Monday photo feature

This is a photo Sonny Salomon shot of me during a late-1990s trip to the Caney Fork River in Rock Island State Park.  He was taking pictures of members of our group surfing on the top wave, and in most cases this would be a throw-away shot because I've just been blown off of it.  But I like it.  My not-unbiased opinion has long been that a C1 paddler cuts the most striking figure on a whitewater river, and at least for this one instant I assumed that iconic image against the backdrop of the Great Falls of Middle Tennessee.

The gears are grinding

This week I started up a strength routine for the first time since August.

Each fall I take a bit of time off after my last race of the year.  How much of a break I take depends on a whole variety of circumstances.  In some years I've stayed out of the boat entirely for as much as six weeks; in other years, like this one, I've kept up a paddling routine of once or twice a week.

In no year have I ever had trouble finding other things to do.  And every fall, these other things promptly expand to fill the time I have freed up by backing off the paddling and training for a while.  There's always work to do in my workshop, and this fall I've had a couple of projects going on.  Also this fall I've been having some major renovation work done on a rental property I own.  Even without canoe and kayak racing to think about, I have felt nothing but busy-busy-busy.

I've mentioned here a number of times before that strength work is my least favorite part of training.  Sitting inside lifting weights or doing repetitive exercises just doesn't appeal to me that much.  But my biggest challenge in getting a routine going again is not the tedium or the discomfort, but the time that I must take back from my non-training activities.

This week I took back that time.  This little routine is what I hope to do three times a week for the next few weeks:

1.  Torso twists with 10-lb. medicine ball
2.  Pullups
3.  Core exercise demonstrated by Jing-Jing Li at 1:34 of this video
4.  Shoulder "pre-hab" exercise demonstrated by Michele Ramazza at 5:47 of this video

I started on Wednesday, doing just one set of each exercise to ease my muscles into their new jobs.  Not surprisingly I was quite sore Thursday and yesterday, but yesterday I moved into my normal practice of doing two sets of each exercise.

After the strength work yesterday I went down to the river for a 60-minute paddle.  Still quite sore, I slogged toward the mouth of the harbor against the stiff south wind that was blowing.  Once out on the river I played around a bit in the small downwind conditions that said wind had created.

With a high temperature around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, yesterday might have been the last day that was warm enough for me to do so without a serious threat of hypothermia should I swim.  Indeed, a front came through in the late afternoon, and today's high will be in the mid 50s.  Winter is on its way.

Monday photo feature

Okay, one more shot from my recent Go Pro obsession and then maybe I'll give it a rest.  In this one I'm heading downriver toward the entrance to the harbor.  You can sort of see the flags on the southern tip of Mud Island: they're right next to that tree at the left side of the photo.  You can also see the Harahan, Frisco, and Memphis-Arkansas bridges off to the right.

I got this effect by clicking the "Fade" button a whole bunch of times.  The iPhoto program on my laptop offers all kinds of ways to make my paddling world look surreal.

Cuttin' loose with my paddle and my photo-editing software

Fall is low-water season on the lower Mississippi River, and the river has indeed been low this fall, but not as low as it can be.  Below-zero readings on the Memphis gauge are typical, but through September and October the level hovered between 5 and 10 feet.  As the dry weather drags on across the U.S., the river is only just now dropping lower: when I paddled yesterday the gauge reading was about 2.8 feet, and the forecast has it dropping below zero in the middle of next week.

I paddled for 60 minutes yesterday morning, and revved the engines more than I had done lately.  After doing three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, I paddled out onto the Mississippi and headed for the waves behind an upstream-bound barge rig.  In the beginning my surfing attempts were on the timid side due to the cooler air and water temperatures, but eventually my confidence grew and I threw in some hard sprints that resulted in several decent rides.

Once the waves petered out I paddled up the Arkansas side toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge until there were less than 20 minutes left in my hour; then I surged long and hard across the river and up the harbor to the monorail bridge.  It wore me out, but it felt really good just to paddle as hard as I could.

I haven't taken the Go Pro camera out since my last post, but I've been playing around a little with some of the editing features on iPhoto.  Here are a few more shots from last Sunday's set:


Number Four

My boat is pointed south/southwest; that's the Hernando DeSoto Bridge on my right, and you can see the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas bridges off to my left.  I clicked the "cooler" button several times to enhance the cooler colors in this photo.


