Monday photo feature

Winter is fast approaching here where I live, but the opposite is true in the southern hemisphere.

As the people on the planet's underside savor the warming temperatures of late spring, there are a number of places down there from which I could have drawn today's photo.  One is the province of Western Australia, where the annual WA Race Week is currently underway at Perth.  This event culminates in a race known as The Doctor, one of the most coveted titles for elite-level ocean racers.  ("The Doctor" is the name of the wind that blows off the Indian Ocean onto the west coast of Australia.)

But for this week's photo feature I think I'll pick a photo from another southern hemisphere nation: Chile.  Native Memphian Boyd Ruppelt is down there right now, enjoying all the Andean whitewater he can stand.  He posted the photo above on his Facebook page: it shows Boyd and friends cruising over one waterfall after another on the Rio Claro.

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Working up a plan for winter

It's been the better part of a month since my last post, but I haven't been in hibernation.

The unseasonably warm weather we had in October bled into the first week or so of November.  But the temperature has surely enough been trending downward.  I'm pretty certain we've seen our last day above 80 degrees Fahrenheit for this year.  This month has treated us to a lot of days in the 60s and 70s, but the last several days have stayed below 60 degrees, and the forecast is showing some highs in the 40s in the next couple of weeks.

In the last couple of years I've come to the decision that I've paid my dues when it comes to paddling in cold weather.  And so at this time of year I transition into some dry-land fitness activities.  Because of the above-normal temperatures this fall, I've continued to paddle quite a bit; but with the water temperature dropping on the Mississippi River, I think I've done my last barge-wake surfing until next spring.  I've been staying in the harbor or at least close to it, and working hard on my rotation from the hips.

Meanwhile, I've worked up a couple of dry-land routines for those days when the weather isn't something I want to paddle in.  My main focus in these is to work on my legs and core.  One is an indoor routine, for when it's pouring down rain outside: I do a couple of core exercises on the stability ball, some Hindu squats, and some abdominal crunches while hanging from the pullup bar.

When it's dry outside, but too cold and windy for paddling to be desirable, I go out and do some running and some medicine ball drills.

So, to borrow a phrase I heard Greg Barton use several years ago, I'm "letting the weather be my coach."  This past week has been a perfect example of that.  The early part of the week was warm, and I paddled both Sunday and Tuesday.  By Wednesday morning colder air had moved in and I stayed out of the boat for several days, doing the indoor routine Wednesday and Saturday and the outdoor routine in the Greenbelt Park on the riverfront on Thursday.

The weather warmed up a bit yesterday: by mid-morning the temperature was in the 50s on its way to a high in the mid 60s.  So I returned to the riverfront and got in the boat.  I did a lot more work on rotation, did a couple of surges, and in general tried to maintain a cruising pace a touch above my comfort zone.

I don't normally paddle on Monday, but with the forecast showing another warm day today followed by much cooler weather the rest of the week, I went on back down to the river this morning.  In a 60-minute session I did some stroke-power drills.

That's how it'll be for at least the next few weeks: a mix of in-the-boat and out-of-the-boat stuff, with the weather dictating how much of each I do.  Our winters aren't too terrible in this part of the country, and I hope that once I come out on the other end of the cold-weather season I'll have a strong platform of general fitness to build on.

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Monday photo feature

The father-daughter team of Mike Herbert and Savanna Wright finish up a race on the Tennessee River at Hales Bar Marina near Haletown, Tennessee, on Saturday.  Mike and Savanna, long-time friends of My Training Blog by Elmore, usually look a lot crisper and in-sync than this, but seeing as how they've just paddled almost 32 miles with very little help from any current, they can be forgiven if their form looks a bit frayed here.  They paddled well enough to claim first place in the mixed tandem surfski class.  Photo by Deb Boyles Glover.

