Monday photo feature

The oldest whitewater canoe and kayak race in the U.S. is the FIBArk Downriver Race, a 25.7-mile race down the Arkansas River from Salida, Colorado, to Cotopaxi, Colorado.  It started in 1949; in this photo, I am participating in the 2005 edition.  "FIBArk" stands for "First In Boating on the Arkansas."

The 2015 FIBArk Downriver Race took place yesterday on very high water that almost produced a course record.  You can read the account of it in The Mountain Mail here.

Circumnavigation! Circumspection!

A front came through the Mid South overnight Friday night and Saturday morning, and we've enjoyed a weekend of lower temperatures and lower humidity.  The Fahrenheit highs have been in the mid 80s under partly cloudy skies.

Yesterday I taught another good introductory kayaking class out at Shelby Farms.  There are three more such classes scheduled for this summer; go here for more information if you'd like to give this paddling thing a try.

This morning I paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar.  Starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina, I made the trip in about two hours, four minutes.  I've done this circumnavigation quite a few times over the years, and every time it has exhausted me thoroughly.  There's a long upriver leg from the mouth of Wolf River Harbor up to the sand-and-gravel operation next to DeWitt Spain Airport, and then there's a long ferry across the river at a spot where it is quite wide.  By the time I'm finally paddling down the chute over on the west side of the Loosahatchie Bar, fatigue is really setting in.  I've spent the rest of today just lounging around the house feeling thoroughly spent.  Hopefully a good night's sleep will have me feeling good as new tomorrow morning.

The Mississippi was at 28.1 feet on the Memphis gauge, and this high level made the trip a little bit quicker: there were bigger eddies along the Tennessee side for the trip upriver, and as I rounded the north end of the Bar I was able to paddle over some sandbars that are exposed at lower water.

Moving into the next phase

Teresa Faulk took this photo as racers charged out of the Wolf River and onto the mighty Mississippi last Saturday.  That's Mike Herbert in the lead, followed by Waylon Willis in the orange shirt.  I'm in third place, over to Willis's right, with Kata Dismukes in between us in fourth.  Rick Carter holds fifth place on Willis's stern wake.

The day after race there was a boat demo event out at Shelby Farms, and I used that for some recovery paddling while trying out several different boat designs.

This week has seen some oppressive summer weather move into the Mid South.  On Tuesday and today I did some easy paddling in the harbor with Joe, and I've been pondering my goals for the next few months.  There are several races I'm considering, the soonest being on the Fourth of July up at Alton, Illinois.  Rumor has it this race will be in the afternoon, and if the forecast calls for the sort of hot weather we've had here this week, I may pass.

Right now my arms and abdominal muscles are sore from starting up a new strength routine.  For a couple of exercises, I've turned once again to this video featuring Chinese slalom Olympian Jing Jing Li.  The other exercises are classics that need no introduction:

1.  Pushups (variety of styles)
2.  Stability ball drill shown at 2:56 of the Jing Jing Li video
3.  Pullups
4.  Lunges while holding a pair of dumbbells down at my sides
5.  Stability ball drill shown at 3:10 of the Jing Jing Li video

Monday photo feature

It's time for a change of pace from all the newspaper clippings and all the race talk and so on.  With hot, steamy weather moving into the Mid South this week, I think I'll share this photo from a chilly early-spring day on the Hailstone River in the high Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.  I'm not sure of the year, but I believe it was early in the last decade.  Photo by Sonny Salomon.

The race is in the books

Race Day arrived yesterday, and the storms had indeed moved out.  Racers went down to the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi Rivers to find a warm sunny day with a pleasant southwest breeze.  The one annoyance left in the storm’s wake was a lot of floating logs and woody debris out in the main channel.

The gun went off, and I executed a good start, though maybe not a great one.  Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, rocketed into the lead, to no one’s surprise; I found myself alongside fellow Memphian Kata Dismukes in pursuit of South Carolinians Waylon Willis and Eric Mims.  Mims would normally be a factor in the fight for medals here, but this time he was “taking one for the team” as a rep for Epic Kayaks, paddling the company’s new V7 surf ski, a short, wide, polyethylene plastic model intended for novice ski enthusiasts.  He fell off the pace not long after we had entered the big river from the mouth of the Wolf.

After a few hundred meters I overtook Willis as well, and the competition began to take shape as I found Tony Short of Traverse City, Michigan, on my stern wake.  Over to our left Rick Carter of Eutawville, South Carolina, was opening a gap on Kata Dismukes, and knowing that he would be one of my main adversaries, I sidled over to get on his stern wake.

