It's been nice spending time with my family at Dauphin Island on the Alabama Gulf Coast this week. But it's not without a few challenges. The biggest is my energy level: I've felt really tired since I got here. I'd had a tough weekend with the hard race and the long drive down here, but even a very inactive day on Monday didn't leave me feeling all that rested. I think my diet is part of the issue: I just don't have as much control over what I eat when I'm away from home like this. It's messed up my digestion, and that in turn has messed up my hemorrhoids, and that's not the most pleasant condition when you're sitting in a boat in salt water.
(Yes, you can count on My Training Blog by Elmore to make a beach vacation sound awful. Don't worry--I'm managing to have some fun, too.)
Another challenge is my paddling priorities. As usual, my coach has sent me a workout plan for the week. Last Saturday's race notwithstanding, I like the direction I'm headed under Maks's guidance and I'm doing my best to get everything I can out of his workouts. What's more, I'm paying for his advice, so it would be dumb of me to ignore it. But I've also discovered some nice downwind conditions here on the coast this week. The wind isn't fierce--it hasn't been more than 13 or 15 knots, maybe--but it's been blowing steadily for days and the conditions have had a chance to build.
Here's a map of Dauphin Island; the wind direction is noted in pink at the bottom:
Our condo is right on the beach on the Gulf side of the island. On Tuesday morning I carried my boat out there, launched into the surf, and paddled out past the impact zone hoping to find placid-enough water to do my prescribed workout. But the water wasn't placid. What I found instead were good-sized downwind swells. So I decided to play hooky from my coach's schedule and catch some runs.
An ideal downwind run is approximately parallel to the shoreline, and the thing to do is shuttle a vehicle a few miles downwind of where you plan to launch so you can ride the swells without any of that pesky upwind paddling. But here at Dauphin Island the wind is blowing in from the south, so you have to paddle into the wind (away from shore) for a while before turning around and surfing back in. So my Tuesday morning session amounted to some little downwind intervals. I would paddle upwind far enough to have maybe five minutes of downwind to do before I had to paddle upwind again.
I'd forgotten what hard work downwind paddling is. After a couple of minutes of sprinting hard after runs, I was gasping for breath. So the "interval" model worked well for me. Paddling back upwind was my recovery interval: the conditions were small enough that I was able to paddle pretty easy and still make progress up and over the oncoming swells.
I'm plenty fit from all the training I've done this spring, but I realize that I'm not "downwind fit" at this moment, so that's something I hope to work on between now and my arrival out in the Columbia River Gorge less than a month from now.
Yesterday I drove to a public access on the Mississippi Sound side of the island so I could find some quieter water for my coach's workout. I put in at the east end of the island, near the mouth of Mobile Bay, and I could see more great downwind swells moving up into the mouth from the Gulf. I put that out of my mind and paddled into the network of canals that serve the residential areas on Dauphin's north side (marked with a red asterisk on the map above). I did three sets of (four times (2 minutes on/1 minute off) at 60 strokes per minute and four times (1 minute on/2 minutes off) at 80 spm). Maks told me to bring the power to these pieces: "find the catch early on and do the required leg/hip work." The workout hadn't seemed all that bad on paper, but it was tough. By the time I was starting the third set my muscles were throbbing and all I wanted was for it to be over.
Once it was over, I paddled back to where my truck was parked and took a few minutes to rest and drink some water. I was very tired, but those downwind swells sure looked inviting, so I decided to go back out for a quick run. I paddled into the wind for about a kilometer, then chased the runs back up toward Mobile Bay. I worked on the basics, trying to put my "nose in the hole" and keep the boat running downhill for as long as possible. Once I was back at the parking area, I tore myself away and took out. I was dead-dog tired and I spent the rest of the day mostly lying around.
This morning it seemed that the wind had abated. I wondered if maybe the downwind opportunities were over for this trip. But I'd already made up my mind to find quieter water for another of my coach's assignments, so it was nice not to have that distraction. I had an errand to run on the mainland a few miles north of the island, so I decided to paddle on the Fowl River near its confluence with Mobile Bay. I did a fairly easy contrast workout: six sets of (3 min. at 60 spm/2 min. at 48 spm/1 min. at 68 spm/1 min. rest). It was a chance for me to focus on posture and stroke mechanics. I thought the Fowl River was a pretty place in spite of the occasional gaudy McMansion that marred its banks. It reminded me of other streams I've visited along the Gulf Coast, like Old Fort Bayou over at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
By this afternoon the wind seemed to have picked back up a bit, and shifted a little to the southwest. I decided to carry my boat down to the beach and see what kind of downwind action might be had. It turned out the conditions were good, though I had a hard time catching and prolonging runs. I paddled into the wind until I was about 2000 meters offshore, and did several laps back in and back out. Downwind is hard to do well, but man, it's fun when you succeed.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment