Down south and back in the boat

I took a couple of days of much-needed rest in Athens.  The weather was miserable, so it was a good time to chill out anyway.

Yesterday I made the next leg of my trip, driving down to Tampa, Florida.  It's a bit out of the way for me (I have to be in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, by tomorrow evening), but I consider it a worthwhile side trip because my friend Heidi lives here.  Anybody who's looked at my Holmes Woodwork website lately knows that it's in bad need of an overhaul, and Heidi's quite the savvy webmaster and she's walking me through some bits of the process that have a way of making my eyes glaze over.  Of course, she probably could have helped me with this stuff long-distance, but Heidi also happens to be one of the nicest, loveliest, most interesting people I know, and I'm relishing spending a little time with her.

And as if that weren't enough, it's WARM where Heidi lives, and her house is across the street from the  Hillsborough River!  So my boat's off the car for the first time since Sunday morning.  Yesterday evening I did a pretty easy 40-minute paddle, just unwinding from the long drive.  With a race this Saturday my ATP-CP system could use a little work, so I did six 12-stroke sprints, starting them at two-minute intervals to ensure a nice full recovery.

This morning I went back out on the river and paddled for 60 minutes, doing another set of six 12-stroke sprints.  Then, a little later in the session, I paddled for ten minutes at my likely race pace for this Saturday--enough to get the feel of paddling hard for a sustained period but not enough to wear myself out.  The weather was breezy but otherwise nice--partly cloudy and low 70s--and it felt good to paddle in nothing but shorts and a T-shirt.

I have a long drive ahead of me tomorrow but this has been a nice stop so far.

Georgia's on my mind

Yesterday morning I did two full sets of the February strength routine and paddled for 60 minutes, doing one last set of five fifteen-stroke bucket tows before my race this Saturday.

Then I put my boat on the car and started driving east.  I took Lamar Avenue out of town, where it turns into U.S. 78.  This road took me to Birmingham, and from there I took Interstate 20 into Georgia. In Atlanta I picked up I-85 north and made my way to the college town of Athens.  I'm now staying at the home of my longtime buddy Travis, who teaches at the law school there.

Travis is nice enough to let me visit for a couple of days during this difficult time, and I hope he knows I'll always be available to him if he ever goes through something similar (though I sure hope he never does, because his wife and daughter are two of the most delightful people I know).  Besides hanging out with him, I plan to do a little paddling and stretching and resting up for this Saturday.

Monday photo feature

I race on the Arkansas River at Little Rock every year, but in June of 2005 I was way upstream doing one of the classic canoe and kayak races in this country.  Starting at Salida, Colorado, and finishing about 26 miles downriver at Cotopaxi, the FIBArk race is, I believe, the oldest and longest-running whitewater race of any kind in America.  "FIBArk" stands for First In Boating on the Arkansas.

Sticking with it

I managed some pullups and leg raises this morning.  I did them on a horizontal beam in a breezeway at my mother's old house.  A decent pullup bar can be surprisingly hard to find.

Then I did my medicine ball exercises in the Greenbelt Park, and paddled my boat for 90 minutes, doing a set of those fun-filled bucket tows along the way.

I've been sleeping better the last couple of nights--not quite the full eight hours I like yet, but pretty close.  It helps that several items of divorce business that I'd feared might be really contentious got settled without much trouble.

In any case, I'm tired this evening, partly because I worked out hard this morning, but more because of what a nightmare this whole week has been.

Monday photo feature

Here's your Monday photo feature on a Tuesday!  It makes about as much sense as anything these days.

It's another picture of our beautiful old bridges over the Mississippi River just down from downtown Memphis.  We're looking eastward from flooded bottomland on the Arkansas side.  The Harahan Bridge is on the left, and the two bridges to the right are the Frisco Bridge and the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge.

Energized

I feel like I've hit my stride with my strength routine for this month.  The exercises seemed tough and I was wicked sore when the month started, but now my muscles are adapting and I'm feeling some "pep in my step" as I do them.  Seeing as how my first race of the season is just two weeks away, that's a nice feeling.

