Tuesday was a very rainy day here in Memphis and the Mid South. If you look back over my posts of the last few months you'll see a few tales of paddling in a bit of rain, but none of those episodes involved paddling in a torrential downpour from first stroke to last.
Well, that changed on Tuesday morning. I drove down to the river in a steady rain. Then I sat in my car in the parking lot until it slacked off enough for me to run down to the marina without getting thoroughly soaked. More heavy rain moved in as I readied my gear under the marina's roof. While doing that I discovered that I'd forgotten the shoes that I wear while paddling. A lot of paddlers prefer to go barefoot, but I don't like to at all. I need a bit of friction between my feet and the footboard, and even when I adjust my footstrap as tight as it will go, my bare feet aren't big enough to fit snugly between footboard and strap, meaning that I can't utilize foot pressure against the strap as much as I'd like.
And so, when I realized I didn't have my shoes, it felt almost like a deal-breaker. I strongly considered forgetting the whole paddling-in-the-rain business and running back up to the car. But then I thought about how important it is for an athlete to adapt when unexpected things happen, especially an athlete in an outdoor/wilderness sport like kayaking and canoeing. The Mocke brothers mention it in their online video courses, and I used to hear whitewater slalom athletes and coaches talk about it. I remember a time years ago when I traveled to a race and forgot my shoes, and raced barefoot and didn't perform terribly.
So, I decided I would paddle barefoot. Fortunately it was not cold: the Fahrenheit temperature was hovering in the high 60s. I waited for another lull in the rain to run out on the dock and get my boat off the rack and put it in the water. The rain intensified once more as I paddled on my way, and was pretty heavy for a good 50 of the 60 minutes I paddled. When it was over I threw my boat back on the rack, got into dry clothes as fast as I could, made a dash for the car during the next slackening of rain, and repaired to my nice dry home.
The rain continued through most of Tuesday afternoon. By yesterday morning the temperature had plummeted to the low 30s; rain returned in the late afternoon, and when I woke up this morning it was raining just as hard as it had on Tuesday. And this time it was cold, hovering just over the freezing point. By the time I got down to the river my car's temperature display said it was 35 degrees, but at least the rain had moved out for a spell, and the wind wasn't bad. And I remembered my shoes this time.
Once I'd warmed up and done three 8-stroke sprints, it was time for me to go another round in the pain locker: yes, six more 1000-meter pieces starting every 8th minute. I'd hoped to maintain close to 12 kilometers per hour through the session, and I felt okay in the first piece, but it sort of went downhill from there. By the second half of the workout I was slowing down noticeably. I tried to keep taking consistent strokes at the slower pace and not fall apart. I'm beginning to think that it might not be the best idea to have specific speed goals, seeing as how speed is affected by atmospheric conditions and even the water temperature, not to mention the fact that I do most of my training in a heavy, beat-up old boat. For years I was a Luddite, relying very little if at all on a G.P.S. device, and maybe I need to go back to that.
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