Making the best of a summer at home

Right now I should be savoring the environs of the Columbia River Gorge.  Should be.

I decided about a month ago that a trip out there for the Gorge Downwind Championships wasn't in the cards for me.  The organizers continued to try everything they could to make the event happen for a much smaller, more local group of racers, but this latest surge of COVID-19 cases proved to be one obstacle too many, and they called it off entirely.

Here in the Mid South, summer is shaping up into its usual self: humid and hot.  This weekend has been pretty bad.  While the air temperature hasn't been as bad is it can be--low 90s Fahrenheit, as opposed to high 90s or 100s--the humidity has pushed the heat index into triple digits.

Such weather has exacerbated a rough patch I'm going through as an athlete.  I'm always tired after I paddle, of course, but whereas it's usually an endorphin-charged feeling of exhilaration, lately it's been an exhausted, beat-down sort of tired.  I noticed it last weekend and ended up taking a break last Sunday.  Then I took a couple of days off after paddling with John Wellens and Bruce Poacher last Monday.  I was hoping I might have some renewed energy by the time I went to the river Thursday, but I still ended up laboring through it.  It was more of the same yesterday.

I got a bit of a break this morning: there were some thunderstorms in the region, and though hardly a drop fell on me, I had some cloud cover and a nice breeze out on the river.  Not coincidentally, it was the best I'd felt in the boat in at least a week.

What exactly did I do these three times out paddling?  Well, I did sets of three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor all three days.  I was hoping to find some barge traffic on the river so I could do some surfing and have fun and get wet, but the river was deserted Thursday and yesterday, and today all I saw was one southbound rig whose wake was too small for doing anything.  What I ended up doing instead was playing around in the eddies below the Hernando DeSoto Bridge's pilings.  The eddies are quite boily with occasional exploding whirlpools, and I did a bunch of S-turn-like moves where I keep my boat moving across the eddies without having to stop and brace or anything like that.  It's an effort to build skill and confidence in the boat.

It sounds like summer will be baring its teeth even more this coming week.  I've heard that we can expect high temperatures in the high 90s by Tuesday.


For more information on what this blog is about, click here.