Schedule updates

I have made a few revisions to the race schedule I posted back on December 28.  I've added two races in the month of September: one on Lake Fontana near Bryson City, North Carolina, and one on Barnett Reservoir near Jackson, Mississippi.

Back when I first posted the schedule there had not yet been a date announced for the Perche Creek Gutbuster race up at Columbia, Missouri.  The event is now set for March 28, the same date as the Battle on the Bayou race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  I've already registered for Ocean Springs, so I guess I've made my choice, but by all means consider going to Columbia that weekend if you're looking for an event and it suits you better.

Smoothing out wrinkles

I paddled with Joe for 90 minutes in the harbor today.  I arrived early and got in the boat and did my three 8-stroke sprints while Joe was still getting ready.  Then we paddled steady at a moderate pace, picking it up a little for the last ten minutes or so.

As I've said before, making even a small change to your stroke can make paddling quite uncomfortable for a while.  But by now I'm feeling good about my increased use of the legs and lower torso, at least at a normal cruising intensity.

Monday photo feature

What's not to smile about during a lovely day on the Chattooga River?  Clay Barbee snapped this picture of me in 1994.

Our sorta-cold winter drags on

It's been warmer this weekend, with a beautiful sunny day yesterday, but today's weather was unsettled.  As I headed downtown this morning I could see a big rain cell approaching from across the river, and I spent the first half-hour of today's 80-minute session paddling in a cold rain driven by a stiff south wind.  After turning around at the south end of the harbor, I found Carol Lee and Joe Royer coming along in their tandem boat, and I enjoyed their company the rest of the time.

I did another three 8-stroke sprints.  Any time I took a "bad" stroke--one with too much arm and shoulder action and not enough lower-torso rotation--I could feel the soreness in my upper back, reminding me why I'm doing this work.

One day closer to spring

I tried to enjoy the milder weather as much as I could.  Today winter seems to be settling back in--not a big surprise with eight days still to go in the month of January.  It was sleeting a little as I left the house to go to the river this morning, but by the time I was finished paddling it had warmed up to around 40 degrees Fahrenheit with no precipitation.

In my 60-minute session I did the same sort of thing I've been doing lately: I did several 8-stroke sprints to practice my higher-intensity technique, and then did a pretty good tempo for the rest of the hour.

Paddling was the one good thing that happened this morning

I had a rather crazy morning with several errands to run, and when a minor household emergency cropped up I was afraid I wouldn't make it to the river at all.  But I got myself down there and managed a 50-minute session.  I'll repeat the point Brent Reitz makes in his video "The Brent Reitz Forward Stroke Clinic": when you manage to get your paddling in, then you've done at least one good thing, no matter how crummy the rest of the day might be.

This stretch of milder weather is supposed to continue for another day or two.  It feels so nice to wear lighter winter gear and paddle without pogies.

I did another three 8-stroke sprints, trying to improve my stroke form at higher intensity.  The rest of the time I paddled at a fairly strong tempo, and at the end I did some backpaddling to work the opposing muscles a little.

Coping with winter and unfamiliar stroke technique

Here in the Mid South we've just emerged from a long, unpleasant cold snap.  I got out and paddled in it, but did not enjoy it.  I'm not asking for sympathy and I'm perfectly aware that there are many places on this Earth that have longer, colder winters than this place does.  But I'm tired of what we do have, and with January just barely half over I'm afraid there's plenty of time for a couple more bad cold spells.

So I'd better enjoy this little stretch of not-so-bad weather.  On Friday I paddled with a temperature above 50 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time that I could remember.  I did a set of eight 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals, and I always forget that this is a fairly tough workout.  As I've mentioned, I'm trying to paddle more with my legs and lower torso this season, and I found this difficult at a higher speed.  I had trouble making all these parts of my body move smoothly and in sync through all the phases of a stroke--the catch, the pull-through, the recovery, and so on.  It's going to take practice, and I think I need to incorporate a bit of higher-speed paddling into every session, even if for just a couple of minutes.

In keeping with that idea, today I warmed up for ten minutes and then did three eight-stroke sprints, trying to achieve maximum technical quality in each stroke.  For the most part the strokes felt good, and after this short and sweet little exercise I had a good 80-minute aerobic session with some long surges thrown in.  I hope a couple of months of this sort of thing will get me feeling better about my form at higher intensity.

The January strength routine

To follow up on Sunday's post, I went through the January strength routine again today and I think it's starting to gel.  Here's how it goes:

Super crunches (shown at 3:10 of the Michele Ramazza video)
Dips
Air squats (shown at 2:16 of the Michele Ramazza video)
Casey Eichfeld's stability ball drill
Butterfly crunches (shown at 3:24 of the Michele Ramazza video)
Front and lat raises

I do two sets of this routine.  At the moment I barely have the coordination to pull off Casey Eichfeld's drill.  Hopefully that'll improve as those core muscles get a bit stronger.  Those butterfly crunches are tougher than they look on the video, too.

