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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