Monday photo feature

In honor of my trip to Baton Rouge over the weekend, here's a picture of another Baton Rouge paddler, Randall Peterson, my friend from camp.  What's Randall doing here?  Just horsing around, that's what.  The year is 1995, and the place is the Woodall Shoals parking lot at the Chattooga River.

Post-race fun stuff

The results of yesterday's Big River Regional race have now been posted.  My time for the 13-mile race down the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge was one hour, 26 minutes, 20 seconds--three seconds slower than the overall fastest time posted by the OC-2 team of Gary and Matt Wise.  (Only one member of each "team" boat is listed in the results.)  I'm not sure I believe Ted Burnell was eight whole seconds behind me, but that's what it says.

Gary Wise was the sternman in the OC-2, the man I spoke to during and after the race.  It turns out Matt Wise is his grandson.  As I mentioned in my last post, I thought I understood Gary to say he lived in Austin, but according to today's Baton Rouge Advocate, he and his grandson live in Miramar Beach, Florida.

The results are posted in photograph form on Face Book, so I share them here.

The race organizers also posted the following photo on Face Book: a group shot of everybody that happened to be hanging around the post-race party when the awards rolled around.  Even though it's a huge group of people, I'm easy to spot because I happen to be standing over on the far right.  That's me in the grey Outdoors, Inc., shirt.

Red Stick Racing

I'm back home from my whirlwind trip to Baton Rouge.  I ran down there Friday; shared a hotel room with fellow racer Phil Capel of Sherwood, Arkansas; raced yesterday morning; hung around the post-race party until the awards; and motored back up here to good old Memphis, Tennessee.

The Big River Regional race started right at downtown Baton Rouge, several hundred meters above the Mississippi River (Interstate 10) Bridge.  The starting line was out in the downstream flow, and with just over 200 paddlers registered, there was some bumping and jostling as we tried to stay in position while waiting for the gun to go off.

The gun did go off right on time, good for a check in the "plus" column of my mental evaluation of the event.  I hurried out into the main current and was joined by Kata Dismukes, whose company I'd expected, and an outrigger C-2 paddled by Gary and Matt Wise, with whom I was unfamiliar.

When I have the early lead in a race, I have to decide whether I should try to put the thing away early or hang back and exchange wake rides with other paddlers for a while.  After some internal deliberation I chose the former tactic and opened up a gap... and not much later I was wondering if that had been a mistake.  Fatigue seemed to be setting in sooner than usual, and with nearly half the race still ahead of me, I began to shift from "attack" mode to "maintain position" mode.

As I approached the big leftward bend in the river that leads into the long homestretch, the OC-2 was hanging in there over my right shoulder and Ted Burnell, a surf ski paddler from Chattanooga, had moved up onto my stern.  Ted then moved to my left and took a much tighter line through the bend than I'd intended to take.  I'd have preferred to stay out in somewhat faster water, but I didn't want to lose contact with Ted, so I played it his way, and by the time we were emerging from the bend he had taken the lead and I was sitting on his stern wake, hoping to chill out for a while and conserve energy for a strong finish.

Over to our right the OC-2 was mounting a strong surge and in a matter of minutes it would take the lead.  This is where some might argue that I should have just let them go, and focus on winning my own class.  But in situations like this my ego and macho insecurity have a way of kicking in: I wanna be the first boat across the line, by golly.  So I dug in and moved onto the OC-2's wake.

With an Australian accent, the stern paddler said to me, "Be careful mate--they might not like you drafting outside o'class."  I replied that I hadn't heard the race director say anything about it.  It's an issue I'm aware of, and I've always understood that it's up to each race organizer whether drafting outside of class is allowed in his event; if there had been an announcement declaring the tactic illegal, I'd have gladly abided by it.  But having heard nothing, I'd assumed that all wakes were fair game.  In any case, I spent the last couple of miles sitting there wondering if I'd be summarily DQ'd at the finish.

As we entered the last several hundred meters to the finish, it was obvious that the OC-2 had a lot more juice left than I did.  I made a game attempt to sprint for the win, but my arms were tying up and the outrigger glided away beyond my reach.  And then I noticed Ted closing fast on my left.  The finish buoys were placed at a bizarre angle and I wasn't sure I had Ted beat until the very last stroke.

I half expected the OC-2 stern paddler to lay into me with a lecture, but instead he just smiled and said "Nice job, mate."  I responded in kind, and asked where he was from.  I think he told me he was now living in Austin, though he was clearly a native Aussie.  I didn't have much time to process our conversation because when I got out of my boat I sank thigh-deep in ultra-fine silt.  "On the mat!  On the mat!" shouted a girl who was helping finishers onto a rubberized plastic mat where they would not be subsumed into the fabled Mississippi Mud.

