Immortalized in literature

There's a canoe and kayak racer down in Natchez, Mississippi, named Keith Benoist.  I haven't seen or heard from Keith out on the race circuit in several years, but he and his girlfriend Melissa used to give me some good competition in their tandem boat, and Keith was perhaps best known as the founder and director of the Phatwater race that took place on the Mississippi River at Natchez for about a decade.

Greg Iles is a best-selling author who lives in Natchez, and right now I'm reading his novel Natchez Burning (published 2014).  There's a character named Kirk in the story who I'm pretty certain is based on Keith.  If you know Keith, check out this passage and tell me if you disagree (the narrator is the novel's main character, Natchez Mayor Penn Cage):

Kirk graduated from St. Stephen's Preparatory School four years ahead of me.  After a truncated career in the Marine Corps--a Force Recon unit--he spent several years working as a commercial diver, both in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.  Kirk owns an earthmoving company now, but he devotes much of his time to kayak racing on the Mississippi River.  Guys like Kirk never quite adjust to civilian life, and thus are usually open to pushing the envelope, especially in a good cause. 

"Mayor Cage," he says by way of answering his cell phone.  "Don't tell me--research question for a novel.  Could I really cut somebody's throat with a Visa card?" 

"Not this time." 

"You've finally found the funding for my white-water park?" 

"Uh... no.  Sorry." 

"Then what the hell are you bothering me for?"

And so on.  I've only just finished the chapter in which Kirk first appears, so I don't know yet how much more of him I'll be seeing in the book.  But I'll let you pick up the book and read it yourself if you're curious.

Monday photo feature

During the big Mississippi River flood in May, 2011, I was able to paddle across Mud Island River Park.

Fun vs. "fun"

The Mid South weather has settled into standard January fare: not freezing cold, but cold nevertheless, with pesky breezes adding some bite.  Maybe we'll have some more warm spells like we did last weekend, but right now we're at the time of year when winter really starts to feel like a drag, and there's at least another month of it to go.

Yesterday I went out on my "long" paddle for the week.  Around two hours is what I consider "long," seeing as how the longest races I enter are in that category of duration.

I was hoping to do another trip around the Loosahatchie Bar--I figured I'd do a clockwise loop yesterday since I'd done it counterclockwise a week before.  But the wind was more of a problem than I'd expected.  It was blowing from the west, kind of unusual in a region where north and south winds are the most common.  Once I was out of the harbor and paddling up the Tennessee side of the Mississippi, I found myself dealing with a beam wind that was driving waves from left to right, and those waves were bouncing off the bank and moving back to the left.  By the time I was above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge I had spent a lot of energy in those messy conditions.  I ferried across to the Arkansas side, where the forested banks gave me nice protection, but I was pretty tired, and I began thinking ahead: if I were to continue paddling up the Loosahatchie Chute all the way to the top of the bar, I'd be paddling back down a choppy river on a practically empty tank, and in that condition I'd be ripe for hypothermia in the event of an untimely flip.  And a not-so-existential hazard was simply having a lot of paddling left to do after exhaustion had set in: the main reason I almost never do any ultra-long training paddles is that a person can go for only so long before his stroke mechanics begin to fall apart, and then from that point on he is ingraining bad habits as he plods along with one poor stroke after another.

So discretion was the better part of valor yesterday: I paddled about two-thirds of the way up the chute and then turned around.  I returned to the south end of the Loosahatchie Bar, then paddled back into the main channel, then re-entered the harbor, then paddled the 2000 meters or so back to the marina.  I did a couple of loops around the marina until I had paddled an even 120 minutes.

When I returned to the river today the temperature was again hovering in the chilly mid-40s-Fahrenheit range, and the wind had shifted to the west-northwest and was blowing even harder.  My motivation was low, but with a stiff upper lip I got back in my boat and paddled for 60 minutes.

I firmly believe that you should choose something you genuinely consider fun when you're looking for an activity that will improve your fitness.  In general there's not anything I consider more fun than paddling a boat, but times like this weekend put that attitude to the test.  It would have been very easy to skip paddling altogether this weekend, and some might argue that that's what I should have done, but I justify my decision with the "delayed gratification" argument.  I enjoy showing up at races feeling good about my fitness and confident in my ability to compete hard.  Paddling this weekend felt like a real chore, but the reward will come later.