Rick and I and Tony paddled in single file, in that order, for the rest of the river leg, dodging plenty of flotsam along the way.  As we rounded the southern tip of Mud Island to enter the harbor, Rick took a tight line—too tight, I thought.  I tried to give the point a wider berth, but doing so required me to go around a floating log; Tony followed my lead.  Rick’s gamble paid off, and just like that he had a couple of boat lengths on us.  I had a feeling Rick had me beat: the only way I was going to overtake him was if he faded badly, and in my experience racing with him, he’s always been too strong to do that.  I put the hammer down anyway.  Tony was an unknown quantity to me, but I had to assume that he would have a fast finishing surge up his sleeve.  As it turned out, Rick and I and Tony would get a bit more strung out but otherwise finish in the same order we’d been in all along.

Mike Herbert finished first in 16 minutes, 58 seconds.  Recovering from a bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Mike was not at his best; but he didn’t need his best effort to win this one.  Kata Dismukes finished nine seconds behind Tony Short for fifth place overall and first place among the women.

My time was 18:32.  That’s quite a bit slower than I was last year and the year before, but I think it’s kind of a fool’s game to try to compare one year’s race with another.  Even though the river was slightly higher this year than last—18.8 feet on the Memphis gauge, compared with 18.5 feet last year—the debris in the river was a hindrance, and it seemed as though the times were a bit slower across the board.  The exception was Kata, who bettered last year’s time by six seconds.  I consider that a testament to the training she’s done this season.

As for Rick Carter, he’s now beaten me in two of our three meetings so far this year, and there’s no question the man is an improved racer.  Fellow South Carolinian Eric Mims told me he’s been working very hard on his stroke mechanics, and I think we’re seeing the results of that.  It sounds as though Rick is doing a lot of the things I try to advocate here in this blog.

Nearly two hundred boats participated in the race.  People in racing kayaks took the first nine places; the first non-race-boat finisher was Phil Capel of Sherwood, Arkansas, who paddled his “fast touring boat” to a time of 19:32.  Dale Burris and Don Walls, residents of the Lake Dardanelle area in Arkansas, added to their long list of tandem canoe titles in this race with a time of 19:58.

The results of the 34th Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race are posted here.  The second-place finisher, a Mr. "Spartacus Rabinowitz," is in fact Rick Carter.  Sometimes he likes to register under a fake name.  Be sure to note his "club name" over on the right.  He's an odd one, that Rick...

Looks like the weather may work out about right

This morning I paddled for 40 minutes, doing four 12-stroke sprints.  I paddled through several brief but heavy showers, and it was quite windy: according to the weather reports, it was blowing from the south at 15 to 20 miles per hour, with gusts up to 30 mph.

The good news is that it's looking more and more likely that the worst weather will be long gone by race time tomorrow morning.  The current forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with a 10% chance of precipitation and a southwest wind at 7 mph. Wind would probably be our main concern--there has been virtually no lightning even during the most severe moments of today's storms--but 7 mph from the southwest is just enough to cool us off.  Until we make the turn up into the harbor, that is; then, the wind will be at our backs and we'll be withering in 90-degree-Fahrenheit heat.  Oh well, I've survived that before, and I reckon I'll survive it one more time.

One more from the Memphis media juggernaut

Our weekly newspaper, The Memphis Flyer, has a cover story this week on the Mississippi River in general and the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race in particular.  Read it here.

Sometimes I make the news, too

This article appeared in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis this past Sunday, June 14.

Mike Herbert makes the news here

Today's edition of The Daily News of Memphis has an article about three-time Olympian, three-time world championships medalist, and Pan Am Games champion Mike Herbert.

Foul or fair?

This week I'm doing what I usually do when I want to be in peak form for a race: some brief, easy paddling; some short sprints; and as much rest and as good a diet as I can get.  On Tuesday I paddled for 60 minutes and did eight 12-stroke sprints.  Today I paddled for 40 minutes and did six 12-stroke sprints.  I'll do something similar tomorrow and load up the boat for transport to the starting area Saturday morning.

My out-of-the-boat life has been rocked by a somewhat stressful event this week.  Without boring you with the details (and the details are relatively mundane--no death in the family or anything like that), I'll just say that every athlete has to put up with some kind of distractions, and the challenge is not to let it disrupt his rest or his focus on the big competition at hand.

Rain in the Missouri and upper Mississippi drainages has prompted the National Weather Service to revise its river level predictions upward a bit.  Right now it looks like the Memphis gauge will read a little over 17 feet on Saturday.  That's good news, not because it will make much difference in the actual racing, but because it will make putting in and taking out a bit easier by covering up more of the rough terrain at the start and finish areas.

