Engine's been cool

This morning I did my little cinder block/step-ups/pushups/core exercise routine, and then went down to the river and paddled for an hour.

I rode my bike to the river and back.  Until yesterday, I'd had a six-day streak going during which I did not drive a car; I had to drive Martha to the airport yesterday, and that's what broke the streak.

I didn't have many places to go during those six days, and when I did go somewhere I rode my bike.  I hadn't set any lofty goal of staying out from under the wheel; it just sort of worked out that way.  Once I get in the habit of riding my bike places, it's really pretty easy to do.  I think being an athlete and living simply are complementary things.

Some Eighties TV

My left bicep is killing me.  I think I might have hurt it in the workshop this morning, when I was moving a bookcase I'm working on.  I was trying to lower it from the workbench to the floor and found myself in an awkward position.  Middle age... sigh.

I did manage a set of exercise ball drills just before lunch (for those of you just tuning in, I'm doing the static drill demonstrated by Jingjing Li, an Olympic kayaker from China, in this video).

If I'm not mistaken, the U.S. has won five Olympic medals in flatwater sprint.  Yes, that's a small number: the sport has been dominated by European nations for most of its history.  But 1988 was a remarkable year for the U.S. Team, which entered the Olympic regatta in Seoul with legitimate medal hopes in three events.  While the '88 Olympics are now cemented in U.S. canoe and kayak lore, I had never actually seen the television coverage of that competition myself until this past week, when I noticed a link on Face Book of footage that is now posted on You Tube.  It is particularly enjoyable for me to watch it now because my involvement in flatwater and open water kayak racing in the last fifteen years or so has given me the opportunity to become friends with two of the leading athletes in those '88 Games, Greg Barton and Mike Herbert.

Here, Mike becomes the first U.S. paddler ever to compete in an Olympic K1 500-meter final.

Greg entered the Games as the reigning K1 1000-meter world champion, and here he tries to win it all again in the Olympic K1 1000-meter final.

Just a little more than an hour later, Greg is back on the water with partner Norm Bellingham for the Olympic K2 1000-meter final.

Many readers of this blog probably already know how the guys did, but I won't spoil it for anybody who doesn't.  Watch the videos and re-live the excitement!

Monday photo feature

Since I've been reminiscing about the good old days of Toes and Elbows and camp in general, I thought I'd post a camp picture this week.  I went to camp in the days before roto-molded kayaks were widely available, and at that time my camp owned a fleet of aluminum canoes for the lake and a trailer of Royalex canoes for river trips.  Most of the time we paddled tandem.  Here, I shoot the photo as Wyly Brown mans the stern and Pierre Villere the bow for a run of Lost Guide on the Pigeon River near Hartford, Tennessee.

Gimme Toes and Elbows, you little punk!

Yesterday I did the exercise ball workout I've been doing lately.  One of the exercises looks like this:

As I strained to hold the position for 60 seconds, it occurred to me that it was very similar to something my fellow campers and I were made to do back when I was a kid at summer camp: the dreaded "Toes and Elbows."  Toes and Elbows was the one-size-fits-all punishment for any of a long list of infractions.  Here I am assuming the traditional Toes and Elbows position:

The most sadistic counselors made us do it on a gravel surface so we would end up with rocks embedded in our elbows, or maybe over a pile of fresh horse dung to ratchet up the stakes.  But Toes and Elbows was plenty unpleasant on its own because of the extreme discomfort it caused in the abdominal area.  Who knew that we were actually strengthening our core muscles?

By the time I was a counselor myself in the mid 1980s, our society's attitude toward corporal punishment was changing, and the camp administration, fearing accusations of child abuse, ordered an end to Toes and Elbows and all other forms of physical discipline.  So I never got to exact "revenge" on the next generation of campers.  And that's probably a good thing: emotionally-disturbed souls don't need to be running around with carte blanche to dispense torture.  But did we unwittingly deprive subsequent generations of the core strength to conquer the world?

Since Rebecca Giddens and Scott Shipley wound up their competitive careers a few years ago, U.S. paddlers have had a tough time in international competition.  Even though I am a fan of the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team, I'm not outraged about it; very few people get to be among the best in the world, and that small group simply doesn't happen to include any U.S. athletes at the moment.  But for those who are determined to point the finger of blame, I suggest a look at the demise of Toes and Elbows.

The glory days of U.S. canoe and kayak racing were the 1980s and early 1990s, when flatwater athletes like Mike Herbert, Norm Bellingham, and Greg Barton and whitewater athletes like Jon Lugbill, Dana Chladek, Cathy and Davey Hearn, the Haller brothers, and Rich Weiss were putting our nation on the podium.  These people would have been summer campers in the early 80s or before; could it be that they were especially naughty, and had to do lots and lots of Toes and Elbows?  I think it is a question that deserves serious study.

