What I'm doing these days

For this period leading up to the longish races awaiting me in late April and May, I seem to be settling into a pattern of paddling long and hard over the weekend, recovering on Monday and Tuesday, and doing strength work and some shorter, faster paddling on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

This past Saturday I paddled for 80 minutes overall, doing four pieces of varying lengths and intensities.  I started the first piece out on the Mississippi at the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and finished it at the mouth of the harbor.  It was quite windy and I had to back off the intensity a bit, focusing mainly on keeping the boat moving over the waves and chop.  Once back in the harbor I recovered for several minutes and did one of the pieces I did last Sunday, starting next to Beale Street Landing and finishing at the H.D. Bridge.

I recovered from that by paddling back south to the monorail bridge, and then I sprinted from there to the H.D. Bridge.  I recently used a GPS to measure this distance and it's about 450 meters.  My time Saturday was about 2 minutes 20 seconds--not a performance that's likely to take me to the Games at Rio this summer.

Finally, after another few minutes of recovery, I sprinted from the H.D. Bridge to the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge.  This distance is around 660 meters, and my time was 3:20ish.

On Sunday the weather was calmer and warmer, and I went back down to the river for a 120-minute paddle.  Going around the Loosahatchie Bar like I did the previous weekend was not an option this time, as the river was too low (16.9 feet on the Memphis gauge Sunday morning).  I decided to paddle downriver from downtown, something I hadn't done in quite a while.  Going downstream I paddled close to the pace I hope to maintain in the Mississippi River race down at Vicksburg at the end of the month.  After 45 minutes, I decided I should start heading back upriver to make it back to the dock in my allotted two hours.  I paddled along the Arkansas bank, using the eddy/slackwater on the inside of the big bend to the west the river makes below the old Frisco Bridge.

Overall, this past weekend felt less taxing than the weekend before.  I wonder whether that's partly psychological: the timed-pieces workout I did on Saturday was less structured than the workout I'd done the previous Sunday.  When I go out and do six or eight pieces at regular intervals it's hard to avoid that "time to make it hurt" mindset, whereas doing a variety of distances with whatever recovery I feel like feels more like play.

My strength routine (I guess I'll call it the April strength routine even though I started it right after my trip to Ocean Springs last month) is my Smart Bell workout.  One day--I promise--I'm going to teach myself to shoot, edit, and post video of me doing this workout and other exercises so readers of this blog can see what they look like.  In the meantime, have a look at this post from last year in which I describe what a Smart Bell is and how I work out with it.  Right now Wednesdays and Fridays are dedicated to strength work.