Monday photo feature

My friend John Kazimierczyk, the owner and builder at Millbrook Boats in Richmond, New Hampshire, is on vacation in Japan right now, and he's been posting some stunning photos of rivers and other scapes there.  He took the photo above on the Tonegawa River in Ibaraki Prefecture.

Finally, good weather for a few days in a row

The weather was as gorgeous as we were promised on Saturday.  I got in my boat and warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then paddled a strong tempo out on the river.  I went down to the old bridges just below downtown Memphis and then paddled back up on the Arkansas side.  The river continues to be quite high: Saturday's level was 27.9 feet on the Memphis gauge.

I had to rearrange my usual weekend schedule to accommodate some Sunday commitments.  As a result, I did my usual Sunday "long" paddle today.  Today is what my friend Joe would call a "chamber of commerce" day: blue skies, warm, a pleasantly gentle breeze.  With the river level still hanging around 27.9 feet, it was a good day to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  I got in the boat and went about this trek in the following manner:

1.  I used the section from the marina down to the mouth of the harbor to warm up and do three 8-stroke sprints.

2.  I pushed the pace up the Mississippi along the Tennessee bank from the harbor's mouth to the mouth of the Wolf River.

3.  I eased up during the stretch upriver from the mouth of the Wolf to the big eddy near the south end of DeWitt Spain Airport.

4.  I paddled hard while ferrying across the main channel.  I continued paddling a pretty strong pace as I worked my way up to the north end of the Loosahatchie Bar against the strong currents there.

5.  Once I had rounded the Bar's north end, and had the current working in my favor, I took a breather.  Then I slowly built into a good solid pace down the Loosahatchie Chute.  I made sure to admire my surroundings: the Loosahatchie Chute might be my favorite outdoor spot in the entire greater Memphis area.  With the picture-perfect weather and the forested banks becoming greener by the day, it was gorgeous today.

6.  When I emerged from the Chute and began working my way back across the main channel toward the harbor, several upstream-moving barge rigs had just passed and there were some decent-sized waves to deal with.  They weren't as rough as what I saw down in Vicksburg nine days ago, but they were big enough to demand my attention.

7.  By the time I re-entered the harbor I was getting tired but still had enough energy to paddle at a decent clip.  At times like this I try to focus extra hard on good stroke mechanics.

I got back to the dock about an hour and 52 minutes after I'd left it.  My paddle today had had a little of everything: some flatwater, some smooth moving water, some waves, some paddling against the current, some paddling with the current, some hard paddling, some easy paddling.  Not a bad morning's work.

Spring can do better than this

Joe and I had a good day for our loop of the harbor Tuesday--it was slightly warmer than it had been lately, and the wind was light.

Yesterday was another soggy day in what has been a wet year so far.  Last time I checked, the greater Memphis area was some ten inches above normal in rainfall for the year up to this date.  As I prepared to head to the river yesterday, rain pouring down outside, I looked at the Internet radar and saw a big mass of yellow (medium-heavy rain) parked over the city.  It was sort of rotating but it wasn't going anywhere.  I would be paddling in the rain, it was as simple as that.  Sure, I could have waited until afternoon to paddle, but I generally don't like to do that.  My energy level is usually flagging by late afternoon, and there's no telling what might come up during the day that would make me have to skip paddling altogether.  So down to the river I went.

What's so terrible about paddling in the rain?  Nothing, really; I've certainly done my share of rainy-day paddling, and as I've said before, some of the most beautiful days out in nature are the days of inclement weather.  But I have to admit I'm weary of the chill and the moisture.  I feel like we're overdue for a good run of beautiful sunny warm days with gentle breezes.  We are in fact supposed to have such weather this weekend, so hope springs eternal, I guess.

Anyway, once I was in the boat the rain didn't really bother me.  I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then paddled up the Mississippi to the lower end of the Greenbelt Park before doing a strong tempo back downriver to the harbor.  By then the rain was finally moving out, so I wasn't feeling like too much of a drowned rat when I got back to the dock.

I did the strength routine on Monday, Wednesday, and today this week.  With the calendar about to turn over to another month, I think I'll come up with something new to start next week.

