Beginning to take some photos

Yesterday I did another round of the January strength routine.  It's beginning to flow now as I've gotten used to the exercises, although that one-foot lift still feels a bit awkward to me.

I paddled with Joe in the harbor for 80 minutes this morning.  The Memphis gauge reading was about 30.1 feet--still not an outrageously high level.  But more water is on its way.  The National Weather Service has revised its crest-level prediction downward a bit--42 feet, rather than the 43.5 feet it was saying the other day--but that's still higher than all but three crests on record.

Mostly just for fun, I'm trying to snap a photo or two each time I go down to the riverfront over the next couple of weeks.  I took this one Tuesday, when the Memphis gauge reading was 27.3 feet.  I'm standing on Harbortown Marina looking over at the Montessori school on the bank.  That's my car parked over in the left side of the picture:

This morning I took this photo from the same vantage point.  The water level is almost three feet higher.  I reckon I'll have to park my car a bit farther up the hill next time I'm down there:

I took this shot today of my car from another angle.  You can see the water coming just past the guard rail in the right side of the picture:

So... check this blog every couple of days for the next couple of weeks, and we'll experience this high-water event together.

Some people are already flooded

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I send positive thoughts upriver to folks in Saint Louis and much of the rest of Missouri, where the flooding reports sound bad.  I think the greater Saint Louis region, where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meet, has a lot more residents in low-lying areas than we have here at Memphis.  Right now it sounds like they're re-living the nightmare of the 1993 flood.

Yesterday I heard on the radio that West Alton, Missouri--just a few miles up the river from Saint Louis--was experiencing some pretty bad flooding.  I went to a race there last August, and I believe it.  It was not high ground.

Meanwhile, here at Memphis things are just fine at the moment.  The Memphis gauge reading is 28.5 feet, just 1.2 feet higher than this time yesterday.  Like I said yesterday, it's a rather high level, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Lotsa water

I paddled my boat today for the first time in twelve days.  The layoff had been caused by both the little virus I had last week and some holiday travel to visit family.  The unfortunate thing about it is that I missed some balmy weather to paddle in: the Memphis area saw Fahrenheit highs in the 70s for most of last week, but today it was a much more seasonable mid-40s while I was on the water.

I paddled for 60 minutes, and concentrated hard on rotating fully and using my legs.  Generally I felt pretty good, although my right shoulder, the same one that was bothering me back in the spring, has been feeling a bit weak and sore.  I might have tweaked it while moving some heavy hickory lumber around in my workshop yesterday.  I probably should re-start the little rubber band exercises that helped it last time.

The big news in Memphis right now is some impending flooding on the Mississippi, the result of the huge storm system that moved across the Midwest Sunday and yesterday.  The current forecast says the river will crest at 43.5 feet on the Memphis gauge on January 9.  I'm hoping that figure will be revised downward a bit over the next few days, to minimize the impact on the lives and homes of people in our community.  Mind you, most Memphians will not be affected in that way: the city sits up on a bluff, beyond the reach of anything shy of a truly biblical flood.  So those thoughtful people who are concerned for my safety should rest assured that I don't foresee any problems whatsoever.  But there are some vulnerable areas, especially in the basins of the tributary streams.  The Mississippi backs up into those basins when it's in flood.

Today's level was 27.3 feet.  That's fairly high, but nothing we don't see practically every year.  The official flood stage on the Memphis gauge is 34 feet, and the river is expected to exceed that by New Year's Day.

Monday photo feature

A guy paddles a slalom K1 in the streets of York, England.  The photo, taken by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images, showed up on The Weather Channel's website.

It seems like it's been wet all over the globe in the last several days.  I've heard of flooding in South America, and right now things are getting pretty soggy from Texas up into Indiana and Ohio.  I spent yesterday looking at my Internet radar, transfixed by an incredibly slow-moving system that was parked over a large region that included parts of six states, with Fort Smith, Arkansas, right in the middle.  That system is only just now moving into the Memphis area this morning.

January strength routine

I started up a new strength routine this past week.  I plan to carry it through the month of January.  It's been a while since I've done any of the exercises in the Michele Ramazza video (embedded at the bottom of this post), so I've picked out a few and put together a circuit:

1.  Pushups
2.  Air squats and squats with a barbell
3.  Butterfly crunches
4.  Pullups
5.  Leg kicks and leg kicks swim
6.  One-foot lift (much harder than it looks!)
7.  Lateral abdominals
8.  Pullups
9.  Plank crunches
10.  Leg swing

So far I've been doing the exercises slowly as I get familiar with the movements and memorize the routine.  My plan is to work it into an aerobic circuit by making two rapid trips through it.

Mele Kalikimaka!

I've been laying low with a pretty bad cold the last few days.  All my life my rule has been that if I'm not running a fever, then I'm not really sick, and in keeping with that I'm trying to do at least a minimum of activity--namely, some stretching and stuff around the house.  But my energy level has been incredibly low.

Anyway... in the spirit of the season, and in honor of what I hope will be a happy and healthy trip to Hawaii in a couple of months, here's the Memphis Ukulele Band.

