Reloading

Anybody who knows me or who has read this blog for a long time knows that I crave a comfortable routine.  And it feels like I've lacked one for at least the last month, with the pain in my hip and the resulting down time followed by a hurried attempt to get back into decent racing form for last weekend's OICK race.

Now, with six weeks to go before I race again, I'm trying to settle back in for a while and put together some days and weeks I can feel good about.  This past week I did a 70-minute paddle with Joe in the harbor on Tuesday, four 500-meter sprints with a group out on Walnut Grove Lake Thursday, a 90-minute paddle out on the Mississippi yesterday, and a 60-minute paddle on the riverfront today.

The sprint session on Thursday was an exhausting but overall good workout.  We've got close to a dozen or so paddlers interested in racing here in the Memphis area, but we're sort of spread out all over town and paddle in different places and we don't see one another that often.  These weekly sessions on Walnut Grove Lake (and eventually Patriot Lake, once it reopens) are a good remedy for that and I'm hoping to get out there maybe every other Thursday this summer.

This past Thursday Kata Dismukes's husband Ralph remarked that it looked like I wasn't getting my paddle blades fully submerged, so when I paddled today I shot some video of myself with my Go Pro camera mounted on my stern to see what was going on.  I tried my best to paddle like I normally do and not do any faking for the camera.  The footage revealed that on maybe every fifth stroke my right blade wasn't going all the way in.  It's not the first time I've spotted that in videos of myself, but I thought I was doing better these days.  So there's something for me to work on.

We're having a run of hot weather here, and I took my camel back full of icewater with me on yesterday's longer paddle.  I drank up the whole thing, and I don't often do that.