Back with a vengeance

I woke up Monday morning feeling some soreness in my arms.  I guess paddling on Sunday caught my body off guard after eight days out of the boat.

The harbor was showing signs of thawing by Monday, but it was still nowhere near paddleable, so again I went up to the north end of Mud Island to find some liquid water.  I paddled up the Wolf River and found it almost completely ice-free.

Monday is usually a day off for me, but this week Maks gave me a Monday workout to make up for the long break.  He made it a hard one, too--you might even say it was 90-proof!  It was three sets of four 90-second pieces at 90 strokes per minute with 90 seconds recovery.  The middle set was to be done with "little resistance" (I made it a single golf whiffle ball tied to the hull), the first and third sets with no resistance.

After so many low-stroke-rate workouts, 90 spm was a shock to the system.  It was downright brutal with the resistance on my boat; one thing I've noticed about paddling with resistance is that it's hard not to paddle with a low stroke rate.  I sort of wondered whether my one whiffle ball was more than what Maks considers "little resistance," especially in combination with the snowmelt-swollen Wolf River current I was paddling against.  I did the last three pieces coming back down the Wolf, and they were noticeably less stressful than the previous nine had been.

Tuesday morning I was expecting to do another session at the alternate training site, but when I got downtown I was pleasantly surprised to find the harbor nearly ice-free.  While it was fun to paddle in a different place for a couple of days, the novelty was wearing off fast, due largely to the hassle of moving my boat on and off the car and not having the familiar environs of the dock as my staging area.  I'm quite aware that I'm spoiled--many paddlers do all their workouts transporting the boat to and from the water, after all.  But I was very happy to return to my cushy home base just the same.  And of course I am paying for the privilege.

Tuesday's workout was less intense than Monday's in terms of stroke rate, but I thought it was ultimately just as tiring.  I did four sets of (5 minutes at 64 spm/2 minutes at 76 spm/3 minutes at 64 spm/2 minutes at 76 spm).  It was quite an endurance session to do on top of Monday's hard workout.

Yesterday's workout was six sets of (4 minutes at 72 spm with resistance on the boat/3 minutes rest/2 minutes at 56 spm without resistance, but at maximum power/3 minutes rest).  Maks said to "feel the power on the blade with resistance, and try feeling the same power without it while on a lower stroke rate."  I did indeed notice the power in both cases.  The workout turned out to be not as taxing as the previous couple, though fatigue was setting in by the fifth set.  I could feel my power leaving me in the final 56-spm piece, just like Superman feels when he opens a package of Kryptonite that Lex Luthor has sent him in the mail.

The weather for the first half of the week was a very nice change from the ten straight days of sub-freezing temperatures we'd had.  The skies were mostly sunny and the temperature rose into the mid 60s on the Fahrenheit thermometer.  A front came though last night and today was not so lovely--mostly cloudy with a north wind and a high in the 50s.  But it's still a lot nicer than what we had last week.

Today's session was a "strong" 60 minutes in what Maks calls the "A1" stroke-rate range (less than 75 spm, more or less).  Maks added a note that this was "to clear your head and make those lungs work a bit ;)."  Of course, Maks well knew that my lungs had been working plenty... hence the little "winky face."  Anyway, it felt good just to go out and paddle without any intervals or any technical stuff to think about beyond general stroke form.  I believe that my stroke rate for my normal cruising pace has gone down a bit: back in December I measured it at about 72 spm, but today it rarely exceeded 68 spm, and today's paddle was a bit harder than a casual cruise.

Whew... this is a long week.  And the weekend promises more exhaustion, with five sessions (gym session included) in three days.

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