Maintaining morale and improving endurance

Since I put up my "tentative" race schedule the other day, our friends down in Vicksburg have announced the date for their event: April 8.  I have updated my schedule accordingly.

Also, I have been sticking to my plan of doing my strength routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  I'm getting a little bit better at those feet lifts, but I still have to be careful not to cheat by thrusting my legs to create momentum.

And, of course, I've been paddling.  Joe and I did our usual thing on Tuesday, and I put in another 60 minutes yesterday.

Yesterday was a perfect example of a time when I felt grumpy and unmotivated going down to the river but felt great once I was in the boat paddling.  We've returned to typical January temperatures here--low to mid 40s Fahrenheit--and when I got to the dock yesterday there was a northwest breeze blowing just hard enough to make things unpleasant as I got my boat off the rack and did a few stretches.  I was tempted to scrap the whole plan and go someplace warm to deal with the dozen other things that were gnawing at me yesterday, but instead I got in the boat and started to paddle.  After a ten-minute warmup I did three 8-stroke sprints and then commenced my main workout, a set of ten 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  My strokes felt good and all the muscles in my body were working in fluid harmony to move the boat, and before I knew it I'd done something I could feel good about for the rest of the day.

I started incorporating this 30-second-sprint workout into my training two or three years ago after reading this post on Ron Lugbill's blog.  Lugbill cites research that suggests that sprint sessions are better than longer steady-state sessions for developing endurance--not just for short-duration events like whitewater slalom (in which Lugbill is a coach and a former U.S. Team athlete), but also for longer events like the racing I'm now doing.

I haven't scrapped long paddles completely--right now I'm doing a long paddle each weekend--but the idea of sprinting to improve endurance fits nicely with my desire to make the best use of my limited time on the water.

Monday photo feature

Mark Clarke carves into an upstream gate at the 1993 Rattlesnake Slalom on the Housatonic River at Falls Village, Connecticut.

An easier day

My trip to Jackson has been postponed until later in the week.  But it nevertheless felt good this morning to have gotten the long paddle out of the way yesterday.  I went downtown and paddled pretty easy for 60 minutes.

I checked the Internet radar before I left the house, and it seemed certain that I'd be getting rained on. But the rain held off until after I'd finished paddling.  A shower moved in as I was driving home.

On a day like today, when I'm giving my body a break from the stress of long, hard, fast paddling, I focus more of my attention on the technical aspects.  I try to make each stroke a really good one: I look for a nice clean catch, full rotation of my torso from the hips up, and a state of relaxation that lets all the relevant muscles from my shoulders down through my legs fire in unison.

Just in case anybody's curious about this trip down to Jackson: I have found a buyer for the K1 I've had up for sale.  He's in Louisiana, and we've agreed to meet at Jackson to close the deal.

Springlike

It's been a surreal January week with Fahrenheit temperatures climbing into the 70s at times.  There's been a fair amount of rain along with it, but during breaks in the rain I've seen people sitting out on decks and patios at restaurants around town.

One thing we've barely seen this week is sunshine.  I for one feel a bit vulnerable to that Seasonal Affective Disorder.  The annoying hassles of everyday life start to feel like real bummers at times like this.

It hasn't quite been shorts-and-short-sleeved-tee-shirt weather down on the river, but I've been dressing lighter than usual for this time of year.  I haven't worn pogies since the sub-freezing spell we had two weekends ago.

On Tuesday I joined Joe for a lap of the harbor.  Joe had missed several previous Tuesdays because of business travel and other conflicts, and it was good to catch up with him.

Thursday was foggy and rainy.  My outer layers got soaked as I walked down to the marina from the car; that rain let up after a short time, and I spent the next 60 minutes paddling in a heavy, drizzly fog.  Another heavy shower moved through as I paddled the last several hundred meters back to the dock.  The temperature was in the mid 60s, but wet is wet, and I was glad to get into the dry clothes that I had stored safely out of the rain.

