Make a plan and stick with it

This morning I did seven laps of the strength circuit and paddled my boat for 80 minutes.

Through last week, I had been working out three days per week.  This week, I'm bumping it up to four.

Having competed at a rather high level in a couple of different sports since I was a teenager, I find it sometimes takes as much discipline to work out "only" three days a week as it does to get in over a dozen workouts in a week.  I think it's fairly common for somebody training for athletic competition to ask himself or herself, "Am I doing enough?"

It's a valid question, inasmuch as there's some minimum level of preparation necessary for almost any endurance-oriented competition.  But there's a danger of going overboard with it, too.  The worst thing you can do is start worrying about your volume of training as it compares to other people's volumes of training.

Having trained for slalom races all by my lonesome in a whitewater-poor part of the country, I rarely saw other slalom racers except on the race days themselves.  In my first couple of seasons, I would get to a race and watch a competitor's warmup drills, and I would think, "Oh no, I'd better do that, too!"  It was a silly reaction that led to some pretty silly race performances.

Fortunately, as my experience grew, so did my confidence in my own routines, and that self-assurance has carried over into the open water/marathon racing I'm doing now.  But I'm still not entirely immune to the impulse of comparing myself to others.  I watch the blog of a kid who made his first U.S. national team in flatwater sprint last year, and when he describes the workouts he and his fellow Olympic hopefuls are doing, my knee-jerk reaction is usually "Oh my God... I'm not doing anything even close to what they're doing!"

It takes a few minutes to start hearing that more rational voice that says "Just relax.  They're trying to make the Olympic team.  You're not.  Your training is perfectly commensurate with your goals."

And that's really the point I'm trying to make.  As your competitive season approaches, take a look at the events you'll be entering and define some reasonable goals for yourself.  Consider your age, and your physical ability to withstand training, and your schedule of commitments.  Draw up a training plan for yourself that fits within all the constraints, and stick to that plan.

Don't worry if you don't have the time or ability for a lot of workouts.  Greg Barton said as much in a Face Book post at the end of this past year:

I paddled 2310 km in 2011 - about half of what I did per year in my prime. I still had some decent results. Training is a game of diminishing returns. If you can consistently get on the water 3-4 times per week, you'll see good benefits from it.

So far I've stuck to my plan, which was to train three days a week until this week.  For the next little while I'll be doing four.  The most intense few weeks of training, leading up to my biggest races, will see me in the boat for five and possibly six sessions a week, but for the majority of this season I'll be at four.  And that's fine with me.  After all, while paddling is important to me, it's not all I do.

Monday Photo Feature

I have all kinds of photos sitting on my hard drive and I'm thinking maybe I should share one each Monday.

This one is from the 2011 Bluz Cruz Marathon, a race that takes place each April on a 22-mile section of the Mississippi River that finishes at Vicksburg (www.bluzcruz.com).  Last year's race was held in blustery conditions that gave many racers a lot of trouble.  The Warren County Sheriff's boat recovered the craft of one unfortunate paddler.  I think a kayak should be standard equipment on all search-and-rescue boats from now on.  Photo by Martha Kelly.

Backpaddling

This morning I did seven laps of the strength circuit and 80 minutes in the boat.  Today I did something I've done once a week this whole month: backpaddle for five minutes of each quarter of the paddling session.

Backpaddling is a big part of slalom stroke drills.  The idea is that it helps racers prevent muscle imbalances while also providing another way of exploring blade control and boat kinesthetics and stuff like that.  Backpaddling is actually sort of a lost art in modern-day whitewater racing: up until the early 1980s, slalom courses had gates through which racers were required to pass stern-first.  I enjoy watching video footage of 70s-era races (you can find some on You Tube) and seeing the technique the racers used to negotiate the reverse gates cleanly.  The boats back then were high-profile and difficult or impossible to sneak under the poles--especially the C-boats, which had to be higher at the ends than at the cockpit--so some real precision was necessary to avoid taking a touch.  Paddlers used rudder and J-strokes at the bow for steering as they moved in reverse.

Anyway, getting back to the point: after doing those stroke drills in my slalom boat in December, I thought I would carry some of that over into my kayak by continuing to do some backpaddling once a week.

Backpaddling is hard.  By the end of one of those five-minute pieces, my biceps and triceps are screaming.  And it's technically as well as physically hard. I do my best to make my backpaddling the exact reverse of my forward paddling, with the body rotation and knee movement and all.  But that takes a lot of concentration because the touring boat--like most kayaks, I guess--is not designed to go backward, and my wing paddle isn't so good for the bow rudders and J-strokes that I can do in the slalom boat.  The boat's rudder sort of works for steering, but not very well.  So I usually end up going around in large circles.  I try to get out in the middle of the harbor or river, away from anything I might slam into, and just ignore the turning and try to paddle with good form and give my muscles a good workout.  If it's a windy day, I've found that the boat tracks better if I backpaddle into the wind.  I think maybe the boat's high-profile works like a skeg in the wind.