Kata Dismukes came into the finish several minutes behind Ted to take the female title, both overall and in the surf ski class.  I later learned that she had been struggling with shoulder pain for the entire race.

All told, I had an enjoyable trip and am satisfied with how I did.  What's next?  I'm not sure.  For today, I plan to go downtown for a short recovery paddle and put my boat away at the marina.  I'm tentatively planning to do a low-key event, the Gator Bait Race, on September 19.  A couple of friends have encouraged me to enter the North Shore Cup, north-northwest of Charleston on Lake Marion, on October 17; I'll have to see how the next few weeks of paddling go and how I'm feeling and how eager I am to drive all the way over there.

We'll see.

Another race already

Here's a quick note before I head down to the river, do a short paddle, load up the boat, and head south for tomorrow's Big River Regional race on the Mississippi at Baton Rouge.

I've kept the intensity low this week because of some achiness in my lats and shoulders.  It's never felt like something that would keep me from racing tomorrow, but since I'm already as trained-up as I'm going to be for tomorrow, there was no reason to push it this week.  I paddled with Joe in the harbor on Tuesday and Thursday, and today I plan to try a couple of short sprints and see how it all feels.

Monday photo feature

The last time I paddled on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge was 22 years ago in a whitewater C-1.  I was accompanied by this guy, Baton Rouge native Barry Kennon.  Barry, a frighteningly-talented paddler, was a member of the U.S. whitewater slalom team at the time.  A few years later he would win the C-1 class at the world championships of whitewater rodeo.  Photo by Randall Peterson.

If I remember correctly, we put our boats in the water in almost the exact spot where the Big River Regional race will be starting this Saturday, just upstream of the Interstate 10 bridge.  I'll be in a much different-looking boat (a surf ski) this time.

Back home and recovering

This morning I paddled in the rain for about ten minutes, and thought I detected a theme for the weekend.  But then the rain let up and I did the rest of my 70-minute recovery paddle under overcast skies in high humidity.

I'd decided that as long as my boat was on the car I ought to paddle someplace different, and give myself a break from the same old, same old.  I drove down south of downtown Memphis to McKellar Lake, which in fact is not a lake at all, but a slackwater harbor off the Mississippi, lined by an assortment of industrial concerns as well as TVA's Allen Fossil Plant.  It'll never be mistaken for pristine wilderness, but it's ours, by golly.

Beautiful McKellar Lake.

I felt sluggish and tired in the boat--not unusual for a recovery paddle.  The whole point of a recovery paddle, after all, is to flush out the lactic acid and get some fresh blood into your race-damaged muscles so they can mend more quickly.  Tempting though it is to stay home and lie on the couch after a race or hard workout, you'll feel better sooner if you drag yourself down to the river and paddle a bit.

Now I turn my attention to my second competition is as many weeks: the Big River Regional, a 13-mile race on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.  I have five days to get my (as of this Friday) 48-year-old self ready to go.

Fun while it lasted

Racers gathered at Alton Slough on the Mississippi River yesterday morning with the intention of racing ten miles, doing five laps of a two-mile loop.  But right as I was completing my second lap the race was called due to lightning.

I had checked the forecast at www.weather.com before I left the motel, and it predicted slim chances of rain before noon.  But a check of the Internet radar showed some heavy storms moving east from the Jefferson City area, and when I arrived at the race site the sky looked like it would let loose well before noon.  In the pre-race meeting, race director Bryan Hopkins said the race would start on time, but that the Corps of Engineers, whose rangers were operating safety boats for the event, would call the race if lightning moved into the area.

We lined up and the gun went off, and I found myself with plenty of company in the first few hundred meters even though I had sprinted hard off the line.  After making the first buoy turn, two tandem kayaks and I began to separate from the pack a bit.  I found myself in a stiff competition with Jim Short and Dylan McHardy of Springfield, Missouri, and Ron Ladzinski and Mira Doneva of Olathe, Kansas.  The pace was fairly brisk and I found myself working hard to stay on my competitors' wakes.  I wasn't exactly on the ropes, but by the time we were finishing our second lap I was wondering whether I would be able to hang with these tandems for all five.  Then the sirens went off, calling everybody to shore, and the question became moot.

We gathered in the park pavilion and discussed what to do next.  One option was to try to resume the race with everybody where he had been when the sirens had started, but since that could not be done truly fairly we decided to do the whole race over, this time over two laps instead of five.  The plan was to start the race about seventy minutes later, but a heavy rain began to settle in and the storm became ever more severe, the Internet radar showing no let-up, so eventually the race organizers decided to send us home.