The sun finally came out for a few hours this morning.  By late morning the temperature was in the low 70s, and I saw a few people walking around in shorts and short sleeves along the riverfront.  I decided to do my "long" paddle for the week, usually a Sunday ritual, today.  Tomorrow's weather isn't looking nearly as nice as today's, and I also have to make a little road trip down to Jackson, Mississippi, and back tomorrow, and I'd just as soon not do that while exhausted from a long, hard paddle.

So today I went down to the river planning to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This circumnavigation becomes possible once the river rises above 12 or 13 feet on the Memphis gauge.  In recent years I haven't considered doing it below about 16 feet: the 2011 flood deposited a bunch of sand up at the north (upstream) end of the bar, making for very shallow water at lower levels.  The reading this morning was 17.2 feet, so I was hopeful I'd have adequate depth up there.

A trip around the Loosahatchie Bar, starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina, is roughly twelve and a half miles.  This varies according to the water level and how tight I make my lines along the way.  When I finished today's paddle my G.P.S. device told me I had traveled 12.66 miles.

Most of the time, paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar takes me a little over two hours.  There are many variables that affect this elapsed time.  Water level is a big one: the higher the water, the smaller the bar is because more of it is underwater; the southern tip of Mud Island is also more submerged.  Meanwhile, the long upstream paddle to get to the north end of the bar is easier at some levels than at others.

Today's level wasn't bad for that upstream leg: I had some good long eddies in which I got the boat moving over 7 miles per hour at times.  But up at the north end of the bar there was a lot of exposed sand, and I had to paddle farther north than usual to get up and around it.  So it was a good day for a fast time, but perhaps not the best day.  Whatever the case, I completed the trip two hours, 30 seconds after I'd started.  I think that's the fastest I've done a trip around the bar in a few years.  I think I've done it under two hours once or twice, and I'd have to refer to my old handwritten journals to see what the conditions were like when I did so.

(To learn more about the Loosahatchie Bar, look at the Google map on my harbor page.  Scroll up a little bit, and you'll see a big island in the river upstream of the Hernando DeSoto (Interstate 40) Bridge.  That's the Loosahatchie Bar.)

I understand a stormy front is supposed to come through overnight tonight, with cooler weather moving in behind it for tomorrow.  It's not supposed to be freezing cold--I think tomorrow's high will be in the high 50s--but I probably won't see people out in shorts.

Where am I going this year?

We're in that time of year now when I'm ramping my training back up, and I ask myself, "What am I doing this for?"  Hmm, yes.  Good question.  I'd better draw up at least a tentative race schedule.

What follows is just that: a tentative schedule--or, every event I could think of that's making even faint blips on my radar screen:


March
18  Battle On The Bayou.  Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  An 8.5-mile out-and-back course on a flatwater coastal bayou.  Register


April
1  Top of the Teche.  Bayou Teche, Leonville to Arnaudville, Louisiana.  A 7.7-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

8  Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Vicksburg, Mississippi.  A 21-mile race down the Mississippi from Madison Parish Port to the Vicksburg front.  Register

22  Pascagoula Run.  Pascagoula River, Pascagoula, Mississippi.  A 12.5-mile race finishing at Lighthouse Park in Pascagoula.  Register


May
13  Osage Spring 12.  Osage River near Jefferson City, Missouri.  A 12-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

20  Chitimacha Race.  Bayou Teche, New Iberia, Louisiana, to Chitimacha Nation.  A 20-mile race down a Class I river.  Register


June
17  Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee.  The 36th edition of this classic.  A 5000-meter race down the Mississippi, finishing at Mississippi River Park in downtown Memphis.  Register

29  Music City SUP and Kayak Race.  Cumberland River, Nashville, Tennessee.  A 6-mile race on flatwater.


July
17-22  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  Register


August
5?  The Paddle Grapple.  Fontana Reservoir near Bryson City, North Carolina.  A 6-mile flatwater race.

