I spent most of Friday doing more ice storm cleanup work at my rental property and in the alley behind my place. I used a chainsaw to cut the bigger stuff and a handsaw or pruning shears for the smaller stuff.
Such work leaves me tired and sore, but I like it anyway. I find it relaxing somehow. And I'm pretty good at it, too. I'm grateful to my dad for that. Fairly often I get asked if my dad taught me woodworking, and the short answer is no, but the longer, more accurate answer is that he had a lot to do with it. He made his living as a lawyer, but when he wasn't poring over boring documents in his office he was often working in the yard or addressing various household chores, and I think he got the same kind of relaxation from it that I do now. Thanks to him I grew up in a house equipped with saws, shovels, rakes, hammers, screwdrivers, and all kinds of other things that seem like normal trappings of life to me but apparently not to everybody. Sometimes I encounter somebody who never learned to use landscape tools or other tools, and I realize that I'm fortunate in that regard.
We had unseasonably warm weather Thursday and Friday, but by yesterday morning we were back to the kind of weather I expect in February. When I got down to the river it was around 38 degrees Fahrenheit and overcast with a biting north wind blowing. I got in the boat and headed for the north end of the harbor, slogging into that wind. Once I'd warmed up and done three 8-stroke sprints, I launched into what's become sort of a bread-and-butter workout for me in recent years: ten 30-second sprints starting every third minute. I did the first two sprints into the wind, and that was a drag, but at last I reached the harbor's north end and turned to have the wind at my back. I was tired by the last couple of sprints, but the workout went well enough and once it was over I paddled easy until I'd completed an hour in the boat. Then I took out and got into dry clothes as fast as I could. I've said this many times: 38 degrees and overcast and windy is much worse than 28 degrees and sunny and calm.
As if to prove my point, this morning it was around 28 degrees (30, actually, but still below freezing), sunny, and calm when I got to the riverfront. It was time for some old-fashioned over-distance training, and I set out to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar. I felt pretty comfortable, especially once I was paddling up the Mississippi with the mild south breeze at my back. I tried to keep the stroke race below 70 strokes per minute until it was time to ferry across the main channel, at which time I picked it up to around 80. I was looking forward to rounding the north end of the Bar and having the current helping me, but that south breeze picked up a bit and that made the downriver leg more of a chore than I'd anticipated. By this time it was probably in the mid to high 30s--still pretty chilly--and I had to stiffen my upper lip and forge ahead into that wind. It was still nicer than yesterday because of the sunshine, but I was feeling a bit chilled and very tired when I got back to the dock.
I made the trip in about 30 seconds over two hours. I try to break two hours when I paddle around the Bar, but today's river level (19.1 feet on the Memphis gauge) was lower than usual for when I do this circumnavigation, and the sandbar at the Bar's north end was more exposed and made the course a few hundred meters longer.
Paddling around the Bar is always taxing and I was pretty worn out the rest of the day. But it felt good to have done good work in cold weather.
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