I'll add that before I get going on these exercises, I do a thorough stretch routine and do several of the upper-back-rehab exercises my massage therapist showed me.  So in all I spend the better part of an hour doing what feels like good-quality stuff.

Monday photo feature

A photographer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal snapped this photo of Greg Barton and Joe Royer in Wolf River Harbor the day before the 2006 Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  This event takes place each Father's Day weekend.

Thoughts on getting strong

Today was the latest in a long string of dreary cold days, and I had to claw through my Seasonal Affective Disorder to get myself out the door and down to the river.  The bright side is that I paddled during the nicest part of the day.  This afternoon the temperature is dropping and the wind has picked up to howling proportions.

I think for most of the coming season my paddling sessions will generally be around 60 minutes, but I'm thinking on Sundays I'll go a bit longer than that.  Today I paddled for 70 minutes, and threw in some surges of 30-60 seconds, so that it was what runners call a "fartlek" session.

Yesterday I started gathering exercises for my January strength routine.  I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but I'll share again the way I go about doing strength work.  Back in the mid 1990s, before I'd met Greg Barton in person, I got my hands on The Barton Mold, William T. Endicott's case study of the world and Olympic flatwater sprint champion, and was captivated by Greg's approach to strength training.  Basically, Greg would put together a routine with an exercise for each general muscle group (abdominals, upper back and lats, biceps and triceps, and so on) and stick to that routine for about four weeks or a month; then he would make up a new routine with a slightly different exercise for each muscle group.

Greg's reasoning went as follows: when you start up a new exercise routine, your body thinks, "Whoa!  I've got a new job here!  I'd better start fortifying the relevant muscles right away!"  As a result, you see some notable gains in strength in the first couple of weeks.  But after a while the body starts to "coast along," as it were, and you hit a plateau in your improvement.  By changing up the routine and substituting the old exercises with new ones that work the same muscles from a different angle or in a different hierarchy, Greg figured you could "trick" the body into thinking it was doing something entirely new and make it adapt accordingly.  You can read this entire section of The Barton Mold here--look in Chapter 5, "How Barton trains."

And that's more or less how I've been working out ever since.  In the last couple of years I've also become more mindful of issues brought up by Ron Lugbill in his slalom racing blog: doing some movements fast so the body will be used to moving fast when you put it in the boat; and focusing on the different phases of a lift, such as the downward (negative) phase rather than always the upward (positive) phase.

For the coming month,  I want to keep working on my legs and core without neglecting my arms.  An exercise I've planned to do this month for a while is one that I saw in a video posted on Face Book by Casey Eichfeld, who was a wee lad when I was racing slalom fifteen years ago but is now a perennial member of the slalom national team.  I can't figure out how to link to this video, so I'll just tell you it's a core exercise in which you maintain the pushup "up" position with your hands on one stability ball and your feet on another.  I have found it very difficult, so far managing to stay up for only a few seconds, and I hope I can get the hang of it as the month goes along.

Several other exercises come from this video, made by a guy named Michele Ramazza who's apparently into extreme whitewater racing (at least, I think that's what he means by "Freeride Kayaking").

And then there's an exercise I've known for some 20 years: front and lat raises.  You stand with a pair of dumbbells, raising your straight arms in front of you, then to your right and left, "crucifixion" style.

I'm still experimenting and will post my January strength routine in the next couple of days.

New year, same as the old year

Yesterday morning I was in the boat at 9:30 sharp, and spent the next 60 minutes paddling under a mostly-cloudy, although a pale sun did manage to peek through for a few moments.  The temperature was in the high 30s Fahrenheit.

My back was quite sore up along my upper spine at the end of last week, even though I had spent the week doing the typical Christmastime sitting around with family.  The soreness has eased during the course of this week.  I've mentioned before that I'm really focusing on paddling with my legs and lower torso these days, and as long as I do that the pain is not aggravated by paddling.  Every now and then, if I paddle through some turbulent water out on the river, I'll stop short of a full rotation at the waist and transfer more of the work to my arm and shoulder and upper back muscles, and then I do feel some pain in that problem area.

Yesterday conditions were very calm, and I had no trouble using my lower body even out on the river.  There were a couple of small towboat rigs moving through, and one of them sent a wave of icy water splashing into my cockpit, but otherwise I was quite comfortable even though it was a dreary day.

When I got home I looked at Face Book and saw this photo that my friend Elise Piper had taken from her mom's condominium down on the South Bluffs:

The towboat in the foreground is the one that splashed me with icewater.  At this moment I am somewhere above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, but apparently too small a speck to see.