On Monday morning I drove through some blizzard-like conditions on my way through northwest Alabama and northeast Mississippi. The snow wasn't sticking to the road, fortunately, but in places there was a decent amount of accumulation on the trees and grass.
Once I was back in Memphis there was little accumulation, but a light snow fell most of the afternoon and the conditions were windy and frigid. But since then the weather has been milder, and the extended forecast shows Fahrenheit temperatures in the 40s and 50s for the foreseeable future.
I'd planned to join Joe for our usual Tuesday paddle, but he called and told me he couldn't make it. As it turned out, I was happy to take another rest day after the long drive home as well as the exhausting ten days in the boat. I spent Tuesday getting re-settled at home, cleaning my boat and putting my gear away, and otherwise doing nothing.
On Wednesday morning I decided to go down to the river. The temperature was in the high 30s, but the sun was out and it was warming up quickly. I got in the boat and did a workout similar to a couple we did down at camp: eight 3-minute pieces with one minute recovery, the odd-numbered pieces being done at 60 strokes per minute and the even-numbered pieces being done at something closer to, but still a bit below, what I would normally do. Paddling at 60 spm was simple enough because I could simply look at my watch and take a stroke each second. For those other pieces, I was sort of all over the place, paddling anywhere from 69 spm to 77 spm... I may need to invest in one of those Vaaka Cadence Sensors if I'm going to continue doing a lot of stroke-rate-based work. And I had a hard time translating the effort into any particular boat speed: at the outset I thought maybe 7.0 miles per hour was a reasonable target, but in fact it was very difficult to maintain that, and I frequently dipped as low as 6.3 mph. A stiff south wind was blowing and that made a mess of my desire for reliable G.P.S. readings. Down in Florida I didn't pay much attention to my speed because we were paddling both upstream and downstream on the Rainbow River, and the presence of other athletes provided feedback on how well I was moving the boat.
Since then I've continued to feel very tired, and I might just need to chill out a while longer and let myself recover from the camp. Chris Hipgrave mentioned in his blog that he too was falling apart by the end of camp, so at least there's nothing unusual about my exhaustion.
The workouts we did at the training camp were part of a training regime that Chris has designed with help from a Slovenian athlete and coach named Maks Frančeškin. Chris told me that he's about eighteen months into his online coaching arrangement with Maks, and I could see that it was paying off significantly: Chris has always been a strong athlete in the almost 25 years that I have known him, but at the camp he seemed to be performing at an entirely different level. In short pieces and long pieces, using low stroke rates and high stroke rates, he was leaving me in the dust time and time again.
Maks is available to create a training plan for any athlete (for a fee, of course). I've exchanged a few e-mails with him to see what he thinks would work for me. I'll share more soon about what he suggests and how I decide to go about things.
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