Sorry about the radio silence

Since my last post I have redoubled my efforts to restore my skeleto-muscular health.  The tipping point came a couple of Saturdays ago when I did a round of my August strength routine.  I don't know what happened as I went through the exercises that morning, but I spent the rest of the weekend with a horrible throbbing ache in my left shoulder and lat area that radiated down my left arm.  The addition of that to the existing soreness along my upper spine that had persisted since March sent me into a pretty bad emotional funk.  I had spent my 30s and most of my 40s feeling strong and spry, as though there was nothing I could do in my 20s that I couldn't still do; but now, all of a sudden, I felt like a falling-apart old man.  I am a vain person--let's be honest about that--and there I was feeling not just physical discomfort, but very negatively about myself as well.  I had to do something more than just the groping attempts at self-help that had failed to bring about any relief.

A while back I had posted something on Face Book about my back discomfort, and my friend Andy mentioned that several people he knew had had good experiences at a place called Back In Motion.  So I called and made an appointment, and as of this writing I have been through two sessions.  Back In Motion is actually just one guy, a Mr. Jon Harvey.  He's a massage therapist with some chiropractic experience in his background, and he specializes in treating sports injuries and other specific ailments.  When I told him what was going on, he sounded very confident that he could put me on the road to recovery.

To make a long story short, my shoulders are sort of hunched forward, putting undue stress on the muscles of my upper back.  I think I can understand how this happened.  This past season I did more workouts involving short, fast sprints at a high stroke rate than I'd ever done before.  Ideal form calls for the paddler to sit erect with square shoulders, but I can believe that I erred toward slumping forward and downward--"bearing down," as it were.

So in our sessions Jon is manipulating numerous spots on both my front and my back, seeking to get my shoulders to relax and open back up.  He spent that first session targeting trigger points and explaining the bearing they had on my pain.  He then prescribed me some exercises to do in between sessions that address the imbalance between the muscles that pull my shoulders forward and those that keep them open.

Now, ten days after our first session, I'm not free of pain yet, but I'm optimistic that I'm on the right track.  I can feel the stuff I'm doing having an effect on my distressed area.  For my strength routine, I'm still doing the core exercises hanging from the gymnast's rings and the vertical lunges, but I've backed off the other exercises for now, replacing them with my new rehab exercises.

On the water, I'm taking a break from straight-ahead kayaking and doing some drills in my whitewater C1.  I'm thinking about running the Gauley River in West Virginia at the end of this coming month, possibly after doing some "warmup" paddling on the lower Youghiogheny while I'm up in that area to watch the slalom world championships on the 18th through the 21st, so I figure it's wise to get back in that boat and make sure I still know how to paddle it.  Also, a whitewater boat with a non-wing paddle allows me to do some stroke drills that open up the shoulders: compound reverse strokes, for instance.

Monday photo feature

Sonny Salomon surfs the glassy-smooth wave on the Caney Fork River in Rock Island State Park near McMinnville, Tennessee.  Photo by Elmore Holmes.

A posthumous honor for Jamie McEwan

Canoe and Kayak magazine has given its 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award to Jamie McEwan.  Lecky Haller, Jamie's C2 partner from the late 1980s through the 1992 Olympics, accepted the award for his late friend.  The story is here.

A break from the K1

This morning I did my new strength routine (I guess I'll start calling it the August strength routine now) and then went down to the river.  I decided to paddle the surf ski for the first time in a long time, and see how the technical stuff I'd been working on in the K1 carried over.  I paddled for 60 minutes, and it was nice not feeling like my next stroke could flip me over.  I also enjoyed the weather: we had a string of very humid days this past week, but a front came through late yesterday and today a north breeze had blown away the moisture.

My surf ski came equipped with a foot strap, but I'd never really relied on it.  Today I tightened it up and tried to make better use of it on each stroke.  The more extreme contortion of my body it allows has been tiring, but then anytime I make a change to my stroke technique I go through a such an adjustment period.  I'm hopeful that I'm onto something good.

I did a set of six backstrokes-then-forward-strokes drills, and then timed myself in the harbor from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the monorail bridge, for which my PR is a second or two under two minutes.  I did it today in about 2:02.

Monday photo feature

A barge rig moseys downriver at sunset.  I took this photo from the Densford Bar, about 18 miles up the Mississippi River from downtown Memphis, in about 2006.

