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.