10-13  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa.  Flatwater marathon races in numerous classes sanctioned by the USCA.  Register


September
9  Lower Atchafalaya Race.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  An 8-mile race on this major distributary of the Mississippi River.

16?  Gator Bait Race.  Barnett Reservoir outside Jackson, Mississippi.  A 5.5-mile flatwater race.



You can pretty well count on me to be at several of these races.  The OICK Race here at Memphis on June 17 is always a season highlight.  The race at Ocean Springs is another one I always plan to go to barring injury or any other unfortunate circumstance.  I've been racing at Vicksburg for many years now, and I expect I'll plan to go back on the 8th of April.

Meanwhile, I've got the Paddle Grapple and Gator Bait events penciled into the same weekends they were on last year.

A more distant event I'd love to do is the Gorge Downwind Championships in July.  I visited the Columbia River Gorge area back in 1998; I spent that trip paddling whitewater on the White Salmon River.  I'd love to go back and experience what I understand are epic surf ski conditions on the Columbia.  But it sure is a long way away... driving there and back would almost certainly make it a three-week endeavor at least, and I have to decide soon if I can be away from home that long, and if so I'll have to arrange pet care and stuff like that.

The USCA Nationals the next month are a good distance away as well, but more accessible.  This year's event in Iowa is probably as close to where I live as the USCA Nationals will ever get, seeing as how the August heat here in the South makes hosting such an event practically out of the question.

Anyway...  I probably won't make it to every event listed here, and new events might be added as the year moves along.  But I've got at least a rough outline of a race schedule.

Monday photo feature

How quaint... a selfie!  This photo is from March of last year.  I had just finished paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar.

An enveloping shroud

The weather has settled down into what I'd call normal for the Mid South in January: chilly but not freezing cold, overcast and moist but not pouring down rain, a bit of breeze but not excessively windy.

The story of the weekend on the Memphis riverfront has been fog.  Both yesterday and today I got down to the river and found it covered in an even denser fog than I paddled in back on Thursday the 5th.  Paddling up the Mississippi from the mouth of the harbor, I couldn't see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge at all until I was within a quarter-mile of it; its M-shaped steel trusses weren't visible until I was within a hundred yards of it.

I felt tired in the boat yesterday, probably because I'd paddled hard on Thursday and started a new strength routine on Friday.  Knowing I'd be going longer and harder today, I kept the intensity moderate and spent my 60 minutes on the water focusing on good precise strokes and full rotation.

Today it was a bit chillier--around 46 degrees Fahrenheit versus 50 degrees yesterday--but the water was calm and I set out on my trek up the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge over the Wolf and back.

I hadn't checked the river level and I was sort of assuming the Mississippi was high enough to back up the Wolf a couple of miles, sparing me from paddling against the current until just a short distance from my turnaround point.  What I didn't know was that the river had dropped almost three feet since Thursday--from over 13 feet on the Memphis gauge to 10.8 feet this morning.  And so I found myself fighting the Wolf's current almost the entire way from its mouth up to the Danny Thomas bridge.

It wasn't that big a deal, really, except that it interfered with my G.P.S.-aided pace plan.  I did a couple of mile-long surges on the Wolf with the intention of maintaining around 6.8 to 7.0 miles per hour.  But going against the current I had to work unexpectedly hard to exceed 6.5 mph, and then coming back down with the current I was making 7.0 while not paddling hard at all.  Basically, I had to rely on my inner sense of pace to do the workout the way I'd intended.

By the time I got back down to the mouth of the Wolf, the fog had lifted enough for me to see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge from there.  I was able to paddle out in the main flow of the Mississippi without worrying about a barge rig coming out of nowhere right in front of me.

When I eased back alongside the dock at the end of 120 minutes, the G.P.S. told me I'd covered about 12.5 miles.

