Monday, October 28, 2019

Monday photo feature


Here's another one of the stars of my blockbuster movie: Mr. Christian Massow.  Christian grew up in the robust flatwater racing programs in Germany, and now makes his home in the greater Houston area.  In this photo he's just finished first overall in the "Battle On The Bayou" race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in 2013.  Photo by Robert Nykvist.


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Sunday, October 27, 2019

Muddling along uncomfortably

My back ailment is now two weeks old, and I'm puzzled by it.  Usually when I tweak my back it works itself out over several days, but this time it hurts just as bad now as it did on Day One.  I've been to the chiropractor twice now, with no improvement to show for it.

At this point I'm trying not to obsess over it, and just live my life the best I can.  But the question is in the back of my mind: what if it's feeling just as bad two weeks from now, or a month from now?  All I can do is try to be good to myself each day and be thoughtful about my movements.  It would probably be wise to do some daily stretching and maybe some warm tub soaks.

The training break continues.  For the last couple of weeks my only paddling has been the usual Tuesday session with Joe.  Joe says I should continue to take a break until I'm good and ready to get back at it.  "You should be hungry," he says.  He's right, of course, but with a physically demanding week in South Africa looming in early February, I can't wait too long to start up some training again.


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Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Followup on my last race

The results of the Buck Island River Race that took place back on October 5 are now posted here.  A guy named Elmer Holmes was the winner!


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Monday, October 21, 2019

Monday photo feature


A training break is a good time to freshen up your boat and gear.  My training paddle--a pair of full-size Epic wing blades on a homemade ash shaft--was past due for some love.  I gave the shaft a good cleaning and sanding, and then applied a new coat of marine-grade epoxy resin followed by two coats of spar urethane varnish.  The epoxy seals and protects the wood, while the varnish protects the epoxy from ultraviolet degradation.


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Oh, to be back in the pink

It's been a while since I've written anything here.  My usual post-season training break is part of the reason.  Another part is my health being down in the dumps.

That "cold" I had during my last race turned out to be more serious than I thought.  As the following week wore on, it became clear that it wasn't going to go away without some pharmacological persuasion.  I finally went to the doctor, who prescribed an antibiotic.  Within a couple of days I was noticing some improvement at last.

The weekend of October 11-13 was the annual crafts fair here where I always demonstrate bowl carving.  I skipped it on Friday because I still wasn't feeling well, but spent Saturday and Sunday swinging my axe and adze.  Bowl carving involves handling some heavy logs, and at some point on Sunday I managed to strain my back.  That sort of thing happens once in a while and it almost always gets better after several days, but this time the discomfort dragged on all last week.  To make matters worse, I woke up this past Friday morning with pain in my neck from having slept on it wrong.

I don't visit my chiropractor as often as I used to because she dropped out of my health plan's network and it's a lot more expensive for me to see her now.  But today I shelled out her fee and got some spinal adjustments.  Sometimes when I see the chiropractor she cracks me just right and I exclaim "Oh yeah!  You nailed it!!!!"  But that didn't happen today.  At the moment I'm still sore, and I can only hope she hit the right spots to put me on track toward healing.

I do have a bit of good news: I've arranged a trip to South Africa in early February.  I'll be staying in the town of Fish Hoek, home of the Miller's Run, the global mecca for downwind paddlers.

I'll be talking a lot more about this trip in due course.  Downwind is the most physically demanding paddling discipline I've ever done, and my training in November, December, and January will seek to put me in an optimum state of fitness.  For now I plan to take it easy for a couple of more weeks and try to get myself feeling good again.


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Monday, October 14, 2019

Monday photo feature


Karen Kesselring of Hot Springs, Arkansas, is one of the stars of my motion picture that premiered last week.  Here she's racing on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 2011.  Photo by Paul Ingram.


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Tuesday, October 8, 2019

The international premiere

Well, a couple of weeks ago I promised it was coming up soon.  And now here it is: my MOVIE!!!!