Somewhat more worrisome is the weather forecast.  I've been watching it all week, and the chances of showers and thunderstorms have risen as high as 100% and dropped as low as 0%... in other words, your guess is as good as mine, and apparently our guess is as good as that of the professional weather forecasters.  As I write this on Thursday afternoon, the prediction is heavy thunderstorms from Friday night into Saturday morning, but only a 20% chance of rain on Saturday.

The thing that seems fairly certain is that we'll have some thunderstorms in the area Saturday morning, but at least right now it looks like the chances aren't bad for a good racing window.  I saw Joe this morning and he was anxious about it, just like any good race director would be, but we agreed that all we can do is be prepared and otherwise think happy thoughts.

Monday photo feature

This photo, taken by Lance Murphey, ran on the cover of the May 1-2, 2010, issue of The Memphis News.  It was part of the pre-race publicity for that year's Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, which, sadly, had to be canceled at the last minute due to inclement weather.  That's me paddling in the foreground, with my friend Joe, who happens to be the OICK race director, in the background.

As of today, the forecast for this Saturday on www.weather.com calls for scattered thunderstorms with a 60% chance of precipitation.  That, of course, is likely to change one way or another between now and Saturday.  Keep your fingers crossed for at least a storm-free window between 10 and 11 AM for us to get the race in.  One thing we can count on is that it'll be hot: we're supposed to have highs in the low to mid 90s (Fahrenheit) all this week.

The river level, according to www.water.weather.gov, is predicted to be somewhere around 15 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That's some five to ten feet lower than it's been the last two years, but not a bad level.  We've had great races with much lower water.

Trying to get everything in line

On Thursday I did what is likely the hardest workout I'll do this year: ten pieces of 75 seconds on, 45 seconds off.  It's basically a lactic tolerance workout.  By the third or fourth piece my muscles were starting to burn, and as always my challenge was to keep my form together and not get sloppy.  In next Saturday's Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, when I enter the harbor with eight hundred meters or so to the finish line, I'll surely have to put the hammer down, either chasing somebody in front of me or holding off somebody behind me, and this workout is intended to prepare me for that.

On Friday I did the May-June strength routine for the last time, and yesterday I taught a beginner class out at Shelby Farms.  I plan to spend this coming week doing a few short sprints to polish my speed and getting as much rest as I can.

I haven't talked much about my shoulder lately, so here's an update.  In short, it's doing much better; but there are hints of pain in the area now and then.  I continue to be conscientious about the stretching and the warmup and the rehab exercises.  The best news is that it has held up very well through a few crushing workouts in the boat.

It seems to be out-of-the-boat activities that pose the greatest threat to my shoulder.  A couple of days ago I was in my workshop doing some tool sharpening, standing at a counter pressing blades down onto sharpening stones; after a while I realized that the previously-injured part of my shoulder was starting to hurt, and it continued to hurt the rest of the day.  Fortunately the pain has subsided, but I'm re-thinking my body position while I sharpen my tools.  The Japanese tradition is to kneel on the floor and put more of the entire body into the sharpening motions, and I think I'll give that another try the next time I'm sharpening.

What's the meaning of all this?

On Monday I did two sets of the May-June strength routine.

Yesterday was another rather hot but lovely day out on the river.  I started with four of my little power-building drills, where I backpaddle and then do eight hard forward strokes, overcoming the inertia; then I did ten 30-second sprints with two minutes recovery in between.

This morning I did two more sets of the May-June strength routine.  On Friday I'll do my last round of this routine before the June 20 Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.

Here's a question I'm sure every athlete asks himself or herself once in a while: Do I really need to be doing all this training?  Could I perform just as well on eighty percent of the training I've been doing?  Sixty percent?  Forty percent?

I'm not really going to attempt to answer this sort of question.  The answer is different for every athlete, and there are many variables: the athlete's age, the level of competition, the type and frequency of competitions... the question will always be asked because there is no definitive answer.

But it's a good question nevertheless, because I think you should always analyze and evaluate what you're doing.  Long-time readers of this blog know that in the last couple of years I've been focusing more on the mechanics of my stroke and not quite so much on the physiological stuff like aerobic fitness and lactic endurance and so on.  I think I've said on many occasions that technique is more important than anything else for the person who wants to go fast in a kayak or canoe.  And, as I get older, my body doesn't handle a high volume of training so well, but I can always make technical improvements.  And it's not like my fitness doesn't benefit even though I'm paying more attention to technique.