A new strength routine

I started up a new strength routine today.  Here's how it goes:

1.  Hindu squats (demonstrated starting at 1:20 of this video)
2.  Military press with dumbbells
3.  Feet lifts (demonstrated at 4:13 of this video)
4.  Bent-over rows with a dumbbell
5.  Lateral abdominals (demonstrated at 3:52 of this video)


The first day of a new strength routine is always something of a dry run, where I go fairly easy to give my muscles a chance to adapt to their new jobs and I also make sure I've got the correct technique down.  It looks like my biggest challenge in this routine will be the feet lifts: I've never been much good at acrobatic/gymnastic stuff.  My difficulty doing this exercise today is also probably a sign that the relevant muscles are weak, so it'll be satisfying if I can get better at it in the coming weeks.

Blowin' in the wind

As I mentioned before, warmer weather was set to move in early this week, and in fact it did: the Fahrenheit temperature was in the mid 60s when I paddled on Tuesday and in the low 70s when I paddled yesterday.  But warm weather at this time of year almost never means tranquil summer-like days.  When it gets unseasonably warm in the winter and early spring you can expect some unsettled conditions to come along with it, and this week wind was the big weather story.

I heard on the radio Tuesday that the wind was blowing from the south at 30 to 40 miles per hour, with gusts exceeding 50 mph.  I couldn't tell you the exact wind speeds when I arrived at the dock that morning, but I do know the wind was as strong as I've ever paddled in on the Memphis riverfront.  There might have been some epic surfing conditions out on the river, but since I was by myself and the water is cold, I played it safe and stayed in the harbor.

I was hoping I might find some surfable stuff in the harbor, but the waves weren't quite there.  I ended up working on keeping my boat moving in rough sloppy conditions.  I spent much of my 50 minutes out there doing laps around the Memphis Yacht Club Marina (the one just south of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge), trying to surf the waves running north on the marina's east side, "eddying out" of the wind on the north (lee) side, paddling back upwind in the protected area on the west side of the marina, and so on.

The windy conditions continued Wednesday and yesterday, but they weren't quite as ferocious.  Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes in the harbor as the wind blew steadily from the south around 20 mph.

It always feels hard when you're paddling into a headwind, but I've always tended to wonder whether the wind was really having an effect on my speed.  I'm a pretty skinny guy; could the wind really be slowing me down that much?  Well, yesterday I had my G.P.S. device on board, and the answer it gave me was yes.  Yes it is.  Paddling at a normal cruising pace, I was moving around 6.5 miles per hour with the wind at my back, but when I paddled into the wind that pace dropped down around 4.5 mph.

It's pretty well established in sports like track and field that the wind makes a significant difference in an athlete's performance.  100-meter sprinters move faster and long jumpers travel farther with a tailwind.  If the wind is above an allowable limit, an effort is deemed "wind-aided" and is not eligible for world-record consideration.

While a tailwind certainly makes a difference for a paddler, I believe the advantage is less obvious because unlike in a track race, the surface the athlete travels on is affected by the wind in canoe and kayak racing.  Waves of any size can slow a paddler down because he is constantly having to climb up and over them.  The ICF does't keep world records for flatwater sprint racing like the IAAF does in track and field, but if I were a paddler hoping to post a really fast time in the 500 meters, for instance, I think I would rather have dead-calm conditions than a robust tailwind.

I bring all this up to explain why, as I lined up to time myself in a sprint from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the Auction Avenue (A.W. Willis) bridge, I was not expecting miracles even though I was curious to see how much the strong tailwind might help me.  My fastest time ever in this sprint is about 2 minutes, 57 seconds, and I think that was on a calm day when I was a lot closer to peak racing form than I am now.

I got off to a pretty good start and whizzing past the waves made me feel fast, but I knew they were probably slowing me down a little.  Then, once I was out from under the HDB, the water started to flatten out, and as I came abreast of The Pyramid I saw that I had a pretty good split going.  I dug in and as I passed the two-minute mark I thought I might have a shot at a sub-3 time.  But the seconds always slip by quickly when I'm sprinting for a time barrier like that, and I crossed the southern edge of the Auction/Willis bridge at 3:06.  It was still my best time in quite a while, I think.

Once my breathing and heart rate had settled down I spent the rest of the hour paddling near anaerobic threshold before cooling down and taking out.

