Final days at home

I registered for the Gorge Downwind Championships last November.  For most of the ensuing eight months the epic journey out to the Pacific Northwest has seemed like an abstract concept looming off in the distant future.  But now it stands right before me, with just a couple of packing days left.  I plan to depart Wednesday, and I'm beginning to make lists.  Lists of all the things I need to take with me: paddling gear, camping gear, clothing, food.  Lists of the many loose ends I must tie off before I leave.

As far as actual paddling goes, I'm tapering off a bit.  But the Gorge Downwinder will be a bit different from most of the other races I attend these days.  When I arrive out there I'll be spending several days doing some pretty hard paddling just to get used to the conditions on the race course.  It reminds me of the slalom racing I used to do, where racers always arrived early to a race site to get some practice time on whatever whitewater the race would be contested on.  I guess one of the main objectives of the training I've been doing in recent weeks is to prepare my body for that kind of stress so that it can still recover and be ready on race day.

Yesterday morning I went downtown and did two of the three exercises in the current strength routine--the Hindu squats and the four-way abdominal crunches--on the dock.  Then I got in the boat and paddled for 60 minutes.  I was feeling a little on the tired side, so I just paddled steady at medium intensity.  A front had just moved through the Memphis area and the humidity was down a bit.  It was still humid, but not quite as absurdly so as it had been.  And so it felt pretty good down on the river.

That was the case again today, as some cloud cover added to the relief.  I had only a vague idea of what I wanted to do in the boat today.  In general I'm feeling good about my fitness level two weeks before the big race, and I'm now in something of a holding pattern, trying to rev my engines every several days while making sure my body gets the rest it needs, too.  What I ended up doing today was warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, paddling up the Mississippi to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and then sprinting hard while doing several ferries from one bridge piling to another. At times it was a little tricky taking full-power strokes out on the swirly water, but overall I was satisfied with how I moved the boat.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this work translates onto the turbulent conditions in the Columbia Gorge.