By this morning I had recovered enough from my exercise-ball-enhanced Toes and Elbows to do my little workout with the pushups and step-ups and stuff, and then head down to the river.  I paddled for 60 minutes in a pretty stiff wind.

Addition to the family

As the week moves along I'm sore but feeling some benefit from these new strength exercises I'm doing.

This morning I did the exercise routine I alternate with the exercise ball workout.  This routine consists of some behind-the-head lifts with a cinder block, some plyometric step-up exercises, some pushups, and a core exercise that Daniele Molmenti demonstrates at 3:47 of this video.

Then I pedaled down to the river and paddled for an hour.  It was awfully breezy and cool but the bright sunshine kept me from getting too cold on my surf ski.

Right now I'm paddling just a couple of times a week, but I'll start increasing that in a month or so.  I'm hoping that by then I'll have something to help get me excited about it.  I've never owned a flatwater sprint K1, and while I've always felt it would be neat to have one I've always restrained myself because it just isn't something I need that badly.  I have neither the speed nor the desire to do a bunch of regulation nine-lane sprint races, and the conditions out on the Mississippi River are often not suitable for such an unstable, low-profile craft.

But this week I decided to get one anyway.  After doing some shopping around on the Internet, I decided on this beauty:

It's a 2007 Vanquish II ML, manufactured by the Nelo boat company of Vila do Conde, Portugal.  Right now it's in Massachusetts, and I have hired KAS Transport to bring it down here on their next run from the Northeast to the Mid South.

I still don't know that I really need a K1, but as midlife-crisis obsessions go, it's a lot more practical than a high-end sports car or a twenty-something nymphomaniac with big blonde hair and breast implants.  It should be fun to paddle it in the harbor and mix up my training a little, and I may take it to some of the calmer-water races I do.

Harbor cleanup video

Back on the 15th of September I participated in a cleanup of the Wolf River Harbor at downtown Memphis.  Here's a video that the folks at Outdoors, Inc., one of the event's sponsors, put together.

Monday photo feature

Regular readers of this blog know I've been taking some time off from any serious training for the last couple of months.  But I haven't exactly been lying around.  My vocation can be quite strenuous.  In this picture I'm using a drawknife, and the photo must have been taken right after I'd started, because even on a chilly day I work up a sweat pretty quickly and shed my sweatshirt.

From drawknife work to axe work to sawing to moving logs and lumber around, I get plenty of exercise as a woodworker.  But I've never really been able to incorporate it into what I consider my "formal" training because it's not something I can easily quantify.  One project might have me doing several days of heavy drawknifing, and then the next project won't involve any drawknife work at all.

And so, I do strength exercises like the ones I've been talking about in my last couple of posts.  My hope is that piling that on top of my non-sedentary day job will make me one strong dude indeed.

Getting back into a daily routine

I had two good 60-minutes paddling sessions on the river this weekend.  I rode my bike down there and back each day.  It was cool but sunny, and almost dead calm.  We've had a lot of windy days this month and it was nice to get a break from that.

I've also got what I think is a good strength routine worked out.  Every other day I'm doing the exercise ball drills in the Jingjing Li video--the static ones that she demonstrates in the first 2:27.  They're surprisingly taxing.  On the days I don't do that routine I do a simple set of exercises including pushups and behind-the-head lifts with a cinder block, just to get a little arm work in.

And so here I go, easing into training for a new race season after taking some time off.  It's still way early and it'll be a while before I get serious in the boat again, but the first step is to get into doing a little something every day.  Once I pile up a few weeks of these simple little workouts, I always start to feel some physical and psychological benefit.

Back to the gym

The race season is still quite a ways off, but I've decided it's time for me to start up some offseason strength conditioning.  As a reader pointed out to me this week, my recent back ailment is a sign that my core needs some work, and I think that's something I will emphasize for the next while.

Years ago I bought an exercise ball, and while I've done stuff with it off and on, I feel I haven't used it to its full potential.  During the Olympics this past summer I happened across a video of Jingjing Li, China's female entrant in the whitewater slalom race in London, demonstrating some exercise ball drills, and I have now gone back and found it here.  I tried a set of her static drills this morning, and for me, the most difficult exercise was the one starting at about 1:50.  I had a very hard time balancing myself in this position for more than 10 or 15 seconds, especially with my left side up.  I got pretty frustrated, but I think it simply highlights a weak area for me and I think it's a good opportunity to get stronger if I stick with it.