Monday photo feature

Joe Royer snapped this photo of his wife Carol Lee as they paddled their tandem boat in 20-degrees-Fahrenheit weather on Saturday.  It's clear to me that Carol Lee's paddling style differs from mine--to wit: she splashes up a lot more water, and on days like Saturday the result is icicles all over her person.  When I paddled both Saturday and yesterday, I ended up with some ice on my pogies and on my boat's deck, but nowhere else, really.

While we're on the topic of cold weather...

I heard an interesting and timely piece on the radio this morning: an interview with a guy named Scott Carney, whose new book What Doesn't Kill Us looks at the human body's ability to withstand extreme conditions, including cold temperatures.  The upshot is that even though in modern times we have the ability to live almost exclusively in a climate-controlled environment, our bodies still have the tools inherited from our ancestors for whom seasonal fluctuations were a part of life.

The thing Carney said that I thought was the most interesting was

...you can activate things like vasoconstriction, which are all of these muscles in your veins through your body which contract when they interact with cold. But you have no conscious way to make those muscles contract. You have to get cold to do that. And if you never get cold, those muscles get weak. And so by reintroducing and intentionally altering your environment, you can really do cool things.

You can listen to the piece and/or read the transcript here.

This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a canoe racer from Parry Sound, Ontario.  The guy operated a fishing boat up there, and had some Native Americans on his crew, and he said that in the middle of winter when the Fahrenheit temperature was forty degrees below zero, those guys would hang out on deck wearing nothing but jeans and tee shirts.  They were simply doing something their ancestors had done for thousands of years.

A winter blast

We had our first snow of this winter on Friday, and it was a decent one by Mid South standards.  I think we got close to an inch in places, and there's a fair amount of it still around since the temperature hasn't risen above freezing since then.  This is the scene that greeted me when I got to the dock yesterday morning:

That's my boat in the purple cover on the top rack.

According to the in-dash display in my car, it was 15 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived at the marina yesterday, and by the time I was driving home it was 19, so it's pretty safe to say it was below 20 degrees the whole time I was on the water.  I think it's been a few years since I've paddled in that kind of cold.  I'd sort of expected to find the harbor iced over, but it was entirely open.  I think there are atmospheric factors besides the air temperature that affect ice formation, because sometimes the harbor stays liquid even when we've had several days of sub-freezing temperatures.

Anyway... it actually wasn't such a bad day to paddle.  The sun was out and the wind wasn't that bad, and I was bundled up.  I paddled for 60 minutes and kept the pace above six miles per hour with a couple of long surges close to 7 mph.  By the end of the hour I'd made a bit of ice art.  Here's a nice layer on the deck of my boat:

And here's one of the better paddlecicles I've ever achieved:

According to today's forecast we were due to warm up into the mid 30s, but commitments from midday on compelled me to paddle in the morning when it was still pretty frigid.  My car told me it was 22 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived at the marina and 29 when I was driving home afterward.

The sun was out first thing this morning, but by the time I was in the boat the clouds were moving in and I would do most of my 110-minute paddle under overcast skies.  The longer session and the lack of solar radiation combined to leave me quite chilled by the time I was walking back up to the parking lot.

Both yesterday and today I dealt with a familiar problem on sub-freezing days: my rudder was frozen up.  Once upon a time I would fuss with it on the dock until I'd gotten it free, but now that I'm older and mellower I just get in the boat and start paddling with the thing still frozen.  As long as the water I'm paddling on is liquid, its temperature is above freezing and it will thaw out the rudder eventually.  If the sun is out like it was yesterday, the rudder should free up even faster because the sun warms up the boat and the rudder cables within.

Paddling when it's this cold is fun to do once or twice a year--if nothing else, it gives me something to brag to my friends about--but I'll be perfectly happy to avoid it the rest of the winter if I can.  It's still the first half of January and we should expect another cold snap or two before winter is over, but on Tuesday, when I next plan to paddle, the forecast calls for rain and a high temperature around 60 degrees.  I might even be able to ditch the pogies.

Relishing the season

After a stretch of rather balmy weather, winter has returned to the Mid South.

