When I got up yesterday morning it was freezing, quite literally--the temperature was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But there was no time to worry over the weather, because I had two in-the-boat sessions on the schedule.
The morning session was essentially a warmup for the afternoon one: 40 minutes paddling at what Maks calls the "A1 zone"--60-75 strokes per minute. I've ordered a Vaaka Cadence Sensor, but until it arrives I'm trying to get better counting strokes and familiarize myself with the various rates. Yesterday morning I paddled for 10 minutes at 60 spm (easy to do because it's one stroke per second), 10 minutes at 68-70 spm, 10 minutes at 64-66 spm, and 10 minutes at 72-75 spm. I also continued working on the stroke modifications that Maks recommended. I stayed in the northern half of the harbor where the wooded banks offered a bit more protection from the biting north wind.
By the afternoon it had warmed up into the low 50s, and the wind had abated. The prescribed workout was eight pairs of 250-meter pieces with two minutes recovery, the first piece of each pair being done at 84 spm and the second one at 40 spm.
I was expecting it to be an exhausting affair--it's easy to jump to that conclusion when I see sixteen 250s on paper--but once it was underway, I found I was rarely breathing hard. Instead, it was the concentration required as I tried to get the stroke rate right and take good strokes that made the workout tiring. I was putting maximum power into each stroke during the 40 spm pieces, and that stressed my muscles pretty thoroughly.
I don't paddle in the afternoon very often, but as I left the river yesterday I was reminded of one of the benefits, especially in the wintertime: the late-afternoon sky reflecting off a calm Mississippi River is beautiful.
On tap this morning was six sets of (5 minutes at 60 spm/1 minute rest/3 minutes at 64 spm/1 minute rest/2 minutes at 68 spm/2 minutes rest). I did this while paddling up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Wolf River and back. Intermittent showers made me good and wet and chilled by the time I was finished. The biggest challenge of the workout was the subtle degrees of change from one stroke rate to the next--each time it was a matter of adding just one stroke per fifteen seconds. Because of that I tried to stay dead-on to each rate, and so I felt like I was expending a lot more brain energy than muscle energy.
Tomorrow is a day off... finally. It remains to be seen how sustainable this number of sessions per week is going to be for the long term, given all the other "adulting" stuff I have to do. But for now I want to jump in with both feet and see what happens. As I mentioned in my previous post, all this "new" stuff has me on the verge of sensory overload, and I'm trying to be patient while my body and brain internalize it all. I'm definitely putting some faith in Maks to know what he's doing, but it's not a blind faith: down in Florida I saw first-hand how much Chris Hipgrave has improved, and then there's the fact that in the last decade or so the Slovenian team, with which Maks is affiliated, has been right up among the top paddlesports national teams in the world.
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