It's been an entire month since I last posted something here. I can't really blame those readers who have given up on me by now. I'm grateful if you're still here.
I have spent the last month recovering, decompressing, thinking, reflecting, attending to some other areas of life that I'd neglected... doing just about everything but paddling, in other words. Don't worry, there's plenty of paddling in my future; I just needed some time off to get hungry for it again.
Several weeks ago Dawid Mocke posted on social media that there was an opening in the downwind camp that he and his brother Jasper will be leading at the end of January at Fish Hoek, Cape Town, South Africa. I thought hard about it for about 24 hours, and decided to sign up. And so I now have a purpose for my next phase of training. This week I am settling into a new routine after my nice long break.
For at least the first few weeks, I plan to train mostly out of the boat. I'll paddle a couple of times a week, but my more strenuous work will consist of bike riding and gym activities. I did do a good bit of leisurely bike riding during the break, and now I'm ramping up the intensity a bit, with some strong rides of an hour or so and some intervals, too.
This week has been pretty typical of what I plan to do for the next month or so. On Sunday I rode from my house down to the south end of downtown Memphis, across the Harahan Bridge over the Mississippi River, and down into Big River Park on the Arkansas side, where the annual Outdoors, Inc., Grit & Gravel bicycle race was taking place. I watched the racers, including my friends Joe and Carol Lee, complete several laps, and then came back home. My total distance was around 16 miles or 25.7 kilometers... not bad for my clunky old low-tech mountain bike.
On Tuesday I did a somewhat quick 80 minute paddle out on the Mississippi, throwing in a few long surges. It was my first paddle of any intensity since my last race back on October 9.
On Wednesday I rode my bike east from my house, picking up the Greenline and following it across the Wolf River in east Memphis. Then I checked out the newly-completed section of the Wolf River Greenway from its junction with the Greenline to just south of Walnut Grove Road. Then I rode back home. My distance was around 17 miles or 27.4 km.
Yesterday I rode to the park just west of my house, where there's a paved loop in the woods maybe 2 kilometers long. I rode two hard laps of that loop, and after each lap I stopped to do a couple of sets of pushups and Hindu squats. Over the next month-plus I'll increase the number of laps I do, probably topping out around five.
Today I started a new gym routine with a couple of dumbbell exercises (bicep curls and front & lat raises) and several plank-type exercises on the stability ball.
I'm good and sore now after these first few days of harder work. Tomorrow I might do a nature hike, but keep things easy so I can recover a bit. I plan to do more weeks like this one for the next little while, and I probably won't paddle more than twice a week until the start of the new year.
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