Monday photo feature

It’s a sure sign of spring: the arrival of the purple martins down at the marina on the riverfront where I keep my boat.  I first noticed them the morning of March 21: that day there were just two, and I think they were “scouts” getting the house ready for their flock.  By this past Friday morning there were at least a half dozen of them here.  (The two visible in the photo were the only ones bold enough to stick around when I approached with my camera.)

The purple martins are one of those simple pleasures I enjoy when I go down to the dock, and I think that's an important part of being an athlete, to savor the little things about the places you go to train.  To like those places.  I genuinely like the environs of the harbor and the entire Memphis riverfront, and I think that helps motivate me to get my paddling in on a regular basis.  Similarly, when I had my little dry-land routine going this past winter, I chose a spot in the Greenbelt Park overlooking the Mississippi River to do it.  The routine felt hard and tedious at times, but I enjoyed being down there and I almost always came away feeling better than I'd felt beforehand.

I think this identification with a place is something accomplished athletes in all sports share.  A dedicated basketball player will probably tell you that he enjoys being in the gym each day, with the echoes of the ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor, the popping sound he hears when he takes a shot and hits nothing but net, even the sweaty smell in the locker room.

The more you like the place where you do your sport, the more eager you'll be to get to work each day and make yourself accomplished in that sport.

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Laying low for a while

It's been a fairly light week as far as paddling goes.  I sort of crashed mentally when I got home from Ocean Springs Sunday night, and I didn't paddle for the next several days.  We had a chilly start to the week, and that didn't help my motivation.  I'd originally planned to paddle Tuesday morning, but it was cool and breezy and I realized as I was getting my clothing and gear ready that I just didn't feel like it.  So I bailed.  I paddle because I want to, not because I have to.

Actually, I could have easily crashed this way when I got home from South Africa.  By then I'd been working quite hard for several months, after all.  But I knew I wanted to race at Ocean Springs, so I kept myself going a few weeks longer.  Once that event was behind me, I couldn't ignore my need for a break.

It's also not helpful that my neck muscle continues to nag me.  My chiropractor has been working on it for a month now, but we haven't achieved any lasting relief at this point.  I'm pretty sure this is all part of the nerve impingement that an MRI revealed back in 2023, but I did feel pretty good for about a year from 2024 into 2025, and I'm longing to get back to that.

Finally, I currently have a hospitalized family member, and that's taking up a great deal of my time and attention right now.

By Thursday we were back to some unseasonably warm weather here in the Mid South, and I got myself back to the river for a relaxed hour of paddling.  I did so again Friday morning, when the temperature was in the mid 60s Fahrenheit but dropping toward the 40s by later in the day.

Conditions improved this weekend, fortunately.  It was on the cool side when I got to the river this morning, but the sun was out and the wind was calm.  With the temperature rising quickly toward an afternoon high in the high 70s, it was really a lovely morning to paddle.  I went out and did an easy 40 minutes before returning to the dock and heading back to the hospital.

This might be what I do for the next little while.  For a couple of months after my return from the Grand Canyon last fall, I mostly did easy sessions of less than an hour.  It gave me a chance to focus on technical stuff, and I think it set me up well to ramp the volume back up in December in preparation for the South Africa trip.

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Monday photo feature

Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi, paddles in the bow seat with his son Thaison just aft.  The pair were the first to cross the finish line in the "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race at Ocean Springs yesterday.

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Though not perfect, it was a fun return to Ocean Springs

The "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race takes place each March on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  The inaugural event was in 2010, and it's happened every year since except 2020, when it was called off in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.  That made yesterday's race the 16th installment of the event.  I missed last year's race, but have attended all fifteen of the others.

Coming into yesterday's race, I had been the overall winner only three times, most recently way back in 2014.  There's almost always been somebody there to give me tough competition for that honor.  Yesterday my main challenger appeared to be a tandem boat paddled by Gulfport, Mississippi, residents Jeb Berry and his 16-year-old son Thaison.  I mentioned in last week's photo feature that Jeb was recently diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver.  He began his treatment just last week, and decided that he was feeling good enough to go ahead and race.  He seemed hale and hardy when I spoke to him before the race and I knew I couldn't take him lightly.