Race schedule update

Now that I've offered voluminous reflection on this past weekend's racing, let's look ahead!  Down below you'll find a list of races that are on my radar for the remainder of this season.

Of course, there's now a gaping hole in the schedule for the month of June.  Father's Day weekend will not be the same without the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race this year.

As I've said before, it's unlikely I'll make every event that is on this schedule.  In fact, it's impossible: the two events I'm interested in next month are on the same date.  I attended one of these races last year and thought it was a good event, while I've heard good things about the other one.  I expect they will offer a similar level of competition.  They're both on what I would call medium-sized Class I rivers, and they're about the same driving distance from where I live.  In the end I'll probably make my decision based on weather forecasts and river flow information.

Anyway, here's the schedule:


May
12  Osage Spring 12.  Osage River near Osage City, Missouri.  12 miles total (10 miles downriver and then 2 miles back up) on a Class I river.  Register

12  Bluegrass River Run.  Kentucky River near Richmond, Kentucky.  19 miles down a Class I river. Register


June
9  Taylorsville Lake Paddle Battle.  Taylorsville Lake, Taylorsville, Kentucky.  A 10-mile flatwater race.  Register


July
7  The Lovely Laurel River Lake Paddle Blast.  Laurel River Lake, Corbin, Kentucky.  A 10-mile flatwater race.  Register

16-21  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  A race for surf skis and outrigger canoes in the legendary downwind conditions of the Columbia River Gorge.


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

9-12  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Onondaga Lake and Erie Canal, Syracuse, New York.  Marathon races in a variety of boat classes sanctioned by the USCA.


September
1  Big River Regional.  Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  13 miles down the largest river in North America.

8  Lower Atchafalaya Sprints.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  A series of 3-mile races on flatwater.  Register

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

29  River Rat Paddle Challenge.  Ouachita River at Monroe, Louisiana.  6.5 miles on a Class I river.

Monday photo feature

Susan Jordan of Lucedale, Mississippi, navigates a particularly mighty Mississippi River en route to Vicksburg on Saturday.  Her "V8 Pro" surf ski put her in the "K1 Fast" class, and she was the winner of that class as well as the second-fastest female competitor overall.  Photo by Paul Ingram.

Got me some press

Hey, check it out!  I got my name in the paper!  The Vicksburg Post ran this article about Saturday's race in today's edition.

Racing at Vicksburg

I got up bright and early yesterday morning and got myself down to Vicksburg's riverfront, site of the race finish.  There I got on a bus that took racers up to the start at Madison Parish Port.

By the time we got up there the Fahrenheit temperature was rising into the 60s.  The river appeared smooth but there was a breeze coming upriver that one sensed would be picking up soon.  The forecast had called for a headwind around 13 miles per hour.

After a brief racers' meeting we got in our boats and lined up, and off we went.  I moved into the lead with Andy Capel of Maumelle, Arkansas, maintaining contact.

Here's a map of the section of the Mississippi we were racing on:

As you can see, there are sort of three "legs" to the S-shaped course.  I spent the first leg paddling strong but controlled, knowing there was a lot of race left and I should conserve energy for the rougher conditions that might arise later on.  For the time being the river conditions and the headwind weren't too bad, though the wind was blowing just hard enough to be noisy in my ears and trick my mind into thinking things were worse than they really were.  With Andy hanging out on my stern wake I threw in an occasional surge to test his mettle, and he hung tough each time.  This photo taken by Paul Ingram shows the state of affairs for most of that first leg:

It wasn't until we were entering the first big bend ("Marshall Point Cut-Off") that I finally opened a bigger gap.  From this point on I could no longer find Andy in my peripheral vision, but I had to assume he wasn't too far back.  Meanwhile the conditions were beginning to roughen a little.  In the middle leg of the course we had more of a beam wind and the waves were moving from left to right, and I had to pay close attention to keep my balance.

One of the things on my mind was the elapsed time: I had last broken two hours in this race in 2014.  Though there were perfectly good reasons (low water being chief among them) for my slower times since then, I had this feeling in the back of my mind that maybe my aging body no longer had any sub-two-hour performances in it.  With the river running at about 43.1 feet on the Vicksburg gauge yesterday--a tenth of a foot above the official "flood stage"--one could expect faster times, but the weather conditions had dampened any thoughts of miracles.