I also like having the routine broken up among several different locations.  Rather than slogging through one long workout session, I get a couple of breaks that enable me to really give everything I've got to every part of the workout.  I think that's especially important with these power-building exercises I'm doing.

Yesterday morning I did two sets of each strength exercise, then paddled my boat for 70 minutes.  Since then I have been concentrating on good recovery (just as important as the workouts, as I've mentioned before).  I've had some trouble sleeping the last few nights and that's not helping, but I'm availing myself of some hot tub soaking and relaxed stretching.

Bleak (cont'd)

Today I did my pullups and my leg raises and my medicine ball exercises.  And I towed my five-gallon bucket.  In the first set I did twenty strokes, but that seemed a few too many for me to put absolutely everything I had into each stroke.  So for the remaining four sets I made it fifteen strokes, and that seemed about right.

After that I just paddled, spending a total of 90 minutes in the boat by the time I was done.  It was another pretty miserable day: overcast, occasional drizzle, and about 42 degrees Fahrenheit.  But I wanted to be alone today, and that's a pretty safe bet out on the Mississippi River on a day like today.

Bleak

Today I paddled for 70 minutes.  The sun was shining when I first got up this morning, but by the time I got down to the river it was overcast and dark.

We have not had a bad winter in this part of the country; in fact, I'm not sure we've had a day yet where the temperature failed to rise above 30 degrees Fahrenheit.  But this has seemed a very grey winter to me.  Bright sunny days have been few.  And it's affecting my mood in the usual way.

A pain in the neck

I woke up this morning with a crick in my neck on the right side.  Ugh.

That made the idea of training today considerably less enticing.  But glumly I commenced my sprawling strength routine for this month, with pullups and leg raises here at home followed by medicine ball exercises in the Greenbelt Park followed by resistance paddling in the boat.  Today I tried a new method of resistance paddling.  I had been butting my bow against the marina and trying to "push" it, but I found it very difficult to maintain good stroke form that way.  Today I tied one end of a long polypropylene rope to a five gallon bucket, looped the other end over my torso, and towed the bucket for twenty strokes at a time.  I felt that I was taking much better strokes this way.  Polypro rope floats, so at the end of a set I could just take the loop off my torso and leave the rope wherever it happened to be in the harbor while I paddled a recovery interval of a couple of minutes.

After all that I continued paddling for a 90-minute session.  My neck had bothered me during all the strength exercises, but it didn't really bother me as I paddled.

Monday photo feature

Here I am in my old Dancer kayak riding the runout of Bull Sluice on the Chattooga River near Long Creek, South Carolina, back in 1990.  I have run that rapid many times and yet it never fails to strike some fear in my heart.  I expect I am happy in this photo because I am upright and in one piece.  Photo by John Chapman.

Paddling (it's what I like to do, after all)

This morning I went downtown and paddled for 60 minutes.  It was chilly but not nearly as windy as yesterday.

I'm feeling a little beat-up right now from all the new exercises I started this week--rather intense exercises at that.  It was nice to get out and do nothing but paddle today.

Recover

I've mentioned in the past that it is not exercise, but your recovery from exercise, that brings improvement in your fitness.  You can train like a man or woman possessed, but if you don't give your body a chance to repair the damage that the training has done, your athletic performances will get worse, not better.  This is what we call "overtraining."

One of the many interesting ideas I've learned from reading Ron Lugbill's blog is to count recovery sessions among your workouts for the week--in other words, if you do three recovery sessions and nine other kinds of workouts in a week, you're allowed to say you did twelve workouts that week.  A recovery "session" consists of activities intended to help your body recover, such as a hot shower or soak in a hot tub followed by some relaxed, deliberate stretching.  Sounds like the kind of workout I can look forward to.  And it just so happens I have a hot tub at my house!  A few years ago a friend of Martha's had one he didn't want, and he told Martha that if she would arrange to move the thing, it was all hers.  Score!  And so since I read Lugbill's advice a couple of weeks ago, I've tried to get in several hot tub and stretching "workouts" each week.

