today were very nice days to paddle even though it wasn't exactly warm, mainly because there was practically no wind to speak of.  Yesterday the temperature was just above freezing with clouds giving way to sunshine, and today it was about 40 degrees with plenty of sunshine.  I've said it many times: I'd rather paddle when it's 30 degrees and sunny and calm than when it's 40 degrees and overcast and windy.

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Monday photo feature

The year is 2019, and I'm standing near the Ohio River in Cincinnati, Ohio.  We have just raced nine miles down the lovely river.  I managed to take the win, with Michael Meredith (center) finishing second and Erik Snider (right) third.

One thing I remember about that event is that the race started at 7 AM Eastern Time--that would have been 6 AM in the Central Time zone from which I'd just come.  I got up around 4 o'clock Eastern so I would have time for some coffee and breakfast.  The nice thing about starting so early was that the temperature was very nice for racing.  It was the first Saturday in August, and by the time we were posing for this photo at the awards ceremony it was becoming about as hot as one expects at that time of year.

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Making my last free week count

Another week went by with no call to duty at the federal courthouse.  So I was free for paddling and related activities.

The early-week forecast called for chilly temperatures with lots of rain Tuesday and Wednesday.  I went down to the river and paddled Monday, when the Fahrenheit temperature was in the high 30s.  It wouldn't have been such a bad day to paddle if it hadn't been for the wind.  I paddled into a headwind to the north end of the harbor, and once I was up there I worked my way back south with a lot of small loops and east-west zigzagging, just to keep my headwind exposure to a minimum.

When I went to bed Monday night my throat was suddenly very sore, and I woke up several times during the night to find that it was still sore.  For me, a sore throat is often a sign that I have a cold coming on.  Tuesday was shaping up to be a chilly rainy day, so I opted to stay in and give my body a chance to fight it off.  I did a lot of work done in the shop, but I didn't do any formal athletic stuff.  By Wednesday the throat soreness seemed to be fading and no cold symptoms were taking hold, and I did my indoor gym routine while some more rain fell outside.

The rain had moved out by Thursday, so I was back outdoors doing some running with some core exercises mixed in the Greenbelt Park that overlooks the majestic Mississippi River.  It was cold and windy and I was glad to have that session behind me.  Friday's weather was even colder, so I stayed in and did another indoor gym session.

Also on Friday, I learned that I finally must report to the federal courthouse downtown.  Because Monday is a federal holiday, my duty will begin on Tuesday.

In the early hours of yesterday morning some powerful thunderstorms moved into the area.  Storms were expected to continue all day yesterday, but the Internet radar showed a mid-morning break, so I went downtown and paddled.  Though the temperature was supposed to rise to near 70 degrees yesterday, it was only 50 or so while I was in the boat.  But the wind was light and the rain held off for most of the session, so in all I'd hit a pretty ideal window.  The heavens opened for about the last five minutes, so I was good and soaked when I got back to the dock, but soon I was in dry clothes, and the rain stopped so I could walk up to the parking lot without being doused again.

By afternoon it was freakishly warm outside, and by early evening another round of heavy storms was moving through with cold air behind it.  By the time I got up this morning, the temperature had plummeted.  I returned to the Greenbelt Park for some more outdoor dry-land work under overcast skies.  The temperature was a steady 35 degrees while I was down there, and if the wind had been bad on Thursday, this morning it was just plain awful.  At least it made me waste no time: I moved briskly from one exercise to the next, knowing that the sooner I got it done, the sooner I would be back home where it was warm.

It's supposed to drop into the mid 20s overnight, but tomorrow the sun is supposed to come out again and the high temperature is supposed to be a little over 40.  I'm hoping maybe I can get in the boat one more time before I'm forced to rest in a jury box.  It looks like the rest of the coming week will be miserably cold, so it's as good a week as any to serve my civic duty indoors.

I will say that while I'm not in any kind of high-level racing shape, I've been rocking the general fitness work this winter.  I'm feeling good about that, and I hope it'll stand me in good stead for whatever comes my way in the warmer months.

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