As I rounded the second big bend I could see a string of barge rigs idling near the river-left bank, and off in the distance I could see a Coast Guard vessel coaxing a couple of more to do the same.  The Coast Guard had ordered a halt to commercial traffic while the race was going on, but it appeared that these recalcitrant towboats were only just now complying for fear of a USCG wrist-slap.  Even though these machines had now throttled down their engines, the waves they'd already produced, driven by the wind, would linger a long, long time.  The approach to the city of Vicksburg promised to be a rough one.

Soon I was climbing up and over one wave after another, with an occasional four-foot breaker crashing over my bow.  I kicked open the drain valve in my footwell and tried to grin and bear the soakings.  I looked for the driest lines and tried to keep the boat moving as consistently as I could, knowing that Andy and maybe others couldn't be too far behind.  I reminded myself that the conditions were challenging for them, too.

The river got nothing but rougher as I inched closer and closer to Vicksburg.  Timing my strokes so I was paddling on the crest of each wave, I was having serious doubts about breaking two hours.  By this time I was just trying to keep my boat upright until I was in the more protected waters of the Yazoo River.  The sun was peeking through the clouds and it was hard to see, but little by little the mouth of the Yazoo came into view.  I could see the calmer water there and in the last few hundred meters my only thought was getting there.

At last I was there.  I reached down and closed my drain valve and began to think about going fast again.  The finish line was some 1600 meters up the Yazoo, and I would be paddling against a mild current to get there.  My watch had read 9:02 AM when the starting gun fired, and it was now about 10:50, so after all my struggles out on the Mississippi I still had a shot at breaking two hours.  I was plenty tired but still had the energy for a good sustained surge, so I bore down and got to work.  I stayed close to the Yazoo's river-right bank, away from the main current, for about two-thirds of the distance.  The finish line was at the foot of the "Vicksburg Front" on the river-left side, so I had to ferry across, but I made it a steep ferry, trying to find that happy medium between adding extra distance to my trek and fighting the Yazoo's current.  I sprinted as hard as I could for the last 300 meters and crossed the finish line at 10:59 on my watch.  I knew I'd made it in an hour and 57 or 58 minutes (my official time was 1:57:36, as it turned out).  This photo, also by Paul Ingram (or maybe one of his minions), captures the moment:

Elated to be finished at last, I turned around expecting to see Andy not too far back, but there were no paddlers in sight.  I began my cool-down paddle and headed back down the Yazoo to cheer on some of the other racers.  After a while I spotted the orange surf ski of David Dupree of Rayville, Louisiana, headed up the river-left bank.  Andy's father Phil Capel of Sherwood, Arkansas, was several boatlengths behind David.  These two would take second and third place overall.

More racers began to come into view, but there was still no sign of Andy.  Eventually I headed back up to the finish area.  Phil saw me and asked if I knew anything about his son.  I said I didn't.  The Coast Guard vessel was making its way up the river and Phil paddled over to speak to them.

I got out of my boat and carried it to my car, which I'd left parked a short distance from the finish area.  Once I'd put some dry clothes on I walked back over to the riverfront and found Andy standing there.  He told me that he had in fact been just a few hundred meters behind me as we approached the mouth of the Yazoo; then, just when he thought he'd made it to the protected water, a wave knocked him over.  Drifting down the turbulent Mississippi, away from the Yazoo's mouth, Andy made numerous attempts to re-mount his surf ski before he finally succeeded.  Then he had to fight his way back up to the Yazoo and to the finish.  The mishap knocked him back to 14th place overall with a time of 2:22:39; it's possible he might have broken two hours if he'd stayed on track.

Karen Kesselring of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, was the first overall female finisher, clocking two hours, 18 minutes, 58 seconds.  The complete results are posted here.