And I could sure use some recovery right now.  My arms did indeed get sore after I introduced some pullups into my routine on Tuesday, and it hasn't run its course yet.  I went easy on the pullups when I did my two sets of the February strength routine this morning.

After the strength work I got in the boat and did five sets of the resistance paddling that I started doing Sunday--that is, I butted my boat up against the marina and tried to "push" it with ten strokes.  Then I continued with steady paddling for a 60-minute session.

The weather conditions were not what I would call hostile, but they sure weren't pleasant, either.  It was overcast and in the mid 40s at the time I was on the water, and the wind was screaming out of the north.  I was just glad not to be having the sort of weather the northeast U.S. is having today.

Quite a day

I have a feeling I'm going to be one sore dude for the next couple of days, because I did a bunch of stuff today that my body isn't used to.

First, my strength routine for February: I started here at home with a set of pullups, followed by a static leg lift while hanging from the pullup bar (I raised my legs straight out in front of me for a twenty-count).  I did this cycle twice.

Then I drove down to the river and did the same medicine ball exercises I did Sunday in the Greenbelt Park.  One of these exercises is a rotational power drill, sort of like what these tennis players are doing in this video.  The other is the "clean and jerk" exercise that starts at the 2-minute mark of this video.  I did two sets of ten for each.

Finally, it was time to get in the boat.  I met Joe at the marina, and since it was a sunny, calm day with a forecast high over 60 degrees Fahrenheit, I decided to do a longer session in the K1.  With Joe there for support in case of a swim, I paddled from the marina to the north end of the harbor and back, a total distance of about three miles. I stayed upright the whole way, but I had to focus nearly a hundred percent of my concentration on balance.  I had brief stretches where I seemed to get in some smooth strokes with good rotation, but I did plenty of braces, too.  It tired me out mentally and I started getting pretty sloppy in the last thousand meters or so.  When we got back to the marina I swapped out for the surf ski and paddled to the south end of the harbor and back in that.

I'm expecting to wake up tomorrow with soreness in my biceps from the pullups and in my core from the leg raises and from trying to keep the K1 upright.  But it's all good.

Monday photo feature

I love our old steel bridges just downriver from downtown Memphis.  This photo was taken while paddling through the flooded bottomland on the Arkansas side a few years ago.  There are in fact three bridges at this spot: the oldest is the Frisco Bridge, built in the late nineteenth century to carry the Frisco Railroad across the Mississippi.  In 1916-17 the Harahan Bridge was built to carry more rail traffic, and it included wooden-plank automobile lanes cantilevered on each side.  Then, in the 1940s, the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge provided a more modern route for automobiles, and the Harahan Bridge has been for trains only since then.  Interstate 55 now crosses the river on the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge.

The Hernando DeSoto Bridge, visible in the background of the photo, opened in 1971.  I was born in 1967, and so until I was about four years old the only way to drive a car across the Mississippi at Memphis was on the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge.  My family took annual trips to Hardy, Arkansas, and as a very small child I thought going across the M&A Bridge alongside the Frisco and Harahan Bridges was one of the most magical parts of those trips.

An interesting project is currently in the works for the Harahan Bridge.  The old automobile lanes are no longer there, but the steel support structure remains.  Now there is a plan to build a bike-pedestrian route here.

While poking around with my Google search engine I found some interesting pages on these old bridges, here and here and here and here.  They contain some great photographs.

Powah!

I haven't worked out a complete strength routine for February, but I tried out several new exercises today.  I started with a couple of medicine ball drills, and since it's a beautiful sunny day today, I took the medicine ball downtown and did the drills in the Greenbelt Park just across Mud Island from my marina.

Then I went down to the dock and once I was in the boat, I jammed the bow into the side of the marina and paddled as hard as I could.  I did five sets of ten strokes (where I define a "stroke" as one complete cycle of a stroke on the left and a stroke on the right) with a minute or so of easy paddling in between.  This drill will take some getting used to; at first I was afraid one of my strokes would pull my boat over.  But by the last set I was getting the hang of it.