I know this sounds supremely corny, but I consider this film sort of a love letter to the sport of canoe and kayak racing. The interviewees here are all people I admire. Some of them are elite-level athletes, and some aren’t; what they have in common is that they’ve embraced the sport and made it an integral part of who they are. If you ask people who know them, one of the first things you’ll hear is “He’s a paddler” or “She’s into canoe and kayak racing.” In this film I ask them all the same questions, and while each of them provides unique answers, they all convey a motivation rooted in a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment. This film focuses on flatwater and open-water racing in boats like surf skis, marathon canoes, sprint K1s, outrigger canoes, and touring kayaks. But having competed in whitewater disciplines like slalom and wildwater in the past, I know that the passion and desire on display here is shared by those athletes as well. In 2019 I participated in nine events, and the interviews in this film were conducted at eight of these events. I regret that I did not conduct any interviews at the Oyster City race at Apalachicola, Florida, on April 6. It was my second race of the year and I hadn’t yet settled into the habit of getting out my camera. After the race I got busy socializing and drinking beer and so on, and I simply forgot. And so that event is not included here, and I’m sorry about that. There certainly were racers there I would have liked to include here, and if I dream up a new project in the future I’ll go the extra mile to write them into the script. Just so you know: a couple of the still photos displayed in the film are from the 2019 season, but most of them aren’t. They’re just a bunch of shots I’ve accumulated on my hard drive over the years and I decided this was a good place to share them with a wider audience. I can speak for nobody but myself, but they certainly make ME want to start cheering. Anyway… thanks to everybody who watches all 27 and a half minutes of this production. For best results, watch it in full-screen mode! Turn on those surround-sound speakers!!


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Monday, October 7, 2019

Monday photo feature


Perched on a stand-up paddleboard, John Ruskey shot this photo on Saturday as Scott Shirey and Robert Cheek approached the finish line to take third place overall in the first annual Buck Island River Race on the Mississippi River at Helena, Arkansas.  The finish was located in the protected water of Helena Harbor, which is actually the mouth of a small creek known as Porter Bayou.


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Sunday, October 6, 2019

I wrap up my season here in the good old Mid South

I was up before dawn yesterday and after a quick breakfast I embarked on the 90-minute-or-so journey down to Helena, Arkansas.

Getting there involved driving across a swath of the fabled Mississippi Delta.  I rarely venture into the Delta because I don't patronize the casinos in Tunica County and most other southward passages through Mississippi are accomplished much more quickly on Interstate 55.  So it was a rather novel experience for me, gazing out over the flat-as-a-board landscape as the sun came up.  The region is among the most impoverished in the United States, and its denizens probably don't see many cars cruising through with surf skis on top.  When I stopped for gasoline in the town of Tunica, the kid ringing the cash register asked me if I was going fishing.  I didn't want to get bogged down in a lengthy conversation because I wasn't sure of how much more time I needed to reach the race site, and I replied, "Um, yeah... actually, I'm just going out on the Mississippi River."

"You doin' that by yourself?"  he asked.

"I'm meeting some people," I replied as I headed out the door.

Back on the road, I followed that 61 Highway down to Lula before turning westward on U.S. 49.  I crossed the Mississippi on the Helena Bridge and glanced upriver at what I figured was the entrance to Helena Harbor, where the race would be finishing.

The First Annual Buck Island River Race was conceived as a fundraiser for the Lower Mississippi River Foundation, a Helena-based organization "dedicated to promoting stewardship of the lower and middle Mississippi River through deep engagement."  The main way it actually does that is by offering opportunities for area youth to experience the outdoors on the river and in its corridor.  I dropped by the LMRF headquarters for the race check-in.  The organizers seemed happy to keep things small in the event's inaugural year: the sign-up list was very brief.

Getting to the start involved following a network of gravel roads up into the Saint Francis National Forest.  As I mentioned last Monday, the race would start at the confluence of "The Saint" and the Mississippi River, and the Forest Service had very helpfully placed a sign with that exact bit of information so that I could find my way:


I followed the increasingly rough road to the sandy beach where the two rivers meet.  After a quick meeting with LMRF executive director Shannon McMulkin and LMRF founder John Ruskey, ten other boats joined mine on the starting line.  On command, we churned through a big patch of squirrelly water out into the main flow of the Mississippi.

