Pain and ennui

I hurt my right wrist on Monday.  Or, rather, I aggravated an injury that's been nagging at me for the last year or so.  Mondays are when I've been doing that fence-rebuilding project over at my rental property, and during this week's work session I managed to wrench my wrist some wrong way while pulling nails out of the old fence.

The bum wrist has never really affected my paddling, and when I met Joe for a loop of the harbor Tuesday morning, it held up just fine.  But for a good 36 hours or so it hurt pretty bad anytime I was just sitting around and was unpleasant to live with.  By now the pain has ebbed back to the vague level it's been at for most of the last year.

The pain killed my motivation to start up my new strength routine Tuesday.  Instead, I waited and did it Wednesday.

This latest motivational challenge highlights the holding pattern we racers are all in these days.  With all races canceled at least through June, serious training doesn't seem like a pressing matter.  I'm still waiting to hear whether the Gorge Downwind race will go ahead in July; some announcement about that is supposed to come at the first of next month.  In the meantime, I'm trying to stay in some baseline-level of shape so I can ramp the training up if in fact I will be racing on the Columbia River in July.

At the same time, all this uncertainty is a reminder of how important it is to enjoy every time out paddling for its own sake.  Every session doesn't have to be an obligation to cross off the to-do list.  Indeed, I'm fortunate to be paddling at all these days.  I think there are parts of the world where even that is forbidden right now.

That's what I was telling myself as I went down to the river this morning.  Earlier in the week the wind forecast looked promising for some downwind action, but by last night the outlook had been revised to almost nothing.  A period of heavy rain had just concluded and conditions were as calm as could be as I walked down to the dock.  I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and paddled out onto a river that was quite placid save for some chop left over from a couple of barge rigs that had passed through.  I worked for a while on keeping the boat gliding in those conditions, and then back in the harbor I threw in a long surge back to the dock.


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