Monday photo feature

Jim Priest of Wenatchee, Washington, surfs a wave on Idaho's Lochsa River in 1996.

Gathering some of my favorite videos in one place

Nobody has ever accused me of being particularly savvy with computers and web design.  But I am pleased to announce that I have acquired a new skill in the last few days: I now know how to embed stuff in my blog posts!  My last post has a Google map embedded in it, and I've figured out how to embed You Tube videos as well.

As time goes on, I'd like to share all kinds of videos, particularly of exercises I incorporate into my strength routines: I always feel bad when I talk about exercises here without some way to show my readers what these exercises look like.  I might even shoot some video of myself doing some exercises if I can ever get myself organized to do so.

For now, I share here several strength-exercise videos that I have referred to many times in the last several years:

Core strength is an asset for paddlers of all disciplines.  Here's Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li demonstrating some simple core exercises one can do with a stability ball:




I love exercises that require little or no equipment.  In this video, slalom kayak world and Olympic champion Daniele Molmenti of Italy shows us some "backpacker" exercises, so named because they're easy to do anyplace on the planet you might find yourself:




The guy in this video, Michele Ramazza, has excelled in "extreme" or "freeride" racing--downriver kayaking in pretty gnarly whitewater:

 


Happy viewing!  And like I said, I'll try to jazz up this blog with some video more in the future.

Let me tell you about our harbor here at Memphis

I'm always fascinated with other racers' home training sites.  When I get to know a racer from another city or town, I tend to ask myself, "What kind of water does this person paddle on?  What does he or she see while out paddling?"  And whenever I visit another place, I always imagine what it might be like to live there and paddle there day in and day out.

Perhaps it's about time I told you more about where I paddle.  If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have seen me mention "the harbor" here many, many times.  "The harbor" is where I keep my boat, and it's the site of a very large percentage of my training.

Here's an interactive map of the Memphis riverfront:



The harbor is the sliver of water that separates Mud Island River Park from the rest of the city to the east.  Known as Wolf River Harbor because it was the bed of the Wolf River before an engineering project redirected the Wolf (you can see where the Wolf now enters the Mississippi by scrolling the map to the north a short distance), it is not quite five kilometers in length from its northern end to its junction with the Mississippi (marked as "Joe Curtis Point" on this map).  It is between a hundred and two hundred meters wide, on average.  It is largely protected from the wind, and it has no current, just like a lake, and that makes it ideal for practicing technique and speed without the distractions of rough conditions.  It also affords the paddler a safer alternative to the mighty Mississippi on very cold winter days and times like that.

Three bridges span Wolf River Harbor.  The northernmost is the A.W. Willis Avenue (formerly Auction Avenue) bridge, which links downtown Memphis with the Harbortown residential development.  The next bridge to the south is the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which carries Interstate 40 over the Mississippi River.  The southernmost bridge is an access way to Mud Island River Park by both foot traffic and a monorail tram.

This photo, taken by a Daily Memphian photographer, offers a panoramic view looking south from about halfway up Mud Island.  That's the harbor on the left, with the main channel of the Mississippi River on the right.  You can see Harbortown Marina where I keep my boat, with the A.W. Willis Bridge just beyond it.

Many racers know Wolf River Harbor as the site of the last kilometer or so of the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, which takes place the day before Father's Day each June.  The finish line is next to Mississippi River Park, just south of the monorail bridge.

I keep my boat at Harbortown Marina.  If you zoom in on the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge, you'll see Harbortown Marina represented by two rectangles just to the north.  The marina is owned privately by its slip owners, like a condominium, and it is equipped with racks where kayakers and canoeists and rowers may store their craft for $100 a quarter ($400 a year).  The marina is approximately halfway between the harbor's northern end and its southern end.  It's maybe a couple hundred meters closer to the southern end; I know this because at my normal cruising pace, I typically take about fifteen minutes to paddle from the marina to the mouth of the harbor, and about 17 or 18 minutes to paddle from the marina to the harbor's north end.

Public access to the harbor can be found on its east side, using a boat ramp directly beneath the A.W. Willis bridge.  There is room to park during both high- and low-water periods.

In the many years I have been training in the harbor, I have established baseline times on several courses defined by permanent objects.  For instance, a good time for me from the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the southern edge of the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge is around three minutes.  From the southern edge of the monorail bridge to the southern edge of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, it's around two minutes.  The A.W. Willis bridge has two sets of pilings in the water, and I've broken 30 seconds a couple of times sprinting across the harbor from one of them to the other.

Joe Royer took this photo of me as we paddled north from the mouth of the harbor.  That's the monorail bridge in the distance.

In each of the last several years, I have timed myself over one full lap of the harbor.  I've done it in mid-March, a couple of weeks before my first race of the year, as a test of my early-season fitness.  My "starting gate" is between two trees at the north end of the harbor; you can actually see these trees if you switch the map to satellite view and zoom in up there.  I paddle all the way to the mouth of the harbor, where, lacking a turnaround buoy, I make sure to cross the center-line of Beale Street before turning around.  Then I return to the north end of the harbor and finish between the same two trees that marked my starting line.  My best time on this course is a little over 50 minutes.

