Monday photo feature

If you've been reading this blog in the last few months, then you know that my mother's condition has been a major concern in both my paddling life and my life, period.

She passed away at about ten o'clock yesterday morning.  Her caregiver called me with the news as I was driving home from my weekend in the Saint Louis metro area.

My life won't be getting "back to normal" anytime soon, what with all the funeral arrangements and estate management and chores like that.  But as one of my best friends said, "She is at peace.  The worst part of the journey is over."

I think my dad took the picture above, and I think it's somewhere in Europe--France or Italy, maybe.  My sister might know for sure.  I know my parents traveled to those locations during the decade or so before my dad died in 2005.  But it doesn't matter, really... it's just a good picture that captures the person my mom was very nicely.

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Touring around Saint Louis a little

When I arrived in Saint Louis Friday afternoon I made a trip to Ted Drewes Famous Frozen Custard--"A Saint Louis Tradition Since 1929."  Treated myself to a regular-size mint chocolate chip concrete.  Mighty good.  You may think athletic types like me always eat healthy, but you would be wrong!  Okay, I do try my best to eat a healthy diet in the interest of both athletic performance and general health as I move inexorably toward old age.  But I've been known to indulge when I'm on vacation.

After the race yesterday I drove back to Saint Louis to take in a Cardinals baseball game at Busch Stadium.  Before the game I stopped in one of the eateries outside the ballpark and continued my slovenly eating ways by wolfing down a big old cheeseburger and fries.

This was the scene as the Redbirds took the field for the 6:15 PM first pitch against the Colorado Rockies:

Pictured here are Matthew Liberatore on the pitcher's mound; catcher Ivan Herrera; first baseman Alec Burleson; second baseman J.J. Wetherholt; third baseman Blaze Jordan; and shortstop Masyn Winn.  Out of the picture, but no less important, are the outfielders: Everson Pereira in left, Nathan Church in center, and Jordan Walker in right.

I attended a Cardinals game when I came up for this race weekend last year, too.  As I mentioned in my last post, I was the fastest solo finisher in last year's race, and conditions were good for fast times.  And the Cardinals did their part by playing a nice, crisp, well-rounded game in which they beat the Chicago Cubs five runs to zero.  This year's race was more of a slog, and I wasn't able to win my class.  And the Cards picked up on that theme yesterday evening.  It was a slow game with deep pitch counts, lots of walks, heavy traffic on the bases, and many pitching changes.  The game was more than three hours old by the time the Rockies completed their 8-6 defeat of the Cardinals.  I actually left after the eighth inning, because my motel in Alton was more than a half-hour away and I was ready to go to sleep.

Here's the parking lot outside Busch Stadium.  All right, you sharp-eyed readers: can you find my vehicle in this sea of parked automobiles?  Can you?  Can you???  You might need your magnifying glass... or just zoom in, this being the 21st century and all.

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It's summertime, and the racing ain't easy

I was up bright and early yesterday morning so I could have some breakfast, get my boat to the race start at Grafton, drive my vehicle down to the finish at Alton, catch the shuttle bus back to Grafton, and attend to all the myriad details involved in being ready to race.

Finally I was in my boat, warming up in the mouth of the Illinois River, as the 9:30 AM start time approached.  Soon enough the gun fired, and we were off.

As we paddled out of the Illinois and onto the Mississippi River, we found ourselves behind a downstream-moving barge rig.  I moved over to try my luck on its wake, but while I got an occasional brief ride, my speed even shooting up over 15 kilometers per hour a couple of times, mostly it was a confused mess.

Meanwhile, over to my left Missouri resident Bryan Hopkins was starting to build a lead.  Figuring he must be enjoying faster, smoother current over there, I edged that way.  Over to the right, Kristofer Oman and Thien Le, paddling a tandem surfski, were cruising out to an even bigger lead, and I knew it was wise to focus on the solo competition.

Over the next half-hour or so I ate into Bryan's lead, taking advantage of small waves coming off the barge rig that occasionally wandered our way.  They weren't big enough to surf, but I could ride them the same way I ride the wake of another paddler, and at times I was moving at more than 13 kph with minimal effort.  I tried to stay relaxed and paddle as efficiently as I could as the mid-morning sun beat down.

As we moved into the middle third of the 15-mile (~24-km) race, I overtook Bryan and looked to press the advantage with subtle surges, using the little bumps whenever they presented themselves.  This was the first time I'd ever raced Bryan head-to-head, and I was getting the impression that I had the edge on him in speed.  However, he's long been one of the top athletes in the longer-distance races around the state of Missouri, and I knew he would be in his element if the race became a test of endurance, and that was not unlikely on this warm, humid day.