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Paddling what little water we've got on a cool weekend

I'd almost forgotten what a cloudy day looked like, but yesterday refreshed my memory.  In addition to overcast skies we had a brisk north wind and a much cooler temperature.  So I wasn't in the mood for any surfing as I embarked on yesterday's paddle, and it turned out there was no barge traffic on the Mississippi anyway.  It was just as well, because I felt tired and achy in the boat and I needed a steady session to work those feelings out.  My quest for better rotation from the hips continues: such mechanics harness more power from the legs and take stress off the arms and shoulders, and I can tell my arms feel a lot better when I'm doing it well.

This morning the temperature was even a few degrees lower, but the sun was out and the wind was calm.  I didn't feel like a world-beater but I did at least feel better than yesterday.  I had a good 60-minute paddle on a river that was again mostly deserted.

About two-thirds of my dock is now on the ground.  I'm having to carry my boat around to another dock that still has access to the water.  The river level continues to hang out just above -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge, and the forecast says it will more or less stay there.  That's a very, very low level, but not quite as low as the record -12 feet we saw last year.  So far I haven't seen any mention in the local or national news about the situation on the lower Mississippi.  The floodwaters from Hurricane Helene didn't prevent low water here, but they at least bought us some time, and I'm hoping wetter weather will settle into the watershed soon so we can avoid another record-setting year.

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Warm weather fun

This week we've had plentiful sunshine and near-record-high temperatures for late October.  I've had ideas floating around in my head about moving to some dry-land training for a while--lots of leg and core exercises, mainly--but as long as it's as warm as it's been it seems to make sense to stay in the boat a little longer.

I paddled for 60 minutes both Tuesday and yesterday.  Both days I found conveniently-placed barge traffic out on the Mississippi and tried to do some surfing.  The waves weren't especially easy to catch, and I wonder if the low water level has something to do with that--it's currently -9.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  And the towboat pilot I tried to surf behind yesterday was a real grump who apparently doesn't like anybody having fun while he has to work.  He gave me five (5) angry blasts on his horn.  If I could have talked to him, I would have made the same point I made here a couple of months ago: as long as it's okay for him to churn up waves on our river, it's okay for me to go out and try to surf them.

Anyway, I probably won't have many more days of favorable conditions for surfing out there.  This warm weather won't last forever, and the Mississippi's water gets very cold in the winter and I won't have much desire to get wet out there until late next spring.

I also prefer warm weather for bike riding.  I planned to ride Wednesday morning, but I discovered my bike had a flat tire and all the spare tubes I had required patching before they'd be usable.  Yes, I know a lot of riders just throw out punctured tubes and replace them with brand-new ones, but I have a hard time throwing a tube in the garbage when one pin-prick hole is the only thing wrong with it.  Anyway... instead of riding, I spent Wednesday morning patching all my spare tubes.  That pushed the riding back to this morning, when I took advantage of another lovely warm day to take the Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.

It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be some ten degrees cooler than it's been the last several days.  But it'll still be nice for paddling.

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Monday photo feature

Here we have a before-and-after pair of photos--well, actually it's after-and-before, since the newer picture is on top.  We're looking at the famous Gorilla rapid on the Green River near Saluda, North Carolina.

When I was first learning to paddle at summer camp in nearby Brevard, the Green was one of the staples of the canoeing program--not the part of it that includes Gorilla, but a section a little ways downriver.  Here we had a lovely Class II stream that was ideal for doing lots of ferries and eddy turns, and also for learning the right way to swim in a river.  Green Cove Road ran alongside the entire run.

The putin for this section was the Fishtop access.  To get there we had to ride in the camp bus, canoe trailer pulled behind, down a harrowing set of switchbacks.  Seeing as how we essentially were descending the Blue Ridge Escarpment, it stands to reason that the river must have some steep gradient upstream of Fishtop.  When I was a camper back in the early 1980s we occasionally heard gossip about "unrunnable" waterfalls up there, and an old guidebook said something about rock climbing equipment being required for a paddler to get down that section.  But honestly, we didn't give it a whole lot of thought.  To us, the Green was a place to go and work on the basics.