It's all made for a mildly fun diversion, and I reckon I'll keep doing a backpaddling workout each week until I get out the surf ski.

Yesterday I told a bunch of people on Face Book that this blog exists, so I guess I'm committed to doing it now.  A few people gave me some nice words of encouragement and I appreciate that.

What my plastic touring boat looks like

Here I am in my plastic touring boat.  The main reason I own it is to slow me down when I paddle with my wife, Martha.  Martha snapped this photo as we paddled around the Tom Lee statue during the big Mississippi River flood last May.

Other boats and Hindu squats

Six laps through the strength circuit again, followed by another 80 minutes in the boat.  It was a beautiful morning out on the river--sunny and calm, with the temperature climbing toward its forecast high in the mid fifties.

I haven't paddled my surf ski since last October 3.  As I said in my last post, I took a couple of months off, during which I became happily immersed in the other areas of my life.  When the time rolled around to start training for the new year, I was fighting some serious lethargy, so I looked for alternatives to the usual hour or more in the surf ski.  I started by pulling my slalom C-1 out of storage and doing some of the stroke drills I used to do while I was racing slalom.

Early in the training year I'm looking for things to do that emphasize strength, and I believe stroke drills fit the bill.  I always feel like I've been in the weight room after a set of stroke drills.  A stroke drill involves exaggerating one particular aspect of a stroke, isolating the specific set of muscles that transfers the energy from the blade in the water through your body to your hips, legs, knees, and feet, which in turn propel the boat in the desired way.

After doing those drills several times a week in the second half of December, I was ready to start doing some kayaking again, but didn't want to get out the surf ski yet because, frankly, after more than a decade of winters freezing my rear end off sitting on that thing, I just don't feel like doing it anymore.  So for the last month I've been paddling my plastic touring boat, a Current Designs model called the "Storm."  It's really a pretty good boat for what it is, but for anybody used to paddling race boats or other well-designed composite boats, it's a clunker.  I hope paddling a heavier, slower boat has a little bit of that strength training value I look for this time of year.  Hopefully, when I do move over to the surf ski it'll feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders.  And with my first race coming up on March 3, I'll probably break out the ski in another couple of weeks.  I hope the mild winter continues.

On another topic, I mentioned a couple of posts back that I'm doing Hindu squats as part of my strength routine this month.  Hindu squats are an exercise I learned from the wrestling coach at the last school where I taught.  This coach had been studying the training methods and philosophies of a guy named Matt Furey, whose "Combat Conditioning" program includes Hindu squats and numerous other body-weight exercises.  You can watch a video of a guy doing a set of Hindu squats here.

I've done over a hundred Hindu squats in one shot.  Seems like I really start feeling it after forty or fifty, depending on my fitness.  Right now, since I'm doing my strength work in a circuit format, I'm doing sets of thirty.

Post Number Two

Back already... not used to this yet.

This morning I did another six laps of my strength exercise circuit and another eighty minutes in the boat.

I'm starting up the training a little later this year than I have in the past.  The main reason is that the race I take most seriously, the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race here at Memphis, is some six weeks later this year than it's been before.  The race had always been the first Saturday in May, but after having to cancel the event for two years in a row (because of violent storms in the area in 2010 and near-record flooding on the Mississippi River last year), race director Joe Royer decided to try it out in June, when weather patterns tend to be more stable and river levels are historically more moderate.  The race will be June 16 this year.

Every year I take a little time off in the fall from paddling and training.  Summers here in Memphis have a way of draining away every ounce of energy and enthusiasm I've got.  Typically, by the end of August I don't want to see a boat or a paddle for a good long time.  As I back off from training for a while, I immerse myself fully in my woodworking and all the other little things I don't find time for during my competitive season.  And I get all happy and comfy with life out of the boat.  By the time November is giving way to December, I'm asking myself, "Oh boy... do I really have it in me to train up for another race season?"

So far, the answer has always turned out to be yes.  Each year I look for some new twist on the old routine to help keep myself interested.  As I ease back into training for the 2012 season, I'm approaching both my paddling and my strength conditioning from slightly different angles, and I'll explain more about that soon.

Making things a little easier is that this winter has been incredibly mild so far.  Actually, today is probably the closest thing to a bleak winter day that I've paddled in so far--occasional drizzle, a blustery north wind that was just strong enough to make the upriver legs a little unpleasant--but with temperatures near 50 degrees, it's really not that bad.  I haven't worn pogies but maybe three times so far this winter.

My First Post on My Training Blog

Well, here we go... I'm a blogger for the first time.

I started today with six laps of the following exercise circuit:
10 clap pushups
30 Hindu squats
6 pullups
10 leg-raises while hanging from pullup bar

I have been doing this circuit since the beginning of the month.  In the first week of the month I did three laps of the circuit; in the second week of the month, four laps; last week, five laps; and now this week, six laps.

After these exercises I went down to the river and paddled my boat for 80 minutes.