After the pre-race meeting I got in the boat, did some warmup paddling, and settled onto the starting line.  As I sat there with some five minutes to go, Jeb and Thaison paddled into the starting area, and I knew they would have to move quickly to get their long tandem boat turned around and into position for a fair start.  Before I knew it, the starting official gave us the 30-second warning, and what seemed like less than 30 seconds later, the starting horn went off.

I wasted little time getting my boat up to speed to put some distance on the pack in the opening meters.  I glanced right and left, fully expecting to see the Berrys nearby, but they were nowhere in sight.  They must have not been in ideal position when the race started, I thought, and I was a bit concerned because I wanted our competition to be fair.  But I told myself to worry about my own self and I continued working to move my boat as quickly and efficiently as possible, knowing that they were entirely capable of reeling me in over a 70-minutes-plus race.

I paddled hard but mostly relaxed as I covered one kilometer, then two, then three.  All the while I kept my ears open for the sound of Jeb's voice or any other clue that I had company up at the front of the race.  There was plenty of race still to come, but once or twice I dared to think that maybe this was the year I would finally claim another overall title here in Ocean Springs.

Then, about five kilometers in, those hopes went down the tubes.

Old Fort Bayou is a narrow creek that meanders through a broad swath of marshland as it approaches its mouth in the Back Bay of Biloxi.  There is one spot on the race course where it is very easy to make a wrong turn.  Here's a satellite image of that spot:

That's Bayou Talla coming in from the north.  The green arrows show where racers are supposed to go, and the red arrows show the wrong turn that is so tempting to the unwitting paddler.

I have now been that guy three times.  In the 2021 race I was one of about four boats in the lead pack, and when we reached this part of the course I started to make the turn indicated by the red arrows.  Fortunately, one of the other boats in the pack was a tandem paddled by Jeb Berry and Ocean Springs local Nick Kinderman, and Nick alerted me to keep going straight.  Tragedy averted.

The very next year, I was sitting in second place overall, a minute or so behind the father-daughter tandem of Mike and Savanna Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas.  They made the red-arrow mistake, and I followed them.  When I rounded the little sliver of island in the middle, the Herberts were paddling back toward me, and I knew we had screwed up.  Happily, we managed to get back on course quickly enough that the final results were what they probably would have been anyway: Mike and Savanna cruised to a comfortable victory, and I took second place overall.

That brings us back to yesterday.  It's easy to sit here and look at the satellite image and think, "Well, DUH... just follow the green arrows!"  But down at water level, the right way to go is anything but obvious.  Yesterday I was all by myself in first place, with nobody around to guide me, and certainly not any green arrows painted on the surface of the water.  What's more, at that time of morning the sun was right in my eyes, making the correct route look like a possible dead end.  And so I made the infuriatingly-easy mistake.  The race organizers really ought to post a person there to keep racers on the right course--not just a buoy, not just a sign, but a person.  They have never done so, and all I can say is that unless they do, wrong turns will happen here again.

I had about reached the end of that last red arrow when I heard some voices yelling at me.  I believe it was the Berrys, who had spotted me through the little passage marked "A" on the satellite photo.  I looked around and saw another paddler, Don Hicks of Cabot, Arkansas, who had followed me on my march to folly.  At this moment I could not see the slot marked "A," and I thought the only way to paddle back on course was to go back to the beginning of the red arrows.  I took a gamble and paddled over to about where point "B" is marked, hoping maybe I could portage over the marsh to the race course.  But I couldn't get a visual on just how much ground I would have to cover, or if I could do so without sinking ankle-deep in mud.  By this time Don was paddling toward the "A" slot, so I got back in the boat and followed him.

By the time I was back on course, somewhere between ten and twenty boats had overtaken me.  I figured running down the Berrys was probably a lost cause, but I felt pretty certain I could still take everybody else.  The challenge now was to stay calm and be patient, and not try to put the hammer down and catch everybody right away.  I still had some 60 percent of the race left to go, after all.

Little by little, I worked my way up through the field.  I rounded the big island by the Fort Bayou apartments and entered the second half of the course, retracing the route back to where we'd started.  Along the way I saw familiar faces: Nick's wife Kelly Kinderman; Karen Kesselring of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas; Billy Howell (friends call him "Chilly" Billy) of Coahoma, Mississippi; Robert Brooks of Biloxi, Mississippi; double surfski paddlers Nova Cross and Nate Payne of Ocean Springs; the Gulfport outrigger C2 team of Penny and Lynn Sanburn.