Classroom management, pain management, and time management

I taught another class out at Shelby Farms yesterday.  This time I had about eight students, many of them in the ten- to twelve-year-old range, who brought whitewater boats with them.  So I took a whitewater boat of my own out there and worked on a different set of skills from what I've been doing in these classes.  It was a bit of a challenge, inasmuch as I've got the routine down for a touring-boat class but don't really have a practiced list of activities for people in whitewater boats.  But I'm happy to say that everybody seemed to have a good time and got a reasonably good educational experience for a Saturday morning.

This morning I went another round with my new strength routine.  That prehab/rehab exercise I'm doing often elicits a pop in my vertebrae right where I've been experiencing pain for so long, and I'm taking that as an encouraging sign.

This afternoon I paddled the K1 in the harbor downtown.  Just like on Thursday, it was only a 40-minute session.  The other day I saw my friend June, a loyal reader of this blog, and she remarked that an hour in the boat seemed long to her.  I'd sort of been thinking the opposite--before this year, a typical session for me was 90 minutes or more--but her comment got me to thinking, and now I've decided to keep sessions shorter for a while for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, it puts that much less stress on my back.  For another, that K1 demands such a high degree of concentration and body control that I think an hour might be a little too long: even in the early part of a session, I allow some bad strokes to creep in among the good ones, and I'm hoping that spending some time doing shorter sessions with a higher percentage of good strokes will pay off after a while.  Sometimes less is more. Thanks, June.

Summer rolls on

Since my return from out West I've been working my way into a new strength routine.  As I mentioned a few posts back, I've sort of used the "5P" workout described here on Ron Lugbill's blog as a starting point.  I'm not quite doing a full 5P, but I've worked in four of the Ps.  The routine starts with a set of pushups (of which I do a variety of types), followed by a couple of types of leg-lifts while hanging from a set of gymnast's rings.  Then I do this prehab exercise, which for me is really a rehab exercise because it targets the area of soreness in my back.  Then I go back to the rings and do a set of pullups.  I finish the routine with two plyometric exercises: squat jumps and chest-drop pushups.  I try to do two sets of this routine three days a week.

This afternoon I went downtown and paddled the K1 for 40 minutes.  I kept the intensity moderate and tried to rotate fully on each stroke.  It's something I've struggled to do in the K1, but the addition of the foot strap has been a boost to my confidence.

The harbor has been lovely most of the days I've been down there this summer, but a mid-afternoon thunderstorm today washed in a big bunch of floating litter.  The city of Baltimore has found a remedy to this problem in its harbor; can't we?

Monday photo feature

That's me in the green tank top, 24 years and about 30 pounds ago.

At the time I was head of canoeing at Camp Carolina for Boys in Brevard, North Carolina.  The camp is still in operation, and right now somebody else is standing on that dock, orchestrating paddlesport activity on the camp lake.  Photo by Mike Davis.

K1 introspection

Yesterday I paddled the K1 for 60 minutes, my conversation with my chiropractor friend on my mind.  Rob had advised me to avoid doing things with my head bowed (such as reading a book) for long periods, and I tried to determine whether I'd been keeping my head up while paddling.  After yesterday's session I'm still not sure, and I might have to get somebody to shoot some video of me.

The new foot strap continues to provide much improvement in my balance.  But it also makes steering harder, as it's not as easy to move the tiller right and left with my feet tight under the strap.  I might have to adjust the tiller with respect to the footboard.

Back to school

I'm back teaching classes for Outdoors, Inc., out at Shelby Farms.  Information on these sessions is available here.  I had one last week, I had one today, and I'll have one next Saturday.  After a week off, I'll be teaching a class in deep water self-rescue techniques on August 23.

Back when I was a high school math teacher, one of my greatest challenges was knowing when not to say anything--to let the students figure things out on their own, without my help.  I'm aware of the same thing now in these kayaking classes.  Once I've shown the students a new skill, I try to give them a lot of time on the water just to paddle around and play with what I've shown them, and hopefully come to understand why what I've shown them improves their performance in the boat.  I move around from student to student and offer a bit of coaching, but often I think the less I say, the better.

My back is sore and uncomfortable once more.  Last night I had a lengthy phone conversation with my friend Rob, a chiropractor up in New York state. He urged me to pay attention to my posture and avoid certain head positions, and gave me an exercise to do, after which I should apply ice.