Then again, the physiological principles do remain important, and I'll say a few words here about how they play into my preparation for the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race ten days from now.

The OICKR is a pretty short race--about 5000 meters.  When the starting gun goes off, racers sprint off the line to get the best position they can; after several hundred meters, they settle into a pace they can sustain for the majority of the race.  For those familiar with the course, I'd say this transition takes place about where racers pass the boat ramp at the north end of Mud Island.

Racers maintain this sustainable (but still pretty quick, to be competitive) pace down the Mississippi for some three to four thousand meters, passing beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge in the process.  As they round the southern tip of Mud Island and head up into Wolf River Harbor, where the finish line awaits some 700 meters away, they pick up the intensity again for the final push.

That "middle of the race" pace is something I think I can handle no matter how much or how little training I've done.  Sure, it'll probably hurt more if I'm out of shape, but I can still make it happen.

It's the first several hundred meters and the last several hundred meters that I'm really preparing for in my training.  In my experience, if I haven't been practicing any kind of speed, then I have no turnover to get myself quickly off the starting line.  And in that final surge to the finish, lactic acid is beginning to assert itself in my muscles, and if I haven't done any kind of work on that energy system my muscles simply tie up and leave me in the lurch.

So that's been the focus of these workouts last week and this week.  (Ideally, I'd have started this sort of work a few weeks prior, but my shoulder ailment put that on hold for a bit.)  The workouts I did last week were for the lactic system: most of the pieces were at least as long as the recovery interval, and the objective was to maintain good stroke form while paddling at my OICKR start/finish pace throughout the workouts.  Yesterday's workout was more of a speed workout: the pieces were 30 seconds, versus two minutes for the recovery interval.  But the pieces were long enough for my body to go a bit lactic toward the end of each one.

The plan for tomorrow is to do the last hard workout before race day.  I'll discuss it in my next post.

Monday photo feature

This article appeared in The Commercial Appeal, the daily newspaper of Memphis, the day after the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race in 2012.

The race was back on for the first time since 2009.  A violent storm system swept in and scuttled the 2010 race at the last minute; in 2011, flooding on the Mississippi River forced the event's cancellation a couple of weeks ahead of time.  Shell-shocked by two hard-luck years in a row, race director Joe Royer considered retiring the event for good; but in the end he decided "the show must go on."  Having staged the race on the first Saturday in May for its entire history, he took this opportunity to pick a new date with a smaller likelihood of inclement weather: the day before Father's Day, which in 2012 fell on June 16.

One thing I've learned over years of watching reporters cover my sport is that even the good ones rarely get everything right.  While I think Mr. Brasher did a pretty good overall job with this story, I'm naturally pedantic and I tend to notice even the slightest inaccuracies.  I'm going to shine my blog's light on a gripe I have with this one.

When the results are posted during the post-race party each year, they are always posted by class: one sheet of paper for women's tandem kayak, another sheet of paper for men's solo canoe, and so on.  In making his list of "Top Finishers," Brasher apparently looked only at the sheet of paper for men's racing kayak (the class for surf skis, wildwater boats, flatwater K1s, and all other kayaks designed specifically for racing).

As a matter of fact, the top seven finishers in men's racing kayak were also the top seven finishers overall.  But then some racers in other classes came across the line.  With all due respect to Chris Brown, the following six people ran the course faster than he did, and therefore should have been mentioned in the paper as well:

Phil Capel (Sherwood, AR), men's fast touring kayak, 21:27
Dale Burris (Russellville, AR)/Don Walls (Dover, AR), USCA Pro C2, 21:33
Jim Budi (Beaufort, SC), men's fast touring kayak, 22:01
Laurens Willard (Charlotte, NC), men's fast touring kayak, 22:18
Wim Nouwen (Memphis, TN), men's fast touring kayak, 22:24

As you can see, there was in fact much more than just "a trio of Memphians" coming in on the heels of the top five.

As long as I'm in "wrong-righting" mode, I'll also recognize the top female finishers, who also deserved some newspaper ink:

Tonya Tittle (Memphis, TN), women's fast touring kayak, 24:19
Karen Kesselring (Hot Springs Village, AR), women's touring kayak 13'3" to 17'6", 25:19
Carol Lee Royer (Memphis, TN), women's racing kayak, 26:42
Traci Clever (Vicksburg, MS), women's touring kayak 13'3" to 17'6", 26:52
Kata Dismukes (Cordova, TN), women's touring kayak 13'3" to 17'6", 26:59
Trish Hipgrave (Bryson City, NC), women's touring kayak 13'3" to 17'6", 27:07

Pleasantly hot

The weather was unseasonably mild in late May, but with Fahrenheit temperatures hitting the 90s for the last several days it's beginning to feel summer-like.  Once the dog days arrive and we're flirting with triple-digit heat, life will be tough out on the river, but right now, with low-90s readings, I love it out there.