As that middle third of the race wore on, I maintained a lead of a few boatlengths and I was starting to think I had Bryan and the other competitors where I wanted them.  But, as if on cue, Bryan surged back into the picture over to my left.  I edged over to get onto his right-side wake, and he didn't seem to like me doing that.  A minute or so later I dropped back onto his stern wake, and I intended to stay there as long as I could.  If I could keep it close enough for the race to come down to a sprint in the final few hundred meters, I liked my chances.

Unfortunately, as we moved past the Ameren Ue Sioux power plant on the Missouri side of the river, I could feel some deeper fatigue creeping in.  Around that same time, I fell off Bryan's stern wake.  I told myself not to panic: I'd reeled him in before, and hopefully I could do it again.

Just past the power plant the Mississippi makes a gradual bend to the right to reveal the town of Alton, and the Clark Bridge that carries U.S. 67 across the river.  According to race director Craig Heaton in the pre-race meeting, it's about 5 miles (8 km) to the finish from here.  The finish line is a short distance upstream of the bridge.

And so, I spent the final third of the race gazing at that bridge, which didn't seem to be drawing any closer no matter how much I paddled.  And it was clear that Bryan had the edge on me in strength.  As we entered the final straightaway toward the finish, he built his lead on me to over a minute.  Once in a while I would take a noticeable chunk out of that lead--I seemed to be better than he at keeping my boat speed up in rough water from passing motorboats.  But in general it seemed that Bryan was pretty safe where he was.  I held out hope that I could inch close enough to make it a race in the closing meters, but at the same time I was feeling worse and worse, and just ready for the whole silly thing to be done with.

In the end, there were no miracles.  Bryan kept me at bay and crossed the finish line 91 seconds ahead of me with a time of two hours, 2 minutes, 24 seconds.  Tandem surfskiers Oman and Le had cruised to the overall victory in 1:56:57, so Bryan and I settled for second and third overall and first and second in the solo competition.

Alma Hopkins, Bryan's wife, was the fastest female finisher.  The complete results are posted here.

My time was more than 17 minutes slower than what I clocked in last year's race.  Ouch.  Last year we had quite a bit more help from the current: I think last summer was wetter in the region than this summer has been, and also last year the lock and dam just below the Clark Bridge had its gates open, so we had good flow all the way through the finish.  Yesterday we seemed to hit the pool above the dam with three or four thousand meters to go, and I watched helplessly as the speed reading on my G.P.S. device plummeted to under 11 kph.  Meanwhile, though it wasn't the worst heat I've ever raced in, it was bad enough: I'm pretty sure we were pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we finished, and I could feel the humidity sucking it right out of me.  And of course there's no escape from the sun out on the Mississippi.  The race distance was indeed the advertised 15 miles, and then some: my G.P.S. device measured it at about 24.5 kilometers, and that's almost fifteen and a quarter miles.

All told, the race yesterday kind of felt like a death march compared to last year's.  Of course, I won the solo class in last year's race, and it's always easy to feel good after a win.  Watching Bryan walk away from me in the final third of the race yesterday was a little disheartening.  But, you know... he's a formidable competitor, and I haven't exactly been ramping up the training this year, for the reasons I've discussed in previous posts.  So, in most respects things went the way they should have gone yesterday, and I should be glad to have finished as high as second place.

I put the boat back on the car and drove to my motel for a shower and a catnap.  The awards were to take place at the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary across the river in West Alton, Missouri, and I thought I understood that they wouldn't be happening until around 3 o'clock, but when I got there around 2:30 I discovered that they'd already been given out.  Fortunately I was able to collect my medal and, more importantly, shake Bryan's hand and congratulate him on his effort.

I'm having a somewhat leisurely morning here in my motel in Alton.  In a little while I'll grind my gears into motion and head back to Memphis and resume life there.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

I'm ready to try another race

We started this week with some remarkably cool weather.  I think we only just barely hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday.  But now the wind has shifted to the south, and the heat is slowly but surely creeping back in.   It's feeling like a Memphis summer again.  I've tried my best this week to prepare myself for this Saturday's race, 15 miles (24.14 kilometers) down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.

I had a doctor's appointment Tuesday morning, so I didn't get down to the river until the mid afternoon.  I'm definitely a morning person when it comes to athletic stuff: by afternoon my energy is starting to wane a bit, and on many days my digestion acts up at that time of day.  I much prefer to do my training in the morning and spend the rest of the day working in the shop or whatever else needs doing in my non-athletic life.

And so it was that my stomach was a little upset Tuesday afternoon, but I managed to paddle for 40 minutes and do a set of six 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

I was back on my morning schedule yesterday, and I did pretty much the same thing: 40 minutes in the boat, six 12-stroke sprints.

This morning I paddled for 30 minutes and did four 12-stroke sprints.  Then I started driving north--upriver--toward the greater Saint Louis area.  I'm in a motel now and hoping for a good night's sleep so I'll be ready to go in the morning.