Medals were awarded based on each racer's position at the moment of the stop-command.  I had been in second place overall, right behind Dylan and Jim and right ahead of Mira and Ron, but since I was in first place among single kayakers, I got myself a first-place medal.  It wasn't really fair, of course--there's no telling who might have mounted a surge and taken me down later in the race.  But the race organizers had medals to get rid of, and there was no fairer way to hand them out, so there it was.  After getting thoroughly drenched while carrying my boat back to the car and strapping it down, I drove away generally happy to have gotten a good workout and paddled in a somewhat different part of the country from most of my race settings in recent years.

As I drove south through the city of Saint Louis, the rain eased and finally stopped.  I found a place to park and had lunch consisting of an apple, celery, and some crackers.  Then I stopped for dessert at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, a Saint Louis institution since 1929.  At the suggestion of the radio announcers for Cardinals baseball games, I tried the lemon crumb concrete.  It was mightily good.

Monday photo feature

This week's photo feature is actually a set of photos I took this past Friday.  It supports my belief that if you look hard enough, you can find some whitewater in almost any part of the world.

As I've been mentioning in this blog, the Mississippi River recently spent several weeks at a pretty high level--around 32 and a half feet on the Memphis gauge.  When the water rises that high, it inundates a wide swath of bottomland in the basin, and oxbow lakes like Dacus Lake, on the Arkansas side of the river just across from downtown Memphis, become reconnected with the river from which they were born.  If you look back at some of my recent posts you'll see that I was able to paddle onto Dacus Lake during training sessions.

Then, when the river level drops, all that water must run off the bottomland back into the main channel.  On most of the acreage of the Mississippi basin, this happens as quickly as the water recedes; but in places where the floodwater fills in a lake, more interesting things can happen.  The photo above shows what happens where Dacus Lake drains back into the Mississippi, straight across from The Pyramid.

The waterfall in the photo is actually an artificial creation: somebody--the Corps of Engineers, maybe--piled some boulders and poured some concrete in the channel, perhaps to maintain a higher "pool" level in Dacus Lake.  And so, as the Mississippi drops back down from flood stage, water cascades over this precipice just like it would in a mountain creek.  Here's another shot of the falls:

Yes, fellow whitewater paddlers, I most certainly did scout the falls for good lines.  But the rapid is full of sharp rocks and concrete and steel rebar (that's rebar sticking up in the foreground), so a paddler would be banging and scraping at best and pinned at worst.  But if you can ignore the non-natural aspects of this rapid, it does at least offer the pleasant sensations of fast rushing water, and it's a nice place to visit on a hot Mid South summer day.  Here are several more shots of the channel as it runs out to the main river.  You can see The Pyramid across the river in the last one:

I get very excited whenever I find a place like this out there in the vast Mississippi basin, but I've found it difficult to get anybody else to care.  I posted one of these photos on Face Book the other day, and the response I got was mostly a bunch of chirping crickets.  Oh well... perhaps it's an acquired taste.  My excitement is probably similar to what astronomers feel when an eclipse happens.  Over the next few days this rapid will dry up as the Dacus Lake level drops below the top of the concrete-and-boulder dam.

Feeling hot, in a good way

We had some truly delightful weather late this past week.  Now the heat and humidity are moving back upward, but it's not too bad yet.  Actually, today was the sort of day I think all summer should be.  Summer should be hot; just not so stifling that I dread stepping out the door.  I think today's high was around 92 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was fairly humid but not suffocatingly so.

I paddled for 80 minutes this morning, doing my usual 8-second sprints before settling into a strong pace with several hard surges.  I felt good in the boat and am looking forward to racing on the mighty Mississippi above St. Louis next Saturday and at Baton Rouge the Saturday after that.

Balance is a skill

Today I did two rounds of the August strength routine.  A couple of the exercises require some pretty keen balance, and when I started the routine a week ago I could barely do them.  Today I'm doing them a lot better even though they're still not easy.  It's a nice little reminder that balance is something you can improve with some practice and persistence, even in a very tippy race boat.

Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes out on the Mississippi.  As usual I started with a warmup and several 8-second sprints.  During the course of the session I did several pretty hard two-minute surges.  Anybody who's raced with me knows that mid-race surges are a big part of my racing game, and I hope to be prepared to throw in some more during the two races I've got coming up this month.

We've finally gotten a true break from the dog days of summer, as some drier air has moved in from up north.  I don't know if it'll last until my race a week from this Saturday, but maybe the weather won't be as oppressive as it has been for the last few weeks.

Monday photo feature

It looks like an exotic coastal locale, but it's actually just Greer's Ferry Reservoir back in September of 2006.  Greer's Ferry is a hundred miles or so west of Memphis near Heber Springs, Arkansas.