While searching for Jingjing Li's video I also found this video of Italian Daniele Molmenti, the Olympic champion in men's slalom kayak in London, demonstrating some "backpacker" exercises (i.e., exercises that require little or no equipment and therefore can be done while traveling).  He shows us some interesting pushup variations and rubber band exercises.

Over the next few days I plan to keep trying out these exercises and put together a routine to carry me through the next month or two.

Monday photo feature

I took this picture from my boat while paddling from Ashport to Randolph three years ago, and it's a cautionary message for anybody who wants to build a house overlooking the Mississippi River.  This home, located some 45 miles upstream of Memphis at Fulton, Tennessee, belongs to a cousin of mine, and I remember attending a family reunion there when I was a kid.  At that time, the house was a good hundred yards from the edge of the bluff, and there was even a tennis court between the house and the bluff's edge.

Today the tennis court is long gone, and the house is unlivable to say the least.  My cousin's family blames the Corps of Engineers for constructing wing dams that directed the river's flow against the bluff, and for all I know they may be right.  But the wandering, meandering river would have claimed the home site eventually, in a few centuries if not in a few decades.

Mugging for the camera

I rode my bike downtown today and paddled for 80 minutes.  It was awfully windy out on the river, and the presence of heavy barge traffic made the water fairly rough.  I tried to stay relaxed and not fight the water.

My back is still hurting, but improving.  One thing that hadn't occurred to me when I wrote my last post is that I might have hurt myself doing yard work, of all things, on Thursday.  There was a layer of half-composted leaves in the street gutter along one side of the house, and I used a flat-nosed shovel to scrape it up and put it in a wheelbarrow.  The shovel has a pretty short handle, so I was bending over a lot.  And I've found that once you reach middle age, you bend over at your peril.

Outdoors, Inc., was hosting its annual cyclocross race this morning in the Greenbelt Park that runs along the Mississippi above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  They always shoot video at this event, and I paddled up there hoping they might get some footage of me while they were at it.  In the Major League Baseball postseason last month, San Francisco Giants closer Sergio Romo attracted attention by persistently getting his face into TV shots and photos, a practice he calls "Romo-bombing."  I guess what I was doing today would be called... what?  "Elmo-bombing"?

Home again; should I start building an ark?

I leave town for a few days and when I get back it seems the whole world has changed.  The Mississippi River is above zero on the Memphis gauge for the first time since early June.  This morning's level was 2.4 feet above zero, and my dock looked like this:

For comparison, look at the picture I posted here back on the 26th of August, when the river was 9.1 feet below zero.

Mind you, the water is still quite low; I would say a "medium" level is around 12 feet or higher.  But it sure did feel high today after the months of near-historic lows we've had.

I paddled for an hour, trying to keep the intensity low.  I've been dealing with some aches and pains from last weekend: I strained something in my middle back area on the Cheoah last Saturday, and aggravated it the next day on the Tallulah.  And I think I may have a mild virus that's making me feel achy and tired all over.  So I hoped some easy paddling would make me feel better.  Too early to tell as I write this.

Monday photo feature

Travis Trimble paddles a flooded South Sauty Creek near Guntersville, Alabama, in 1994.

Travis now lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife Mandy and their 21-month-old daughter Olivia.  I'm spending a couple of days with them before I head home to Memphis.  I'd have loved for Travis to join me on the rivers I paddled over the weekend, but he's not feeling up to paddling right now after a recent bout with the shingles.  We're hoping for many happy days on the river in the future.

Another whitewater weekend

I got in my car Friday morning and began to drive east.  My day ended in the San-Ran Motel in Robbinsville, North Carolina.  The Cheoah River awaited down below Santeetlah Dam.

My plan was to meet Ruthie and Curtis, a couple from Atlanta I had met at the Gauley at the end of September, for a run of the river.  But when I got up Saturday morning and walked outside to find a decent cell signal, I found a voice mail from them saying that the roof rack, with boats attached, had blown off their car on Highway 400, and they wouldn't be making it.  So I went down to the putin to see who else might welcome my company.  I found Ava Carr, a former Memphian whom I had last paddled with in the late 1990s, and I joined her and her two friends.

The Cheoah can be divided into a couple of distinct sections.  The first several miles of the run are in a narrow riverbed that feels even narrower because of the vegetation that has grown there during the long periods when the river is dewatered.  Since most of my whitewater friends have run the Ocoee River, I typically describe other rivers in terms of the Ocoee: if you take an average piece of the Ocoee, choke it down to about a third of its width, and increase the gradient by a few degrees, you've got this upper part of the Cheoah.  Expect to spend most of your time weaving through long series of ledges with numerous rocks and holes sprinkled in.