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Monday photo feature

I can't believe this was an entire decade ago.  It's August of 2016, and here I am paddling on the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky.

I was on my way home after attending the USCA Nationals up in western Massachusetts.  Over the course of that trip I had paddled on the Connecticut River and the Deerfield River in Massachusetts, the Seekonk River in Rhode Island, the Hudson River in New York, and Salt Fork Reservoir in Ohio.  This little romp on the Ohio River concluded my tour of a few of our nation's great waterways.

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Criminal charges, the temperature, and my time in the boat: all dropped

I'll start with a bit of good news: on Friday, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia announced that her office was dropping its charges against my friend David Hearn, a world champion and three-time U.S. Olympian in whitewater slalom.  In her motion to dismiss, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro noted

Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC") presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional document.

While shrugging the blame off onto other agencies, Ms. Pirro provided no acknowledgement that her office had gone off half-cocked without a full grasp of the facts.  She certainly conveyed no remorse that I could discern.  At the very least, the government, including his ultimate accuser in the White House, owes Davey an apology.  But I expect none will be forthcoming.

Many are urging Davey to sue for the damages he's suffered as a result of this baseless indictment.  To be sure, he was forced to spend time and money that he'll never get back, and he admitted in an interview with The Atlantic that he was suffering mental stress as well.  Maybe he'll sue, but then again I can understand completely if he'd rather just put this all behind him and get on with his life.  The saddest thing is that Davey is almost certainly not the last person who will be subjected to this kind of harassment.

Hopefully right now Davey is just out there doing his thing, and that probably includes some bike riding (his preferred athletic pursuit in his post-Olympic life).  I'm trying to do my thing as much as possible, too, and for me that still involves paddling a boat.  Yesterday I was feeling sort of tired and sluggish, and I did a fairly easy 50-minute paddle in the harbor and out on the Mississippi.  Some cooler, more pleasant weather has moved in here, with the Fahrenheit temperature expected to stay below 90 degrees at least through tomorrow.

This morning I still wasn't feeling much giddy-up.  Fortunately, with a race coming up next weekend I can keep the sessions short.  I stayed in the harbor and paddled for 40 minutes, doing a set of eight 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.  It was one of those sessions that had me feeling better afterward than I'd felt before.

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Surfing! Riding! And there's a race coming up!

Memphis and the Mid South is known for its sweltering summer heat, and we've had just such weather here in the second half of July.  In the last couple of weeks the mercury has climbed up to about 100 degrees on the Fahrenheit thermometer, with heat index values exceeding 110.

But we've also had some pretty nice days during this period.  The weather here seems to go in cycles: it'll be oppressively hot, but then a front will come through, often with thunderstorms, and then for a couple of days we'll have a north breeze that brings in more pleasant air.  At some point the wind will shift back to the south, bringing in humidity from the Gulf of Mexico, and then we'll be back to miserably hot weather for several days.

Early last week we had some of the worst heat and humidity I can remember in at least the last decade.  Then a line of thunderstorms came through, and by Wednesday the weather was quite pleasant.  It was still pretty warm, with afternoon highs reaching the high 80s and even low 90s, but the wind was blowing from the north and the air was much less humid.  Over the next several days the wind shifted back to the south, bringing that humidity with it, and another hot spell settled in here over the weekend and lasted through Tuesday.  Then yesterday the wind shifted to the north and we had some scattered showers, and by this morning it was again much more bearable.

Back and forth it goes, and that's the story of summer around here.

It was still very hot on Tuesday, and I got in the boat hoping for some wet fun.  For much of this summer I haven't had much luck finding surfing opportunities on the Mississippi; most days there has been no commercial traffic in sight during the times I've paddled out there.  But on Tuesday I reached the mouth of the harbor and found a huge barge rig just below the trio of old bridges, coming upriver.  I moved onto the river and proceeded downstream at a leisurely pace, doing a few warmup sprints along the way, aiming to meet the rig once it was just above the Harahan Bridge.

I made my rendezvous with the commercial vessel and found some of the best surfing conditions I've seen in a long, long time.  The waves were big and beautiful, and they were linkable, too.  I would ride one for close to a minute, and "follow the hole" to keep myself in a trough or move onto a building wave.  I could almost hear Dawid Mocke's voice in my head: Nose in the hole, Elmore!  Okay, now FOLLOW the hole!!  Where's it going???

Once in a while my bow would plunge into the trough and throw up a burst of spray that sure was pleasant under the scorching sun.

I rode the waves for maybe a third of the distance between the Harahan Bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  That's not bad considering I was moving against the big river's current.  But no matter how well I navigate the waves, those towboats always move upriver faster than I do.  And so the waves eventually petered out as the barge rig put more and more distance on me.  Finally I ferried back over to the Tennessee bank and paddled back up toward the harbor.  The sun continued to beat down and I was baking by the time I was back in the harbor, so I remedied that with some remount practice.  At this time of year it's more about cooling off than practicing a skill, but it pays off nevertheless, especially when I travel someplace like the Miller's Run in South Africa.