By the late 1980s, techniques and materials had advanced enough that a few pioneering paddlers began to believe that this section of the Green above Fishtop, known as The Narrows, might not be unrunnable after all.  Then they went in there and proved it, running every last one of the rapids, including the raucous Gorilla and the frightening Sunshine.  Before long a couple of videos, Green Summer and Gorilla, were commercially available on VHS cassette.  Steep creeking had truly arrived.  With Lake Summit Dam providing frequent flows, more and more paddlers sought to get in on the action.

I have never run The Narrows of the Green myself.  I can cite a short list of reasons, and yes, fear of the place is one of them.  I simply couldn't imagine myself running something as bodacious as Gorilla.  But since the late 80s many people piled up dozens and even hundreds of runs on The Narrows and could do it in their sleep.  Since the early 2000s there even has been an annual race on the Green Narrows.

The Green is one of the rivers that got positively hammered by Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago.  Green Cove Road, including the switchbacks, sustained tremendous damage, and many houses along the road were swept away.  I've seen some photos and video footage of this section of river that was such a part of my early paddling education, and it looks completely scoured out.  It remains to be seen whether it will ever again be the ideal whitewater training ground that it was before.

Upstream in The Narrows, the rapids have changed radically.  The word on the street is that nothing is the same as before.  Pictured above is the "new" Gorilla rapid on top and the "old" Gorilla (during the 2017 edition of the annual race) on the bottom.  The camera angles aren't quite the same, and the upper photo is closer in to the rapid than the lower photo, but it's pretty clear that an impressive amount of rock got washed away from the river-left bank.  The early assessment of the few paddlers who have ventured into the gorge since the storm seems to be that Gorilla is no longer runnable.  I won't be surprised if somebody puts that to the test before long, however.

Both the photos above are screen-grabs from videos on You Tube.  The top one is from a drone video posted by a Wesley Shelmire, and the bottom one is from a video on the Kayak Session TV channel.

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Healing and getting back in motion

The last time I posted here I mentioned I was trying to get a response from my doctor's office about an X-ray I'd had taken.  They finally got back to me, a full seven days after the X-ray was shot, to tell me there was no sign of a fracture.  That was nice to know, though I sure would have appreciated getting the information in a more timely fashion.  I asked them if the image shed any light on my continued coughing, and they said no.  It's now been more than a month since I first got sick, and while I think the coughing is getting ever-so-gradually less frequent, I'm still having some occasional fits of it.  It's at its worst when I get up in the morning, when I'm expelling all the gunk that had collected overnight.  My friend Rob who rents the little studio apartment in the rear of my building told me that he's been praying for me because he's heard me coughing so much.  I genuinely found that touching.

Since learning that I had no broken bones in my chest area I've been easing myself back into some physical exercise.  I did a couple of 50-minute paddles toward the end of the week before last, week and paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday and Friday of this past week.  My stamina was probably down a tad, but in all I felt reasonably good in the boat.

I woke up this morning with an inexplicable sharp pain in my left wrist--I don't recall doing anything yesterday that might have caused such an ailment.  I went on down to the river hoping for the best, and was relieved to find that I could paddle with no real pain.  I did another 60 minutes, and even got to do some barge-wake surfing.  The waves had a long wavelength and a small amplitude and seemed to require a bit more speed than I could generate, but I did get a couple of okay rides.  The best thing was that I felt good after doing some hard sprints--a sign that maybe I'm getting some stamina back.  By the time I finished paddling my wrist seemed to feel somewhat better, so maybe it just needed some exercise to loosen it up.

