The week started overcast, breezy, and cool with some occasional showers. It was a little annoying having to get some of my cooler-weather clothing back out, but the truth is we’ll be missing this kind of weather by mid-summer.
On Tuesday I went out and did what Maks called an “aerobic pyramid”: three 18-minute pieces with 2 minutes recovery in between, paddling at 64 strokes per minute for the first and third pieces and at 68 spm for the second. The biggest challenge over an 18-minute piece is keeping my mind on task so that my stroke rate doesn’t wander all over the place. I used the time to visualize what this Saturday’s race might be like. I’ve always been pretty good at staying laser-focused on what’s happening in a race, but one can never get too much practice.
Wednesday was breezy and cool again but the sun was out. My workout was four sets of four (1 minute on/1 minute off) at 80 spm, with "big resistance" (all three golf whiffle balls) for the first set, no resistance for the second set, "moderate resistance" (two balls) for the third, and no resistance for the fourth. It was the latest of many power-building workouts, this time at the pace of a longish race like the one this Saturday. The pieces with resistance were tough, but not as painful as I thought they might be.
Yesterday morning I went out for a sprint session: eight 15-second sprints, with a flying start every 4th minute. It was a good workout to do two days before a race. Maks told me to put all the power I had into them, and I also focused on staying smooth. I've long thought a smooth sprint is a good sprint, just like in my woodworking shop I believe that seamless joinery is strong joinery, and just like a rock climber will tell you that a neat knot in a rope is a strong knot.
It was beautiful down on the riverfront yesterday morning, with clear blue skies and a lighter breeze than we'd had the previous few days. It was dead calm on the Mississippi, and I did a couple of my sprints out there.
Readers here in the U.S. have likely heard the news about the Hernando DeSoto Bridge that carries Interstate 40 over the Mississippi here at Memphis: it's shut down indefinitely, for reasons detailed in this article. Even barge traffic on the river is suspended while authorities determine whether the bridge can continue supporting its own weight. I've paddled under the part of the bridge that spans the harbor, but I haven't yet tried to paddle under it out on the main river, so it remains to be seen whether any law enforcement types have a problem with me doing that. Whatever the case, it's a serious disruption of both a major road artery across this nation and the continent's biggest waterway.
This morning it was time to hit the road, bound for the Louisiana Bayou Country for tomorrow's race. Maks had given me a pre-race workout to do, so I planned to do that en route. When I’m traveling down through Mississippi my go-to training site is usually Enid Reservoir in Yalobusha County, but today I had a small item of business to take care of in the Delta town of Sumner, so I looked for another alternative. The Tallahatchie River, made famous in the Bobby Gentry song “Ode to Billy Joe,” flows near Sumner, so when I crossed a bridge over what looked like a river on my way out of town, I decided to stop and paddle.
The water was muddy, just as Ms. Gentry sang. But once I was on the water I noticed there was very little current even by Delta standards, and several hundred meters from the highway bridge the riverbed disappeared into dense vegetation. I suspected that I must not be on the main Tallahatchie, but one of its oxbows (a check of the Google map later confirmed this). Fortunately there was plenty of water from the recent storms in the area, and the oxbow was long in the other direction, so it worked just fine for my workout. It was two sets of (6 times 1 minute on/1 minute off at 60 spm and 4 times 45 seconds on/75 seconds off at 76 spm). I used light resistance on the boat so I could really feel the pressure on the blades.
I expect not too many surfskis get paddled in the Tallahatchie watershed or anyplace else in the Mississippi Delta. In any case, thanks to all my moseying around in northern Mississippi, it was dark by the time I got to where I’m spending the night, at a campground in Morgan City, Louisiana. My site was hard to find in the dark—just my luck, I didn’t think to bring a flashlight—and the place is crowded with noisy people. Sigh... Time to try to get some rest.
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