The purpose of all these drills is to incorporate some power into my training, an idea I've gotten from reading Ron Lugbill's blog.  I don't want to overdo it--Lugbill is writing for a slalom-racing audience, and slalom requires a lot more re-acceleration of the boat than straight-ahead racing does--but I hope some power training will improve my starts and also help with the occasional burst in the middle of a race.

Anyway, once I get a full routine worked out for this month I will describe it in detail.

After the power drills I continued paddling for a 90-minute session.  I spent the last ten of those minutes in the K1, since it was a nice day and the water around the marina was calm.  I'm still tentative in that boat, and for once I'm actually looking forward to one of our legendary Memphis summers, when a flip is sort of fun rather than a prospect of freezing to death.  For now, I remain a "project" as a K1 paddler, just like that player on the college basketball team who has college-level size but not college-level skills, and therefore won't really help the team until at least a couple of seasons from now.

"If you've got a good stroke, your body won't feel broke!"

Yeah, I know... I could have made my living writing slogans for the Burma Shave billboards if I'd been born a half-century sooner.

But my innate corniness should not diminish the importance of my point: if you find yourself dealing with a lot of nagging injuries, you should take a good, hard look at your stroke.

When I started doing some kayak racing with a wing paddle in the late 1990s, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the forward stroke.  I had studied the photos and diagrams in William T. Endicott's The Barton Mold, and the blades seemed to be doing the right thing in the water as I paddled, so I figured I was good to go.

But in my first couple of years I ran into some problems with wrist tendinitis.  At times the pain was so keen that I couldn't paddle or do much of anything else.

Then I saw the then-new forward stroke video, The Brent Reitz Forward Stroke Clinic.  In the video Brent discusses a common mistake people make in their strokes that causes tendinitis, and recommends what he calls the "Chicken Wing": as you finish a stroke on one side and withdraw the blade from the water to begin a stroke on the other side, you should raise not just your hand, but your entire forearm including the elbow, as you do so.  I took Brent's advice and incorporated this simple change into my stroke, and I never got wrist tendinitis again.

For the next few seasons I trained hard and raced pretty well without any injuries that kept me out of the boat.  But I was not always free of pain.  The most common discomfort was soreness and stiffness and pinched-nerve feelings in my shoulders and neck.  I was frustrated by all that but sort of resigned myself to the idea that these ailments were simply my price of admission to the sport I loved.

Meanwhile, I continued to ponder my stroke.  A couple of times I asked Greg Barton, when he was in town for the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, how my stroke looked.  He told me it wasn't bad, but cautioned me to rotate fully and not use my arms too much.

In the summer of 2005, after my biggest races were over, I made a conscious decision to increase my rotation to the extent I was capable.  For a few weeks or even months paddling was quite uncomfortable as I tried to internalize this unfamiliar motion.  But eventually I got used to it and now I don't know how to paddle any other way.

I don't know if this alteration to my stroke improved my competitive results at all--it seems like I have continued to finish about where I always have in my races, and my times have remained roughly the same.  But my shoulder and neck pain has all but disappeared.  I think the less-complete rotation I had been doing had concentrated the work in my upper back and shoulders, whereas now the work is better distributed throughout my torso.

This topic came back to my attention last week when I suddenly found myself with one of those old shoulder knots.  I thought to myself, "I'll bet this is the result of paddling my K1."  As I have described in recent posts, my stability in that boat is pretty dicey at this point, and I haven't been able to relax and rotate fully.  The episode has reinforced my belief that my improved stroke has eliminated most of my shoulder and neck pain.  Not a bad return on my investment even if I do wish I were faster.  I advise anybody with nagging pain to look over everything that he or she is doing with the paddle: there's probably a flaw in there somewhere that can be fixed.

Month's end

On Thursday, I brought January to a close with two sets of the January strength routine and an 85-minute paddling session.  Joe and I stayed in the harbor and did a fairly strong tempo session: it wasn't too intense for conversation, but I think we were slightly out of our normal cruising comfort zone.

Now I'm taking a couple of days off, partly to catch up on some other work and partly to regroup physically for some new training routines for February.