It was still balmy when I paddled on Tuesday--in the mid 50s Fahrenheit--but a dense fog blanketed the river.  I stayed close to the bank, out of the main channel that the barge rigs use.  Even so, I got a little surprise as I was coming back downstream toward the mouth of the harbor.  The city of Memphis sits on the outside of a large bend in the river, and most of the time the downstream-moving barge traffic uses the outside half of the bend (the Tennessee side) while the rigs traveling upstream use the inside of the bend (the Arkansas side).

So there I was paddling downriver near the Tennessee bank on Tuesday, figuring that any big commercial vessels would be approaching from my rear, when suddenly out of the fog comes this huge upstream-bound raft of barges right in front of me.

Mind you, it was not a close call--I was well out of the main channel and in no danger of being run over.  But it was startling nevertheless, and a reminder of why it's a good idea to be cautious when the visibility is so limited.  Meanwhile, the towboat pilot seemed to think I wasn't being cautious enough--my guess is he was miffed that I was there at all--and he gave me a loud ten-second blast on his horn.

Colder temperatures began to move in Tuesday night and yesterday, and when I got to the river this morning the temperature display in my car registered 34 degrees Fahrenheit.  I felt the chill as I readied my boat, but once I was on the water I warmed right up.  I was dressed in wetsuit pants, a couple of layers of fleece, a wool cap, and pogies, and soon enough I was toasty.

After a 15-minute warmup with three 8-stroke sprints, I did three ten-minute pieces with five minutes recovery in between.  I'd intended to do each piece between 6.5 and 7.0 miles per hour on my G.P.S. device, but I went off and left the thing at home, plugged into its charger on my kitchen counter.  So I had to trust my gut during the workout.  Actually, I would bet that I was pretty close to the target pace while paddling by feel.

By the end of the 60-minute session I was still warm, but it was a wet warm.  An hour's worth of my own sweating and dripping water from my paddle had wet me down pretty good, and once out of the boat I became cold and clammy in no time.  The worst part of paddling on cold winter days is not the paddling itself but the time on the dock afterward trying to get my boat put away so I can go someplace warm.

Monday photo feature

Most people who paddle with me these days know me as a kayaker, but my earliest paddling was done in canoes, and on a whitewater river my preferred boat has always been a decked canoe (C1).  In a whitewater C1 you kneel and use a single-bladed paddle.

My first C1 was a Gyra-Max manufactured by the Perception company of Liberty, South Carolina.  If I'm not mistaken, the Gyra was the first roto-molded C1 commercially available.  Eventually I would move on to some more sophisticated designs, including slalom race boats; but that Gyra saw me through some epic formative experiences.

It took me a while to get the hang of the balance and boat control that a C1 demands on whitewater.  I guess one positive result is that I developed a pretty bombproof roll.  This photo was taken on the Pigeon River near Hartford, Tennessee, in 1993, at which time I'd owned the boat for a year.  I think Mike Davis was the photographer.

Pain without suffering

“Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.”

I'm afraid I don't know the origin of this quote, but it sums up nicely the whole idea of participating in sports.

I did a two-hour paddle this morning, and I experienced what I would call more discomfort than pain.  By the time I re-entered the harbor and saw the marina some fifteen minutes in the distance, my efforts of the previous one hundred five minutes had left me fatigued and achy, but it was a feeling I've had thousands of times and I've learned to take it in stride and know it will be over soon enough.

In other words, I wasn't suffering.  The chilly temperatures and grey skies gave me some lovely sights to see.  From the marina I paddled out of the harbor and up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Wolf River, and then up the Wolf a couple of miles to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge.  Then I turned around and came back.

My plan for the next several months is to do a longer paddle once a week, usually on Sunday.  My other sessions during the week will be the usual 60 to 90 minutes.

I'm trying to change whatever I've been doing that has caused the plantar fasciitis, and I'm starting that with an effort to relax my feet as much as I can.  I still want to use my legs to get maximum rotation, but I think I need to make sure I'm using my legs against the footboard and the footstrap, and not my feet.

I got home from North Carolina last Monday and paddled on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I also did my current strength routine Tuesday, Thursday, and yesterday.  So it's been a good solid week of offseason work.