Some rest, some strength work, some intensity in the boat

Just in case anybody's curious about the goings-on at Casa de Elmore... I've just wrapped up another big round of masonry work and am taking it easy for a couple of days to admire the results.  I spent most of this morning doing some serious housecleaning because of all the dust that project produced.  Previously the mortar between the bricks was crumbling and raining sand all over everything, and I hope this work I've done has fixed that problem.  Even in the Before Times I was sort of a homebody, and now in Pandemic Times I'm spending more time at home than ever, so I think it's worth a few rounds of hard work to make my home as pleasing as it can be.

On Tuesday I did a relaxed loop of the harbor with Joe.  That felt good after the fairly strenuous paddling I'd done on Monday.

Yesterday I did a round of the new strength routine and then headed back to the river.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I went out on the Mississippi and did a workout that I first did under Dawid Mocke's watch back in February as we paddled from Muizenberg Beach to Fish Hoek Beach in South Africa.  I did ten strokes on, ten strokes off, twenty strokes on, ten strokes off, thirty strokes on, ten strokes off, forty strokes on, ten strokes off... and so on, all the way to a hundred strokes on.  Once I'm up over fifty strokes on, I'm really feeling this workout--ten strokes off seems like a very meager rest interval at this point.

After completing this workout, I paddled easy back to the harbor and up to the monorail bridge.  Then I timed myself in a bridge-to-bridge sprint.  I didn't have a particularly crisp start, and by the time I reached the halfway mark I could tell I wasn't on pace for a fast time.  I was tired from my workout on the river, and it felt like every time I bore down I was actually slowing down a little.  My thighs were throbbing big-time in the last hundred meters.  I broke the southern plane of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge with a time of 2 minutes, 7 seconds.  Not terrible, but not really that good either.

The Fahrenheit highs have been in the 90s most of the week, but this might be our last hot stretch: the extended forecast is showing highs in the 80s with some rain this weekend, and then highs in the lower 80s and even the 70s for the next couple of weeks.  And of course, the official end of summer is less than two weeks away.

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