As soon as the awards were over I made the four-hour drive back to Memphis.  I was unbelievably tired and was in bed before ten o'clock.  I woke up this morning feeling sore in my midsection; that's pretty typical after a long hard race.  A short, easy recovery paddle was in order, but it was pouring down rain this morning and I just couldn't bring myself to immerse myself in the elements again.  Instead I spent the morning alternating between lazing around and unpacking the car and doing a load of laundry and doing some overdue house cleaning.  Yes, even a big canoe and kayak race winner has to clean his own house and do his own laundry.

I finally made it down to the river after four o'clock this afternoon.  The post-race recovery paddle is a ritual that must be observed... I told you in my last post that I was regimented.  I was still quite sore but once I was warmed up I felt pretty good in the boat.  The clouds were giving way to some sunshine and it was a lovely late afternoon on the Memphis riverfront.

Fun in north Mississippi

I got an early start this morning, so I didn't feel in a rush to get to Vicksburg.

I like to get a short paddle in the day before a race so I can rev the engines and move some blood through the relevant muscles.  I decided to stop at Enid Reservoir, just off Interstate 55 in Yalobusha County, for this purpose.  Enid Reservoir, about 70 miles south of Memphis, was created by the construction of a dam on the Yocona River.  One reason I picked it for today's paddle was something I'd heard about for years but had never seen first hand: apparently there's a short section of whitewater just below the dam.  When I stopped to check it out today, this is what I found:

I was wishing I had a whitewater boat with me.  But I didn't, so once I'd beheld the sight of Mississippi whitewater to my satisfaction, I drove up to the flatwater impoundment above the dam and found a place to put in.

A calm, quiet expanse of water to do my pre-race paddle on was what I'd had in mind.  Instead I got offshore conditions, with wind-driven waves moving from southeast to northwest.  As an athlete I tend to be regimented and don't always like when things don't go as expected, but today I made myself relax and go with it.  Instead of the 12-stroke sprints I might have done, I did my sprinting in the effort to catch waves and ended up getting some nice rides.  I would have liked to do it for hours, but with a race tomorrow I limited myself to 40 minutes of playing around.

Back at the car I put my dry clothes back on and ate the lunch I'd brought with me.  I hit the road and reached Vicksburg around 3 o'clock.  I continued across the river and up to Madison Parish Port, where I dropped my boat at the start.  Then I returned to Vicksburg and picked up my race packet.

Now I'm at my motel streaming the Cardinals game on my computer and settling down for what I hope will be a good night's sleep.

It's about time to race again

On Monday I got myself signed up for the Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race, a 22-miler down the Mississippi River starting at Madison Parish Port and finishing at Vicksburg.  So I'm committed now. This week is being spent getting myself race-ready.  That means doing the strength routine Monday and Wednesday, but not Friday.  It means polishing my speed in the boat.  And it means getting as much rest as I can--the mental kind as well as the physical.

Joe and I did our usual loop of the harbor on a warm, breezy day Tuesday.  Yesterday it was breezy again and the temperature exceeded 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon.  Today it is cooler, with a high in the 50s expected, but it seems that our cool spells are getting less chilly and shorter in duration.  I paddled for 60 minutes, starting with a set of six 12-stroke sprints and then spending some good time out on the Mississippi in preparation for Saturday's race.

Monday photo feature

How often does an ordinary guy like me get lumped together with the two best male Olympic sprint kayakers the United States has ever had?  Not very often.  But it happened here at Memphis in 2002, when Greg Barton and Mike Herbert were the top two finishers in the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, and I managed to beat everybody else to the finish line.  Photo by my mom.

Greg and Mike are two of a number of "heavyweights" that have attended the OICK race over the years.  But there's a lot more to the event than that.  I consider it to be an annual celebration of this incredible natural resource our city has at its doorstep, and the wonderful recreational opportunities it affords.  Park remodeling has doomed the event for this year but I hope it will be back better than ever in 2019.

No racing in Memphis this year

This past week I got some bad news from my friend Joe, the director of the long-running Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race on the Mississippi River here at Memphis.  This year's race, scheduled for June 16, has had to be called off.  The reason is that Mississippi River Park, the park next to the finish line that has always been the site of the awards and other post-race festivities, will be closed for construction and remodeling during the month of June.  Even though Joe had submitted his permit application to use the park back in January, the Riverfront Development Corporation, the private organization that contracts with the city to manage the public land along the riverfront, did not notify him of this closure until the week before last.

