Wave therapy

This has been one of those weeks in which I've struggled with motivation.  It happens.

On Tuesday I did a round of the strength routine and then went down to the river, where I felt really tired in the boat.  The strength work was part of the reason, of course, but I also was feeling tired in a more general sense.

I didn't do anything on Wednesday.  Yesterday I still felt tired and lacking in energy, but I made myself do another round of the strength routine.  Doing so elevated my mood some: I was pleased with myself for doing something that would have been easy to blow off, and of course studies have shown that exercise is beneficial at the biochemical level as well (endorphins).

By this morning I was feeling not only tired and sluggish, but a little weird in the head, too.  I'm not sure how to describe it except to say that my eyes are watery and seem more sensitive to bright light than usual.  I decided to book an appointment with my eye doctor for Monday.  I'm not sure anything is really wrong with my eyes--I think it's more likely that this is just some allergies acting up--but I'm long overdue for a routine eye exam and I'm using this motivation to take care of that.

I went back downtown this morning and got in the boat.  A cool south breeze on top of the lovely sunny day countered my feelings of sluggishness.  I warmed up and labored through three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, then headed out to see what was happening on the Mississippi.  There were waves crashing against the tip of Mud Island, so I expected to see an upstream-moving barge rig once I rounded the point.  Eventually I did see it, but it was up above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and moving fast, and I entertained no big hopes of good waves to surf.  I paddled up along the bank until I was just above the bridge myself, and then ferried out into mid-river.  Even though the barge rig was at least a mile upriver now, there was some interesting stuff going on.  Barge wakes are not typically a good simulation of downwind conditions because they sort of wander back and forth across the river and don't follow the pattern of wind-driven waves, but today the south wind was strong enough to take what the towboat had created and generate some small runs.  Whenever I saw swells forming in front of me I aligned myself with them and tried to do all the things I'd learned from Dawid Mocke back in July--"nose in the hole" and "small runs lead to big runs" and stuff like that.  The swells were nowhere near the size of what I see out in the Columbia Gorge each summer, but darn if I didn't get a pretty good run, reaching about 5.8 miles per hour on my G.P.S. device--that's not bad when you're paddling against the mighty Mississippi.

Eventually the waves petered out and I figured the fun was over, and I was ready to call it a morning and go back to the dock.  But then I looked downriver and saw another tow heading up from beneath the Harahan Bridge.  My arms were tired but I hate to pass up good surfing when it's available.  Down the river I went, meeting up with the barge rig alongside Tom Lee Park.  At first I struggled to do much of anything because the waves were huge and moving fast, but as the towboat distanced itself the conditions moderated in size and I was able to get one really sweet ride and a couple of off-balance but decent ones.  The water is a nice temperature at this time of year and the spray felt good whenever my bow flirted with the trough of a wave.  I returned to the harbor feeling good about what I'd managed to do.

For my money, there's just nothing more fun in this world than getting out and surfing waves, whether they're generated by the energy of water moving down a riverbed, the thousands of horsepower of commercial towboat engines, or the wind blowing just the right way over open water.  I've continued to feel tired and out of sorts the rest of today--my current condition feels a bit like a head cold without the actual cold symptoms.  But if some surfing can't lift my spirits at least a little, I reckon nothing can.


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