I got back to the dock and treated myself to a lovely cool bath under the hose.  Too many of my paddling sessions this summer have felt like slogs, but with some awesome surfing and the attendant adrenaline and endorphin rushes, some remount practice, and a refreshing hose bath, Tuesday's visit to the river was about as perfect as it could have been on a blazing hot July morning, and I left the dock with a smile on my face.

Yesterday afternoon I rode my bike for a little over an hour.  This time last year I had a solid general fitness program going in preparation for the Grand Canyon, with lots of paddling and bike riding as well as stroke drills in the whitewater boat and some strength exercises.  This summer I haven't had the motivation of a big wilderness trip, and I've had numerous distractions that I've talked about in previous posts.  And so I haven't been on the bike as much, or done much of anything else besides bare-minimum surfski sessions on the riverfront downtown.  But in the last week I've gotten in a couple of decent rides and I hope I can keep that going for the rest of the summer.

This morning I got even bolder and signed up for a race!  The Firecracker canoe & kayak race is scheduled for a week from this Saturday on the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  I did this race last year, and for the last several weeks I've been debating whether to return: I'm not nearly as fit as I was a year ago, and of course it's always possible that a development in my mother's condition could require my presence here at home.  But this morning I made up my mind to go ahead and enter.  If it turns out I can't go, at least I'll have made a donation to the Mississippi River Water Trail organization that puts the event on.

Knowing that I might do this race, I've stepped up my efforts in the boat a little in the last couple of weeks--just some long surges and stuff, nothing too sophisticated.  Today, nine days out, was pretty much the last day to do any kind of substantial workout that my body will be able to internalize by race day.  So I went down to the river this morning with a simple but solid plan: I would paddle for 60 minutes, and from 0:10 to 0:50 I would do some two-minute pieces starting every fifth minute.  Within each piece, I would paddle at my likely Firecracker race pace for 90 seconds, and then push it up to sub-maximum intensity for 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, with Tuesday's fun in mind, I was also in the mood for some more surfing.  So I made a deal with myself: I would start my workout in the harbor, and if there was any well-positioned commercial traffic out on the river when I reached the harbor's mouth, I would suspend the workout and go out and try to surf.  After that, I would resume the workout for whatever portion of my 60 minutes remained.

It takes me around 15 minutes to paddle from the dock to the harbor's mouth, so at the 10-minute mark I started the first workout piece.  At the 15-minute mark I was able to see out onto the river, and there was indeed a barge rig in a good spot out there.  So I did my second piece en route to the towboat's wake, and then spent a few minutes seeing what kind of surfing I could do.  The waves weren't nearly as user-friendly as what I'd seen on Tuesday; they were sort of wandering right and left.  But I got a handful of brief rides.  Then I resumed the workout having missed just one of my pieces.

By the 40-minute mark I was headed back toward the harbor, planning to finish the workout there.  But there was a bigger barge rig coming upriver from beneath the Harahan Bridge, and even though I had planned to paddle for just 60 minutes, I had no pressing commitments back in my non-athletic life, and I reminded myself that this was my last day to get in some good hard paddling before race day.  So I finished the workout near the harbor's mouth, and then, with the barge rig now in a good spot for me to access it, I paddled toward it with high hopes for the kind of surfing I'd enjoyed on Tuesday.

On my approach I could see that the waves were big and beautiful.  But once I was in the middle of them, I realized that they were slightly out of my league.  Like the ground swell that I saw in South Africa six months ago, these waves were a little too big and moving a little too fast for a mere mortal like me to catch them.  I gave it my best effort, but I didn't get a single ride.

By now I was feeling pretty spent, so I headed back to the harbor.  I did a couple of remounts on the way back to the dock, and took out after 80 minutes of paddling.

So... it's been quite a week here in the dog days of summer.  Between now and race day I'll shorten the sessions a little, work on my speed, and hopefully get some rest.

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Monday photo feature

In my post yesterday I "name-checked" Mr. Bill Endicott, who served as coach of the U.S. whitewater team in the 1970s and 80s and 90s.  Under his leadership, the U.S. team went from barely noticed to a force to be reckoned with on the international stage.

Endicott was part of the crowd that showed up outside DC Superior Court last Thursday in support of Davey Hearn, who is charged with a felony count for allegedly "vandalizing" the Reflecting Pool.  That's him wearing the "Davey's a champ, not a scamp!" sign, which sums up perfectly the post I put up here on Saturday.

Taking the "selfie" alongside Bill & friends is Adam Van Grack, a paddler and former administrator in canoe & kayak racing's governing body, and now a member of the town council of Rockville, Maryland.

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