And so, the event that is typically the highlight of my season is off the schedule.  I believe it will be sorely missed this year--not just by the canoe and kayak racing community, but by the entire city of Memphis as well, in ways that are less tangible but no less valid.  The good news is that Joe says he intends to bring the event back in 2019.  Here's hoping that racers will be back on the water with the full support of the R.D.C. and the city of Memphis, and that this year's loss will seem like nothing more than a blip in the history of this great tradition.

Feverish goings on this spring

This past week was a crazy one with a lot of out-of-the-boat things to deal with.  I managed to do about all the training stuff I'd do in a normal week, but the time to write about it here proved elusive.  Here's my attempt to make up for that.

I got in the usual three rounds of the strength routine this week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

At this time of year warmer weather is typically accompanied by strong winds, and that's what we had in the later part of the week.  When Joe and I met to paddle on Tuesday, it was still calm, sunny, and cooler: the temperature was in the mid 50s Fahrenheit.  By the time I got back in the boat on Thursday it had warmed up into the 70s and the wind was screaming out of the south.  I dealt with it by staying in the harbor and arranging for a workout with the wind at my back.  I warmed up paddling toward the mouth of the harbor, into the wind, and I did three 8-stroke sprints into the wind as well.  Then I turned around and commenced the workout: ten 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  Tiring as they were, the sprints felt good and smooth and fluid.

On Saturday I would be involved in an all-day event in the arts district where my workshop is, so I decided to paddle Friday afternoon.  By then I was dead-dog tired, I guess from the strength routine that morning combined with all the things that had been going on all week.  I felt as sluggish in the boat as I'd felt in a long time.  The wind was blowing again, and I just tried to stay relaxed and paddle easy for 40 minutes.

Some heavy rain came through yesterday, and today we're immersed in the cooler air than moved in behind it.  The temperature was in the mid 40s when I got down to the riverfront this morning, with a pretty stiff wind blowing out of the west.  My usual Sunday routine is to do a longer paddle, but with a race coming up next weekend I didn't want to make it super long.  So I paddled for 70 minutes, doing a set of eight 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals and then paddling on the fast side of medium the rest of the time.  I paddled out on the Mississippi for a short while--I didn't stay out there long due to some towboat wakes intensified by the windy conditions.  In any case, by the time I returned to the dock I was feeling better than I'd felt at the outset, and that was satisfying after Friday's lethargic session on the water.

Monday photo feature

The recent cold weather has me dreaming of warm sunny days, the kind of days when you can run a cool mountain stream with no layers on under your life jacket.  That's what Billy Treadway and I did on the Pigeon River near Hartford, Tennessee, in the summer of 1993.  Photo by Mike Davis.

Cooling my enthusiasm

I was slow to get some new strength work going last week.  I got back to doing some work on my rental property that I'd had to put aside for a while, and I didn't do anything Monday or Wednesday.  On Friday I finally did a cursory round of the new routine, just to get my body used to doing something new.

The weather forecasters had predicted unseasonably cold weather for yesterday, and Mother Nature delivered.  When I got up it was overcast and cold, with a howling north wind.  I donned clothing I thought I'd worn for the last time this season and headed down to the river.  When I arrived the temperature display in my car said it was 34 degrees Fahrenheit.  The pogies came out of my bag and went back on my paddle... yarrgh.

I mentioned in my previous post that nothing should seem too bad after the weather I paddled in at the beginning of the year, but in a way today might have been worse: I've been saying for years that I'd rather paddle when it's 24 degrees and sunny and calm than when it's 34 degrees and overcast and windy.

But seeing as how there was not a thing I could do about the weather, I just got in my boat and started paddling.  And from then on I felt fine.  The hardest part of cold-weather paddling is not the paddling itself but the time spent on the dock readying the boat beforehand and putting it away afterward.

I warmed up by paddling to the north end of the harbor so I'd have a nice long stretch with the wind at my back.  After doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did a workout consisting of eight two-minutes-on-two-minutes-off pieces.