Off in the distance I could see the last person, other than Thaison and Jeb, still in front of me.  It was Don Hicks, and that made sense, seeing as how he'd been the next-fastest paddler behind me when I made my wrong turn.  He had a good lead, but I could tell I was whittling away at it.  I set my sights on him and finally pulled onto his wake as we passed beneath the Washington Avenue drawbridge, about 1300 meters from the finish.  I rode his wash for several minutes to gather myself for a strong final surge.

With 700 meters to go, I dug in and pulled away.  I could see Jeb and Thaison paddling their post-finish cooldown as I sprinted the last several hundred meters.  I crossed the finish line with a time of one hour, 13 minutes, 47 seconds, and it turned out that was just a little over two minutes behind the Berrys (1:11:30).

Don finished the race 28 seconds behind me.  A short while later Team Sanburn crossed the line with a time of 1:15:23.

The fastest solo female finisher was Kim Arnold-Bridwell of Gulfport.  Her time was 1:23:47, two minutes and three seconds faster than Karen Kesselring.

The complete results are available here.

My G.P.S. device measured the course at 12.27 kilometers.  My best guess is that I added two to three hundred meters to my distance with my red-arrow blunder, so I would say the course is about an even 12 kilometers.  That's not quite seven and a half miles.  The course, altered slightly from what it had been in previous years, had been advertised as "8-ish" miles.

Looking back, I'm satisfied with how I did.  It feels good to have come back to take the title among solo paddlers after going off-course and wasting four or five minutes.  I'm just sorry I didn't get a chance to compete with the Berrys for that overall title.  I expect they're sorry about that as well.  But I hope they can savor their victory, especially considering the off-the-water challenges that Jeb faces in the coming months.  (Once again, I hope folks will consider helping out with his expenses by chipping in a few bucks here.  Even with insurance, having a serious illness is an expensive state of affairs.)

The weather was beautiful, and I enjoyed visiting with friends before the awards were handed out.  Once all business was concluded I set sail back north to my humble hometown on the mighty Mississippi.

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

Prepping to race despite ailments

My week began with some dry-needling treatment at the chiropractor's office.  The chiropractor warned that I would probably feel worse before feeling better, and that's been the case as my muscles react to being stuck with those needles.  I've been living with this pain in the right side of my neck for close to six weeks now, and it's making my whole body feel out of whack.  Like I've said before, it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, but the discomfort is pretty severe nevertheless... it makes me feel like I'm not paddling well even when I probably am.  I've got an almost OCD-caliber desire for balance and symmetry in all my affairs, and I'm feeling anything but balanced and symmetrical these days.

Meanwhile, I'm signed up to race down at Ocean Springs this Sunday, and I'm trying to go through my pre-race motions this week.  It was cold and miserable outside on Monday and Tuesday, so I took those two days off.  The forecast for Wednesday was a high temperature around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still in the low 50s when I went down to the river that morning, and a fierce south wind made it seem colder than that.  I paddled into the teeth of that wind toward the mouth of the harbor, and then turned around to do a few 12-stroke sprints with the wind at my back.  I did ten of them at two-minute intervals, and at some point I managed to tweak a muscle in my right lower back.  Wasn't that just all I needed...

Yesterday morning I did some back stretch exercises that I think eased the lower back pain.  I went back to the river and got in the boat, and this time I did eight of those 12-stroke sprints.  The wind wasn't blowing nearly as hard and that helped me feel more comfortable, though the neck pain was quite an annoyance.  It's hard to feel like I'm ready to go out and compete with an ailment like that nagging at me.

By this morning the back pain was about gone, I think.  I went downtown and did six 12-stroke sprints.  When I got back home I tried putting some ice on my sore neck muscle.  It hadn't occurred to me to do so until last night when I got to a part of a book I'm currently reading where the narrator, a doctor, talks about putting ice on a trauma victim's edema.  I figured it couldn't hurt to try it on my neck.  So far I've done it just once, and maybe it's helped a little... hard to tell.  I'll do it once more this evening and again tomorrow, because why not... right?

The plan for tomorrow is to do several more of those sprints in the harbor, and then load up the boat and embark on the six-hour drive down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

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

Monday photo feature

It's 2017, and that's me on the right, locked in a tight contest on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Pushing me hard is Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi.