So, you could call Wolf River Harbor my gym... my dojo.  It's where I get myself ready for the races I do each spring, summer, and fall.  Needless to say, I have spent untold hours there.  And there is no question I have developed a relationship with the place.

As in any relationship, there are negatives as well as positives.  The harbor has a fairly serious litter problem.  After a heavy rain, especially when the water level is low, the harbor is choked with floatable trash that has washed in from the storm drains. The city has attempted to remedy the problem by installing a boom at the mouth of Bayou Gayoso (for some reason it's called Quincy Bayou on this map), but the litter continues to come in from other sources.  There's also some evidence of a broken sewer line (i.e., condoms), and I know the problem has been reported, but so far the city has been in no hurry to fix it.

The harbor's industrial denizens have not always been the best stewards, either.  Though I enjoy the vibrancy of the barge traffic that comes in and out of the harbor serving the LaFarge, Bunge, and Cargill plants, I bristle at the sloppy practices at the loading facilities that allow grain, Portland cement, and who knows what else to escape into the air and the water.  Some stricter enforcement by our city and county authorities is definitely in order.

To put it simply, I sense that these authorities don't consider the environmental health of the Memphis riverfront to be a great priority.  I detect an attitude that the Mississippi River is strictly a commercial and industrial waterway and has no recreational value.  Certainly, a few more recreational users to demonstrate a contrary argument would be nice--besides my friend Joe and me, I can think of maybe a half-dozen other paddlers who are down there on any kind of regular basis--but the folks with the power in our town could reap some benefit in the long run if they would embrace us rather than shrug us off as a mild annoyance.  When I look at southern cities of similar size--Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Chattanooga, Nashville--I see cities that have lovingly brought back their once-decrepit waterfronts and made them destinations for citizens (all of them, not just the ones with money to spend) to enjoy the outdoors on or around the water however they please.  In this way as in so many others, my hometown seems to be several decades behind the times.

Well... I love our harbor anyway, no matter how few other people do.  I love the turtles that sun themselves on logs along the banks, and file off into the water when they see me coming.  I love the beavers that slap the water smartly with their tails.  I love the willows that stand in the shallow water up in the north end.  I love the birds--blue and green herons, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, geese, ducks, gulls, purple martens, eagles--that call the harbor home for at least part of each year.  I love the alligator gar that lurk near the surface in the summertime, diving deeper when my boat passes over them.  I love the high-water periods, when I can paddle among the trees, and the low-water periods, when I am surrounded by sloping muddy banks.  I love paddling from the harbor's relatively clear water onto the silty brown water of the Mississippi River, and back again.

I hope that paddlers visiting Memphis will find this information useful, and that they will value paddling on my home water as much as I do paddling on theirs.

Monday photo feature

Today's photo feature is a satellite image of the island of Oahu.  Why have I posted such a thing?  Because I am going there myself in a couple of months!  I'll be sharing more information about this trip as the date draws nearer.

What's been going on lately

My training activity has been light in recent weeks, and as a result the blogging here has been light as well.  I apologize to anybody who's been looking in vain here for new thoughts from me.

Since my last race in mid-October, I've been paddling twice a week, usually with Joe on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Typically we do a lap of the harbor (paddling easy, it takes us 70 to 80 minutes) and talk about every topic under the sun.  In terms of training value, I look at these sessions as a way to maintain muscle memory and practice stroke technique while giving my body a break from the intensity of being in race form.

For the last three weeks I've been doing four simple core exercises three times a week.  Two of them can be found in this video featuring Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li that I've shared here many times in the past.  Another one is an exercise I learned years ago at a slalom training camp where U.S. world champion and Olympian Rebecca Giddens shared some yoga-inspired exercises she'd been doing.  The fourth is a static position I think most people can visualize.

Specifically, my exercise routine is as follows:

1.  Static exercise shown at 1:03 of the Jing Jing Li video.

2.  A plank exercise that involved lying face-down on the floor and lifting the head and the legs in a "Superman" pose.  This is the exercise I learned from Rebecca Giddens.  I hold the position for 20 seconds, then rest for 20 seconds, and so on until I've done a set of five.

3.  Exercise shown at 2:55 of the Jing Jing Li video.  This exercise always hurts bad the first time and leaves me wicked sore for several days, so I always ease into it.  When I first did it several weeks ago I did sets of ten reps; since then I have worked up to 20 reps in a set.

4.  An exercise where I hang from my gymnast's rings and raise my legs up to horizontal in front of me (i.e., my body is in an "L" shape).  Each time I count "One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi" and so on until I reach Twenty, and I do this two twice per set.



So, there you go.  This is how I'm spending my break from training this offseason.  Some of the aches and pains I was dealing with in the late summer have had a chance to subside while I carry on a minimum level of stuff in and out of the boat.  I'll probably continue this laid-back routine until after Christmas, and then I'll start putting on a more serious face for the 2016 season.