Then you reach Bear Creek Falls, a drop with several obstructed lines, and the riverbed's character changes.  Below Bear Creek the river becomes wider and, more significantly, much more cluttered with big rocks.  Suddenly, picking out clean lines becomes more difficult.  I have now run the Cheoah three times, and each time I have come off the river with busted-up knuckles from doing low braces off rocks in this section below Bear Creek.

But busted-up knuckles ain't gonna kill nobody.  I had a good day of hard work and play on the Cheoah and it was great to see Ava again.

As I headed down the road away from the Cheoah, I raised Ruthie on the phone and learned that they had fixed their roof-rack problem, and would meet me Sunday morning for my very first run of the Tallulah Gorge.

The Tallulah River is located in Rabun County in the northeast corner of Georgia.  I had been aware of the river's existence since I was a teenager working at a summer camp up in Brevard, NC, and I had driven right by the dam at the top of the gorge many times while in the area to run the nearby Chattooga River.  But since neither the dam nor the gorge is visible from the highway, I had never actually laid eyes on the place.

In fact, the Tallulah (and the Cheoah, too, for that matter) has only recently become known to the greater paddling community.  Several scenes of the movie "Deliverance" were shot in Tallulah Gorge in the early 1970s, but the riverbed otherwise lay dewatered until a coalition of paddling organizations began lobbying for scheduled dam realeases during the dam's relicensing process with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the early 1990s.  The result is that Georgia Power and Light now realeases water for paddlers during several weekends in April and November.  There's an interesting account of a 1993 "exploratory" run in Tallulah Gorge here.

I made camp Saturday evening in Tallulah Gorge State Park on the river-left canyon rim.  The next morning I met Ruthie and Curtis in the parking area next to the dam.  A gate was open and water was spilling over the dam into the deep gorge below.

We hiked the path that runs beneath U.S. 441 and descended the long staircase into the gorge that was built when recreational releases began some fifteen years ago.  I was immediately taken with the incredible beauty of the place and couldn't believe I had zoomed right by it in my car all those years.  We put in and immediately had to run one of the trickier rapids in the gorge, Last Step (so called, I suppose, because it's the "last step" of that long staircase).  Then we ran Tanner's Boof and found ourselves on the brink of one of the Southeast's most famous rapids, Oceana Falls.

A paddler must make many decisions on a whitewater river, and "to run" vs. "to portage" is one of the most basic.  As I stood on the bank and regarded the very impressive rapid that is Oceana, several things were going through my head.  Certainly, I was evaluating my ability to make the crux move, which in this case involved putting my boat in just the right spot at the top of the rapid and then simply hanging on for the rest of the drop.  I was also thinking about the hole at the bottom and the likelihood that I would be stuck there--not really an issue of personal injury, as there is nothing but a large pool below, but rather of the hassle and demoralization of having to rescue myself and my gear should I come out of my boat.  Finally, there was the knowledge that later, whenever I would tell somebody I had run Tallulah Gorge, his or her first question would be, "Did you run Oceana?"  I don't like to admit that I care what others think of me as a paddler, but the reality is that I sort of do, and I would bet that most other good paddlers are the same way to some degree.

In the end, I decided to run it.  I chose the "safest" line on the far left (the choice of most other boaters on the river), and hit the spot I wanted to hit at the top.  The rest of the run went by so fast that it's all a blur in my memory.  At the bottom I was upside down, but not stuck in the hole, and after rolling up I was done with this particular milestone.

Oceana Falls was by far the part of Tallulah Gorge that I had heard the most about, but as we continued on downriver, I discovered that there was much more excitement in store.  Most of the run consists of read-as-you-go whitewater that is really, really fun.  I did have one scary moment at the bottom of a rapid known as "Tat": without paying attention to what Ruthie and Curtis were doing, I went ahead and ran the drop on the far left side, and found myself being sucked into an undercut rock at the bottom.  My boat got flipped, and before I could even attempt to roll I was out of it.  As I swam underwater for some five seconds, I figured I was in a dire situation until I saw daylight above me.  When I broke the surface, I was well downstream of the rock and my boat was floating upright a few feet away.  It was the coziest I had ever gotten with an undercut rock and I don't care ever to repeat the experience if I can help it.

The Tallulah Gorge run ends the same way its neighbor, the Chattooga, ends: with a paddle out on Lake Tugaloo.  It was good to get back together with Ruthie and Curtis and I hope to do so again before long.  And it was good to spend some more of this fall in the mountains.  I love my home in the lower Mississippi basin, but a change of scenery can recharge one's spirit.