It didn't warm up much while I was on the water.  As I drove home my car said it was 36 degrees.  The forecast high was in the mid 40s but I don't think it actually got out of the 30s yesterday.

When I got up this morning the temperature was right at freezing, but the sun was shining through a patchwork of clouds and the wind was lighter.  With one of my longer races of the year coming up in two weeks I wanted to get in a good long paddle today.  With the Mississippi River flowing at 27.5 feet on the Memphis gauge, there was plenty of water for a good unimpeded trip around the Loosahatchie Bar.  By the time I got down to the river the temperature was up to 43 degrees and I got in my boat envisioning a lovely wilderness tour on a cool but sunny day.

But you know how that saying goes: "Man plans, God laughs," or something like that.

I paddled south from the marina, doing three 8-stroke sprints along the way.  When I got to the mouth of the harbor I found heavy barge traffic out on the river: one rig had just passed by and was moving upriver under the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and I could see two more coming up from the President's Island area.  This would have been less of an issue in the middle of summer, but on a chilly day like today I didn't want to push my luck by ferrying across the river in a bunch of rough water.

As I was making this decision to stay on the Tennessee side, I realized I was stuck.  The southern tip of Mud Island sort of plateaus as it slopes down into the water at the harbor's mouth, and at today's water level this plateau was no more than a couple of inches beneath the surface.  My rudder had sunk deep into the mud and I spent a couple of minutes jerking the boat forward with my body to get it into deeper water.  Once I was finally there I realized that my rudder's post had gotten bent so that the rudder would not swivel freely.

Exasperated, I muscled my boat across the harbor to the cobblestones, the nearest place where I could easily get out of the boat and fix the rudder.  Of course, getting out of the boat someplace other than a dock means getting my feet wet, and with the waves created by that first barge rig crashing against the cobblestones, I got drenched up to my knees.  I managed to get my pogies wet, too.  And thickening clouds were beginning to cover up the sun.  I was able to bend my rudder post back so that it functioned properly again, but by this time I was angry at everything--at the heavy commercial traffic on the river, at my failure to read the water in an area I've paddled through zillions of times, at the presence of February-like weather a week into April... everything.

I headed up the river, and it took me most of the way up to the mouth of the Wolf River to calm down and get my mind back on the task at hand.  I paddled about a mile up the Wolf before turning around and coming back.  When I got back to the Mississippi the last barge rig was passing by, and I paddled somewhat gingerly downriver in the ensuing turbulent water.  The cold weather combined with my blown concentration had me in complete self-preservation mode.

Finally I was safely back in the harbor and I returned to the dock to finish up a 120-minute session.  In the end I did get a good long paddle in, but it was nowhere near as enjoyable as I'd hoped for.

New strength routine

(What follows is a re-post of something I wrote last year to explain the "Smart Bell" workout that will serve as my strength routine for the next little while.)

At my last teaching job in the 1990s I became good friends with the school's wrestling coach, and he introduced me to a thing called a Smart Bell, invented by a friend of his, U.S. National Team wrestler Paul Widerman.  A Smart Bell is a steel object that sort of looks like a steering wheel; it is precisely balanced to facilitate numerous strength-in-motion exercises.  My Smart Bell, more than 15 years old, weighs 15 pounds; it appears that modern-day Smart Bells are lighter.  That suits my general attitude toward weight training, that the amount of weight is less important than precise technique.

I've got a set of Smart Bell exercises that my wrestling-coach friend showed me years ago.  I've looked all over You Tube for video footage of these exercises, but haven't had much luck; perhaps one day I'll post videos of myself doing them.  In the meantime, I'll point you to this video in which a guy does some of my exercises in one approximate form or another.  (Actually, he does some other exercises I'd never seen before that I should consider incorporating into my routine.)