Wednesday morning I did a 75-minute bike ride.  I went out the Greater Memphis Greenline to its junction with the Wolf River Greenway, and then rode down the Greenway to where it makes a loop just south of where it passes under Walnut Grove Road.  I traversed the loop and retraced my path back home.  I felt like I'd lost a bit of fitness on the bike too, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so when I had almost nothing left in my legs.  At least there's plenty of time to get that back.

How is the Mississippi River doing these days?  Well, in a post several weeks ago I said that the catastrophic floodwaters in the North Carolina mountains "might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row."  And might is the key word here.  The lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded is -12.04 feet on October 17 of last year.  This fall the level had been below -10 feet before the floodwaters brought it up to about 6.5 feet a little over two weeks ago.  That's almost a 17-foot rise, coming mostly from a small area in North Carolina.  Now that surge of water has moved through, and the level is back down below -8 feet.  By the time I got down to the river on Friday my dock was starting to run aground:

The current forecast has the level holding steady for the next couple of weeks, and the hope is that it will stay above super-low levels until the wetter season settles into the Midwest.  "Super-low" water makes things tough for the barge-shipping industry, and its struggles can eventually ripple through the greater economy; it also causes damage to our marinas and other infrastructure that local river users depend on.

The weather has been just plain gorgeous lately, with plenty of sunshine.  We had our first cool spell of the season in the middle of last week, with the temperature just barely reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  But it's warming back up now and we're expected to have highs in the 80s for the next week.

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Monday photos feature

Yes, it's "photos" plural this week because I've got a number of them to share.

The photo above, a screen-grab from WVLT-Knoxville footage, shows Interstate 40 where the eastbound lanes collapsed into the Pigeon River.  The North Carolina Department of Transportation is currently saying that this part of I-40 will be closed until September 2025.  I won't be surprised if that date gets pushed back as time goes on.

I understand that this destruction is located at about Mile 4 in North Carolina.  The putin for the main dam-controlled section of the Pigeon is right at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.  So that means this damage is about four miles upstream of that putin.

Back in the mid-1990s several slalom races were held on the Pigeon right at the state line, including an installment of the old Champion International Whitewater Series in 1996.  I shot this photo of the C2 team of David Hepp and Barry Kennon in that race.  That's David in the stern and Barry in the bow:

I competed in that race too, and I've also run the section of the Pigeon from the state line to Hartford, Tennessee, a number of times.  In this photo, taken by Mike Davis in 1993, I'm on a camp trip paddling with a camper named Billy Treadway:

On another Pigeon run, I'm in my old Gyramax C1 practicing my roll:

Another river that flooded last week was the French Broad.  The French Broad has its headwaters in the vicinity of Rosman, North Carolina, and flows north through Asheville; it crosses the state line into Tennessee north of where the Pigeon does.  Communities along the French Broad that received significant damage include the towns of Hot Springs, Marshall, and Asheville, and the Biltmore Estate just outside Asheville.  Rion Smith took this photo of me during a 1992 trip on the French Broad where it flows by the Biltmore Estate.  I'm putting on the sort of stern expression that befits such an important man as the head of a summer camp canoeing program:

In the summer of 1994, Clay Barbee shot this photo of me as I tried to get enders in Frank Bell's Rapid.  This rapid is on the French Broad a couple of miles upstream of Hot Springs:

A couple of miles above Frank Bell's Rapid, Big Laurel Creek flows into the French Broad.  My friend Amelia drove by the putin for Big Laurel last week, and she told me it didn't look like it got quite the amount of flooding that the French Broad did.  Here's a shot of me running Stairsteps rapid on Big Laurel in the spring of 1994.  Alfred Thompson took the photo:

These photos represent just a small sample of all the paddling I've done in the mountains of western North Carolina in times when a hurricane seemed the least of the region's worries.  From what I hear, some of the rapids in these rivers have now been completely rearranged.  Whatever the case, I hope that in good time, once the rivers have settled into their altered courses and the region has had a chance to recover from this meteorological disaster, paddlers will once again enjoy carefree days on these playful streams.

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