It's not uncommon for me to shy away from the mighty Mississippi and stay in the harbor.  In the wintertime hypothermia is a concern, and there's no reason to push my luck.  And then for much of the spring, the wind blows hard and the water is rougher out there than I want to deal with.  You might be surprised to hear that, seeing as how I've paddled some Class V whitewater and stuff like that, but the boats I paddle here in the Memphis area are much tippier than a creek boat, and are typically not rollable.  And if I'm dealing with an injury, like I have been the last few weeks, I want to stay in easier water where I'm not putting undue stress on it.

But when summer begins to settle in, the big river is a much more inviting place.  With a higher temperature for both the air and the water, an unplanned swim is not nearly such an ordeal.  And with the wind not blowing so hard, the river is smooth.

The weather was just right today, and after an easy session in the boat yesterday I looked forward to getting after it a bit more today.  I did three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, then went out on the river did all kinds of fun stuff in the moving water: I worked on keeping the boat gliding through the squirrelly eddies along the bank, and then did some quick ferries beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, paddling a pretty brisk tempo to keep from washing downstream as I went from one set of bridge pilings to another.  It was some of that "unstructured play" that I talked about last Monday, and it was a good way to paddle hard without it feeling like the sort of gut-busting workout that I did with Joe this past week.

More race training

Yesterday I did two sets of the May-June strength routine, and today I was back in the boat, doing another workout with Joe.

We did a "pyramid" workout: pieces of 1', 2', 3', 4', 5', 4', 3', 2', 1' with two minutes recovery in between.  I went out a bit too hard in the first half of the workout, and by the five-minute piece I was feeling the pain for sure.  I had to back off the intensity a bit, but I concentrated hard on taking good strokes and not letting my form fall apart.  All told, I feel good about how I finished out the workout.

Race training

With the big Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race less than three weeks away, it's time to get down to serious business.  Today Joe and I did eight pieces of two minutes on, two minutes off.  I aimed for a pace somewhat faster than my average pace is likely to be on June 20--something like what I might be paddling if I'm in a tight race in the last few hundred meters after the course enters the harbor.  I felt good for the first two or three, but by the fourth I was definitely feeling the pain.  I tried my best to maintain good form and control through the remainder of the workout.

Joe and I plan to do a workout together on Thursday, and on Tuesday and Thursday of next week.  The week after that we'll be tapering off and making sure we're ready for race day.

Don't take my word for it. Take Dawid Mocke's.

Here are a few tips from Dawid Mocke, one of the world's top surf ski paddlers for the last decade or so.

I like this article for its concise simplicity.  Improving your paddling should be a simple, fun thing to do rather than a complicated, tedious process.  True, many top-level paddlers have very sophisticated ideas about what they are doing, but such ideas are the cumulative result of many years of playing and having fun with the sport.

When I raced slalom back in the 1990s I attended many races that featured the nation's top racers, and one thing I noticed as I watched them paddle before and after competition is that they were always playing around on whatever river features were around.  No wave or hole was too small, and no maneuver was too silly.  I promptly adopted this habit and brought it back with me to Memphis, where whitewater features are small if they exist at all.  I think it helped me develop a modicum of skill in the dauntingly complex sport of whitewater slalom.

I've continued the habit in open-water/surf-ski racing, and it's helped me as much as anything in the areas of balance and technique that Mocke mentions in tips 1 and 2.  For example, it's not uncommon for a north or south wind to produce a steady procession of small waves in Wolf River Harbor, and I practice balance by paddling parallel to the waves' ridges and troughs--that is, I paddle east and west, back and forth across the long, narrow harbor.  This and other little drills are a staple of my training, and what you must understand is that I never expect to achieve any noticeable improvement in my balance in one session; it's a process that goes on over weeks and months and years.

Fortunately, I actually enjoy doing these little drills and stuff, and that's the whole point that I'm trying to make, and that I think Mocke is trying to make: you have to have fun with this.  When great paddlers get in their boats and work on balance and technique, it isn't something they have to do; it's something they want to do.

Monday photo feature

The first Battle On The Bayou race took place in 2010 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  I won the first two editions of this event, but since then the quality of the field has inched upward and it's become a harder race to win.  But that's a good thing.  The next race is March 19, 2016.  The distance is actually about nine and a half miles, not 12 miles as this article states.