My routine goes like this:

1.  Standing torso-twists (similar to what the guy is doing at 1:37 of the video)

2.  Orbital circle (not on the video)

3.  The Russian (what the guy is doing at 0:28)

4.  Pushups, placing the Smart Bell on the floor and gripping it

5.  Situps, holding the Smart Bell behind my head

6.  Squats (what the guy is doing at 1:10)

7.  Circle (what the guy is doing at 0:44)

8.  Lunges (the guy does lunges at 1:23, but I do them with the Smart Bell behind my head, and I actually walk across the room)

It really IS all relative

Spring is definitely here, but it hasn't yet taken the form of idyllic, tranquil, balmy days.  When Joe and I got together to paddle Tuesday morning it was around 70 degrees Fahrenheit but the south wind was as fierce as anything I've paddled in in a long time.

By yesterday the conditions were calm, but a cool spell had set in.  The temperature was barely over 50 degrees as I put my boat in the water for a 60-minute paddle.  I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, and then did a fast ferry across the river to the Arkansas side and did a couple of long surges both up and down the river before returning to the harbor and heading back to the dock.

It's chilly and rainy today, and the forecast for tomorrow looks rather miserable.  By April I'm starting to feel entitled to some lovely warm weather, and when we go through spells like this it's tempting to get all whiny and maybe even blow off a workout.  This is why I think it's worthwhile to get myself out on the harshest winter days we get here in the Mid South: when I get down to the dock tomorrow and stand there in the unpleasant sub-40-degree weather that's predicted, I'll know deep down that it's really not that bad.

Monday photo feature

Jake Stachovak and I depart downtown Memphis, bound for the Tunica Riverpark some 35 miles downstream, in December of 2010.  Photo by Ernest Kelly.

Computers don't compute everything

Yesterday's weather was breezy but otherwise lovely.  When I got down to the riverfront the sun was out and the Fahrenheit temperature was in the mid 60s and rising toward a high in the low 70s.  I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then practiced my strokes at varying levels of intensity.

It was overcast and cooler when I got in the boat today, but the conditions were the calmest they'd been all week.  It would have been a good day to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar again, but having done that some four times already in 2018, I'm a little weary of it.  I decided to stay on the Tennessee side instead.

I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, and then headed up the Mississippi.  The paddle upriver was slow-going: at the current water level (24.6 feet on the Memphis gauge) there was a lot of swirly water along the bank but not many eddies to paddle up, and the north wind was blowing just hard enough to make me feel like I was fighting a bit.  But I made it to the mouth of the Wolf River, and I figured the bottom section of the Wolf would be a good place to do a workout with my G.P.S. device.  When the Mississippi is high like it is now, it backs up the Wolf for several miles and the water there is basically flatwater.  That's what I'd always thought, anyway.

The plan was to do a four-minutes-on-four-minutes-off sort of thing, with the target pace for each "on" piece being about 7 miles per hour.  But once I got started I found it very difficult to go more than 6.8 or so.  I figured the wind had something to do with it, but even in places where I had good protection from the wind I struggled to hit 7 mph.

I paddled two miles up the Wolf, or about two tenths of a mile above the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge, and then turned around.  Coming back downriver I suddenly had no trouble at all going 7 mph; in fact, at times I exceeded 8 mph.  Now, anybody reading this will tell me the obvious explanation--that there was in fact some current.  But each time I paddled under a bridge I took a close look at the pilings and couldn't see any eddy lines coming off them.

I was quite puzzled about it all until I took some time to do the arithmetic in my head.  Going up the Wolf my speed had been 6.5ish and coming back down it was 8.0ish, so the water must have been moving only about three quarters of a mile per hour, and that might not be enough to create any visible eddy lines.  If I'm right about that, then my speed during the "on" pieces was in fact 7.2 or 7.3 mph, and that's pretty much what I'd wanted to do in the first place.  In any case, today's experience was a good example of why I don't rely too heavily on a G.P.S. in my training: it's hard to get reliable information from it when you're doing an outdoor wilderness type of sport, even when the conditions seem as ideal as can be.

In all I did six cycles of the workout.  The sixth piece actually took me back out onto the Mississippi, and on that mighty river I could go much faster: I got it up as high as 12.7 mph... world class, baby!

I was plenty tired by the time I was back in the harbor.  I tried to relax and take good strokes all the way back to the dock.  I listened to the baseball game as I drove home.  Those mean old Mets had beaten the Cardinals twice to open the new season, but the Cardinals came back and won today.