Number Five

This photo got taken just a few moments later, by which time I was turning upstream toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  I clicked the "cooler" button a bunch of times to make this photo look really cool.


Number Six

In this photo I'm heading into the mouth of the harbor toward the central part of downtown Memphis.  Here, I availed myself of iPhoto's option to turn a photo from color to black-and-white.


Number Seven

Now I'm a bit farther up into the harbor.  For this photo I clicked the "sepia" button, which I guess is supposed to give it sort of an old-timey look.


Thanks to everybody who commented on the photos in my last post.  If you have an opinion on any of these, feel free to share it.

Amateur photography

I continue to paddle a couple of times a week.  When Joe and I get together on Tuesdays our pace allows for conversation.  When I get back out by myself on Saturday or Sunday I push the pace a bit more to keep my body used to the idea of training and racing.

I won't bore you with the details, but I've been exceptionally busy on numerous fronts lately, and as much as ever an hour or so on the river has been a welcome respite from all the other things going on.  Each time I prepare to head downtown I ask myself if paddling is the best use of my time that day, or if I shouldn't be "getting things done" in one of those other areas.  But once I'm down at the dock stretching and readying my boat and gear, the sudden relaxation I feel gives me confidence that I'm doing the right thing.

Of course, even in the boat I have to have a side project, and my project for the last few weeks has been to try to get a really good photograph of the Memphis riverfront with my Go Pro camera.  I usually set the camera to take a shot every ten seconds and have hundreds of photos by the time I'm finished, and you'd think surely I'd end up with at least one winner each time out.  But while I've gotten a lot of pretty good pictures, and certainly some very interesting ones, that iconic image that begs to be on the cover of Life magazine hasn't quite materialized yet.

Anytime I see a thing or a landscape I like, I just point my boat in that direction and paddle toward it... not the most precise method of point-and-shoot.  I'm often disappointed when I try to get a particular object in a photo because the camera's lens has a very wide angle and the object looks much smaller and more distant in the picture than it had appeared to my eyes.  Back in August when I paddled on the Hudson River I tried several times to get shots of Amtrak and Metro North trains going by, but they're barely visible in the photos.

Perhaps what I'll do for the next little while is share a few photos here and see what readers think.  I hope you might be inclined to say something in the "Comments" section or, if you're my Face Book friend, to tell me what you think there.  Here's today's offering:

Number One

This one has many of the elements I'm looking for: the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, the river, a good chunk of the downtown skyline.  And the late-afternoon light looks pretty good.  I wish the sky were a bit more interesting... it's lovely and blue, but I like some clouds and stuff.


Number Two

This was taken in the late morning.  I remember being all excited to get a barge rig in the photo: one of the things I love about the Mississippi is that it has incredible natural beauty and recreational value even while being a major artery for commercial transportation.  But just like those trains on the Hudson, it turned out not quite as prominent in the photo as I would have liked.  Another problem with Number Two is that the camera was tilted farther upward than I realized and the Outdoors, Inc., sticker didn't get in the photo.  Outdoors has been a good friend and sponsor of mine for many years, and is largely responsible for the very existence of sports like paddling in Memphis and the Mid South, so I'd like it to be acknowledged in that one great photo I come up with.


Number Three

Number Four

Numbers Three and Four were both taken yesterday when the sky was much more overcast, and I like the effect that has on the lighting.  Both photos have pretty good composition, with the bridge and the skyline and The Pyramid on display.  But is either of them the photo?  Hmmm....


Anyhoo, I'd be grateful to anybody who weighs in.  If nothing else, I'm always thrilled to know when somebody has actually read all this stuff I write.

Monday photo feature

Fall has been slow to arrive this year.  Through last week the daytime Fahrenheit temperatures in the Mid South were still well into the 80s.  It was nice in a way, but in another way it didn't feel quite right for the beginning of November.

Some cooler weather finally moved in over the weekend--the kind that makes you want to put on a sweater or even a jacket between 5 PM and 9 AM or thereabouts.

It's always with a sigh of resignation that I start pulling out more clothes to wear in the boat.  Soon wetsuit pants and a paddle jacket and a variety of layering garments will be part of my everyday gear, and I'll yearn for those carefree days when I could head out the door with nothing on but a pair of swim trunks and a short-sleeve shirt.

But winter isn't here just yet.  Yesterday I decided it was cool enough for a long-sleeve shirt, but I stubbornly stuck to wearing shorts.  And it turned out I felt just fine in the boat.