River dynamism here in the flatlands

Today's forecast called for a high temperature near 100 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index up near 110.  But once again I got out this morning before conditions were that bad.  I paddled for 80 minutes, and my energy held up well and I felt about as good in the boat as I have in quite a while.

I paddled over to the channel where Dacus Lake drains into the Mississippi.  A couple of weeks ago I was able to paddle up this channel and onto the lake, but today, with the river some 18 feet lower on the Memphis gauge, there was a waterfall where the channel meets the main river.  No joke--there's a pile of boulders there, probably put there by the Corps of Engineers long ago, and the water that had filled Dacus Lake during the recent high water period was rushing down the channel and over these rocks.  I paddled right up to the base of it, and for a brief moment I felt like I was on a Blue Ridge Mountain creek as I felt the spray and took in the smell of the aerated water.  I also beheld with curiosity the sight of the clear green water from the lake flowing into the muddy brown water of the mighty Mississippi.

This afternoon I submitted my registration for the Big River Regional race on the Mississippi River down at Baton Rouge on August 29.  I'm now signed up for two races on consecutive weekends: on the 22nd I'll be doing the Firecracker Race on the Mississippi up at West Alton, Missouri.

Summer continues its ups and downs

This week we've had some lower temperatures, but not lower humidity.  Between Wednesday and yesterday several inches of rain fell here.  I mentioned two Sundays ago that the Mississippi was about to start dropping fast, and it has done just that: when I paddled this morning, the Memphis gauge reading was a hair under 15 feet.

On Thursday I paddled for 50 minutes, doing several of my backpaddling-then-forward-paddling power drills followed by steady paddling with a couple of long surges. Yesterday I continued to get my body used to the August strength routine.

This weekend we're heading back to some high heat indices, but it wasn't bad at all when I paddled this morning.  A mild north breeze kept things bearable.  I started off my 60-minute session with a warmup and three 8-stroke sprints, and then did eight 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  Actually, I took a break after the sixth sprint because a down-bound barge rig was putting out some good waves and I had to surf.  I got several brief rides and then one totally sweet ride before my waves began to mix with the wake of an up-bound rig and the water became too confused for surfing.  Once my frivolity had run its course, I got back down to business and did my last two 30-second sprints.

A new strength routine; races coming soon

I'm easing into a new strength routine for the month of August.  With races coming up later in the month, I'm keeping this one pretty simple and focused on "pre-hab" exercises:

1.  Stability ball drill shown at 1:35 of the Jing Jing Li video
2.  Flies with the rubber bands
3.  Stability ball drill shown at 1:53 of the Jing Jing Li video
4.  A compound exercise with the rubber bands that includes squats and overhead curls

Yesterday I did a "pyramid" workout in the boat: pieces of 1', 2', 3', 4', 3', 2', 1' with two minutes recovery in between.  My objective was to paddle at the maximum pace I'm likely to reach during the two-hour race I have coming up on the 22nd of this month.  I usually top out with a 5-minute piece in this workout, but scaled it back a bit yesterday because of the heat.  Another heat-dodging move was to do most of the workout in the shadow of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  Even with those precautions, the workout took a lot out of me and I felt worn out the rest of the day.

Monday photo feature

Having just survived the maelstrom that is El Horrendo, I turn my attention downriver during a 1997 trip to the Russell Fork of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River near Elkhorn City, Kentucky.  Photo by Ward Graham.

Another week, another recap

For about the last six weeks I'd been doing the June-July strength routine on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, but last Monday I gave myself the day off.  It was the first day in a while that I hadn't either paddled or done strength work.  I've had a lot going on in my non-athletic life lately, and it was nice to have a day to focus on other stuff.  I did do the strength routine on Wednesday and Friday, and now with a new month underway I'll be drawing up a new routine shortly.

Tuesday was a speed day in the boat.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did six sprints of approximately 30 seconds on fixed courses in the harbor.  I sprinted from one set of pilings to the other beneath the Auction Avenue (A.W. Willis) bridge (best time was about 30 seconds), from one set of pilings to the other beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge (about 32 seconds), from one piling to the other beneath the Mud Island Monorail bridge (about 28 seconds), and the entire length of the Beale Street Landing floating dock (about 38 seconds).

On Friday and today I did 60-minute sessions in which I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then paddled steady with a couple of strong surges of three minutes or so.

And yesterday I taught my last "Intro to Kayaking" class of the summer.  It was a pleasure meeting and working with the couple dozen or so students who signed up this year.

We finally got a break from the stifling heat in the second half of the week.  The high temperatures were still quite warm--low to mid 90s Fahrenheit--but a mass of drier air moved in from up north, keeping the heat index at a much more bearable level.  I expect we'll be back to sweltering discomfort soon, but at least with July over it feels like we're on the downhill side of summer.