When I return to Ocean Springs to race this coming weekend, Jeb would likely be my stiffest competition.  Sadly, he was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and will probably not be racing (though I know better than to count him out entirely).

The bright side is that Jeb has many friends and they are rallying to his cause.  If you'd like to chip in to a fundraising effort for his medical expenses, you can do so here.

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

Never a dull moment in the aches-and-pains department

My neck continues to be a source of misery.  The chiropractor adjusted it again last Monday, and for the next couple of days I could tell that the discomfort had eased, but by the end of the week it was feeling as bad as ever.  When I return to the chiropractor's office tomorrow, she's going to perform some dry needling in hopes of stimulating a more lasting healing process.

After paddling just an easy 40 minutes yesterday, I planned to do something more substantial today: a lap around the Loosahatchie Bar.  Right now the Mississippi River, at 21.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, is high enough to do it for the first time in at least six months.  (The bare minimum for doing it is around 16 feet, but at that level there's a big sandbar at the north end of the Bar that you have to paddle around, and even then you're either scraping the bottom or getting out and portaging.)

Yep, that was my plan.  But the weather had other ideas.  Today there's a fierce south wind blowing, with some strong thunderstorms and maybe even a tornado or two moving through this evening.  On top of my neck woes, that made it seem unwise for me to be out all alone on the big river.  Paddling around the Bar is something I feel like I ought to do at least once a year, but the year is young, and surely this isn't the only time in 2026 that the river will be high enough for me to do it.

Instead, I paddled for 70 minutes, mostly in the harbor.  I pushed the pace at times, especially while coming back north with the wind at my back.  I did an impromptu bridge-to-bridge sprint for time, and clocked 2:11.  One might think that with such a strong tailwind I should be much faster than that, but it's been my experience that there are limits to that advantage.  When the wind is dead calm I have a smooth surface to paddle on, while with the wind blowing like it is today the surface is very bumpy, and I think those bumps slow the boat down just like bumpy dry-land terrain slows down a car or a bike or a similar vehicle.

After that sprint I got a good full recovery while paddling easy, and then I timed myself over the second half of the bridge-to-bridge course (the approximate halfway point is noted in the video).  In my workouts this winter I've been covering this distance in 64-65 seconds, but this time I wanted to see if I could do it at or below 60 seconds.  I pushed the stroke rate up over a hundred per minute, and reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge right at 60 seconds.

After that I paddled mostly steady for the rest of the 70 minutes.  My neck ailment, while not directly impeding the act of paddling, continued to make me blue.  I really hope tomorrow's dry-needling session will help me turn a corner on that.

I do have one bit of more positive health news.  If you've read this blog's posts from last fall, then you know I came down with a case of shingles shortly after my return from the Grand Canyon.  I haven't mentioned it here in a long time, and that's because the symptoms were pretty much gone by mid November.  But I could still see remnants of the rash for a long time after that.  Just in the last week, however, it occurred to me that the rash is now all gone.  Well, almost, anyway--there are still faint traces of it.  But I doubt anybody who doesn't know I had shingles could look at it and tell there was ever anything there.

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

I'll be racing again before long

We've had a good bit of rain lately, and that rain has moved across the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio River watersheds, so it's translating into higher levels on the Mississippi River.  When I did a steady 60-minute paddle Tuesday morning, the river was flowing at 15.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  When I got back on the water for a workout today, it had risen to just over 19 feet.  As of this writing the river is forecast to crest at 21.8 feet next Monday or Tuesday.

I paddled in the afternoon today because of some nuisance stuff I had to deal with in the morning.  With just ten days to go before my race down at Ocean Springs, it was about my last chance to do a workout that's likely to have any bearing on my race-day fitness.  I did four bridge-to-bridge sprints, starting every 8th minute, and clocked 2:14, 2:15, 2:15, and 2:15.  My times were a bit slower than when I did the same workout two weeks ago, and I think the main reason was a light headwind today as opposed to almost no wind then.  I didn't use my cadence sensor two weeks ago, but today I used it and tried to keep things under control by targeting a stroke rate of 90 spm.  I think that helped me stay consistent over all four sprints.

The afternoon's effort has me feeling pleasantly tired this evening.  Knowing that I can cut back the volume a bit between now and race day has me feeling upbeat as well.

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