My resolve gets an early test

Winter has decided to come early to the Mid South.  When I got down to the river to paddle on Tuesday it was 36 degrees Fahrenheit, overcast, and windy.  As I mentioned in my new stretching video, it was definitely a day to do my stretching before leaving home.  I broke out the heavy winter gear for the first time: wetsuit pants, pogies, fleece shirt, long-sleeve shell.  Once I was actually in the boat paddling I didn't feel too bad: going against the north wind wasn't fun but it wasn't anything I haven't endured many times before.  I stayed in the harbor and paddled on the quick side of medium for 60 minutes.  The worst moments were standing on the dock before and after paddling.

Every year around this time I ask myself if I have it in me to put myself through another round of winter training.  It would appear that the answer is... yeah.  At least once more, I guess I do.

Winters here in the Mid South are never really that bad.  In a typical winter we might have two or three blasts of Arctic air, plunging temperatures down into the 20s or teens for several days at a time, but we have a lot of stretches in the 40s and 50s as well.  Portions of the harbor might occasionally freeze over, sometimes bad enough to make me skip a day of paddling, but that's just once every three or four years, maybe.  Some snow and ice isn't uncommon, but it doesn't happen every year.

But I'm pretty sure this is the earliest round of winter weather in my lifetime, especially one that includes snow.  Yes, yesterday afternoon enough frozen precipitation moved into the area to force the cancellation of evening activities and close some rural school systems today.  Weird.

I'm in the mood to hunker down for a long cold winter, but actually this is quite temporary: the current weather forecast says it'll be sunny and in the 60s this weekend, and the highs will be above 50 for the next nine days.  It wouldn't surprise me that much if the rest of this winter isn't as cold as it is now.

I did the strength routine Monday and yesterday and plan to do it again tomorrow.

Update: Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame

The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame has announced its latest induction class.  The group of nine includes two football players, two football coaches, one football administrator, two basketball players, one tennis player, and one bull rider.  Eight of the inductees are male, and one female.

I'm sad to say that our canoe and kayak racing friend Mike Herbert did not make the cut.  Neither did any of the other people I voted for on my ballot.

Nevertheless, I thank everybody who took the trouble to buy an ASHOF membership and vote on Mike's behalf.  Just getting Mike's name on the ballot took close to a decade of effort, and I hope there will be opportunities to try again in the future.

Monday photo feature

It's been a long time since I've been on a good old-fashioned paddling tour.  But that's what I've just done in this photograph.  Back in 2009 I joined a group of folks to run a 22-mile section of the Mississippi River from Ashport to Randolph.  Here I'm helping Heather Havens and Alicia Huettel carry their big old kevlar canoe up the hill to the parking area at Randolph, located on the Tennessee side some 40 miles upstream of downtown Memphis.

Stretching my body and my tech skills

Joe and I did our customary paddle on Tuesday, and I did rounds of the strength routine on Monday, Wednesday, and today.  Right now the strength work isn't ending there: those oak planks I'm dealing with in the workshop are still pretty heavy even though I've got them milled down close to their final dimensions.

The weather was gorgeous when Joe and I paddled Tuesday: sunny and calm with a temperature in the mid 60s Fahrenheit.  That now seems a lifetime ago.  We've had periods of rain the last couple of days, and for the next week we're looking at highs in the 40s and 30s.  Meanwhile, the Mississippi River continues to be unseasonably high as a result of heavy rain in the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio watersheds.  It's supposed to crest around 25 feet on the Memphis gauge in the middle of next week.

I try my best to make my training activities as understandable as possible, whether you've been reading this blog for years or you're looking at it for the first time.  For instance, I've been building up a reservoir of pages I can refer the reader back to, like the one about the harbor, or my 8-stroke sprints, or my bridge-to-bridge sprint, or strength routines like the one I linked to above.

I can't really blame you if you haven't noticed, but lately I've been trying to make My Training Blog by Elmore a sure-enough multimedia experience.  In the last several months I've been developing a modicum of video-production skill.  I do mean a modicum: I don't expect anybody to be impressed by what I can do.  But as a guy who's still stuck in the 20th century when it comes to technological know-how, I'm impressed with myself, and that's good enough for me.

Here's my latest creation: a video about my pre-exercise stretch routine.  Just like this blog in general, I offer it not as the last word on the subject, but simply as an example of what one guy does.  I hope at least a few people might gain some useful ideas and even a bit of inspiration from it.

Monday photo feature

Joe pulled out his iPhone and snapped this picture as he and I paddled a loop of the harbor a couple of Tuesdays ago.  These Tuesday sessions are all the paddling I've been doing lately, and the rest of my life has expanded to fill the extra time.

Oaken muscle

All my paddling in the last several weeks has taken place on Tuesdays.  My friend Joe joins me most Tuesdays to paddle a loop of the harbor, but this past Tuesday he was busy setting up for the annual Outdoors, Inc., Cyclocross Race ("OICX" for short), so I paddled alone.  It was the warmest day of the week with a pretty good south breeze blowing, so I ventured out onto the Mississippi for a short while.  There was a barge rig coming downriver and I attempted to surf behind it, but there were practically no surfable waves.  A south wind tends to knock the waves flat behind downstream-moving rigs.

I mentioned a while back that my arm muscles are getting plenty of work from my current project in the woodworking shop.  The project itself is simple enough--a small cabinet--but processing the material has been a bear.  The client brought me several 9'-long-by-20"-wide-by-3"-thick planks that he'd had milled from a willow oak tree that stood on his property.  The stock includes a high content of early-growth wood:

The wide portion of each growth ring is the early-growth wood, and such material is dense, hard, and heavy.  Moving each plank from the client's truck into my workshop was quite a chore for the two of us woking together.  Once I'd cut up the lumber into rough-sized parts for the cabinet, I had some hefty hunks of wood to run over the jointer and through the planer:

The rough-sawn lumber was not very true, so it took quite a few passes over the jointer to establish a flat face on each piece.  And the client wanted me to get the thickness of each piece down to two inches, so that required quite a few more passes through the planer.

If you can picture me picking up each piece, running it through a machine, then repeating that process many times, then you can imagine that I'm getting quite a workout.  Each time I do a round of jointing and planing, my arms end up throbbing for the rest of the day.  The fine-milling of lumber is best done over a period of days rather than all in one day, so I've done a few of these workouts over the last couple of weeks.

But of course, exertion in the woodworking shop is not official canoe and kayak training.  I said in a previous post that I'd resume "official" strength work come November.  It's now November, so it's time to keep my word.  I began doing this strength routine this morning.  The road to 2019 racing begins here.

A new strength routine

It's time to get some offseason conditioning in motion.  I plan to do the following strength exercises for the next little while:

1.  Pushups

2.  Hindu squats (demonstrated in this video)

3.  Bicep curls

4.  Hanging planks (demonstrated by yours truly in this video)

5.  Cleans