By this time I knew my main competition would come from fellow Memphian Adam Davis.  Though he'd never beaten me in a race before, I knew better than to take him lightly.  Adam has improved steadily over the last several seasons and he raced extremely well in the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race earlier this year.  He took the overall win just a week ago in a race on the Ouachita River down at West Monroe, Louisiana.  On top of that, I still wasn't entirely over the bug I'd been dealing with all week, so I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Adam and I put some distance on the rest of the pack and settled into our mid-race pace.  I let Adam take the lead, falling back onto his stern wake, and I hoped to hang out there for a while, conserving energy as much as possible before attempting some kind of move in the second half of the race.  Adam was paddling a strong pace and it took some work on my part to hold my position.  I wasn't feeling terrible but I was clearly not a hundred percent, and I knew that if Adam didn't eventually tire I would have real difficulty going for the win.

At Mile 5 I threw in a surge and took the lead.  I kept the pressure on for some 30 seconds to see if I could open a gap, but Adam was sticking right there with me.  So I settled down and cruised along with him on my stern, only fair since he'd pulled me for almost a half-hour.  We rounded the broad rightward bend of the river with Buck Island to our right and the state of Mississippi to our left, and paddled toward the industrial facilities that sit on the outskirts of Helena.

From our position the entrance to Helena Harbor was not easy to spot, and we ended up paddling side-by-side wondering aloud: "Is that it?  No... is that it?  No..."  I finally managed to make out the near "corner" of the riverbank where the harbor began, standing out ever so subtly against the wooded backdrop.  I picked up the pace a little, but Adam stayed right with me.  I knew what I had to do: stay on Adam's side wake as long as I could so I'd be in position to take the lead should the race come down to a final sprint.  I couldn't tell if Adam was feeling any better than I was, but if he were to throw in a hard surge with a kilometer or more to go, he would drop me.

He didn't do that.  As the orange finish buoys came into view several hundred meters up into the harbor, I hung on his right-side wake until I was sure we'd reduced the distance to a sprint I could handle.  I began to hammer, and so did Adam.  For several seconds I thought he was going to hold me off, but then I realized I was gaining, centimeter by centimeter.  My confidence grew as my bow edged into the lead.  A hundred meters became fifty, fifty became twenty, twenty became ten, and at last I crossed the line no more than a third of a boatlength ahead of Adam.

At this time I haven't yet seen the official results, but I know our time was a little under 55 minutes.  The race had been billed as a 9-miler, but my G.P.S. device measured the course at about 9.73 miles.  With the river flowing at a medium-low level of 17.7 feet on the Helena gauge, I think a sub-one-hour finish is not bad.

A 23-foot-long Kevlar touring canoe paddled by Robert Cheek and Scott Shirey took third place overall in one hour, three minutes and change.

I'd paid an extra fee for a race volunteer to drive my car back down from the start, and I availed myself of the dry clothes and water and other essentials that awaited within.  We enjoyed a post-race lunch and a brief awards ceremony, and it was time to head home.  Since I'd driven down to Helena on the Mississippi side of the river, I elected to make the trip back on the Arkansas side.  The Arkansas Delta looks very much like the Mississippi Delta, but the latter seems to get all the attention because it's where Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and traded his soul to the Devil for some wicked guitar skills.

This morning I'm feeling not any worse than I had before, but not any better, either.  Lots of coughing and sinus congestion are carrying the day, and now I seem to have lost my voice, too.  Please don't call me up on the telephone.


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Friday, October 4, 2019

Illness is never timely

The top story this week is that I've come down with a pretty bad cold.  My throat started feeling sore on Sunday, and that's the typical sign that I've got one coming on.  Since then my condition has followed the familiar trajectory.  My sinuses are swollen and clogged, and my energy level is low as my body has had to fight off this crud.

I've mainly spent this week trying to get as much rest as I possibly can, hoping that maybe I'll be through the worst of this by the time I line up to race tomorrow.  On Tuesday Joe and I paddled a half-lap of the harbor, and that was it.  Today I went back downtown and paddled for 50 minutes, doing six 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals midway through.  Once I was warmed up I actually felt okay in the boat.  Probably my biggest impediment was my body's current achey state, and I may just have to accept that tomorrow's race may involve a bit more discomfort than usual.  In any case, this is my last race of the year and I expect it'll take a triple-digit fever to stop me from going.

One bit of good news: I'm pleased to report that my eye exam revealed nothing out of the ordinary on Monday.  The doctor updated my glasses prescription, but said everything otherwise looks good.


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