Cooling the agenda back down for a while

I was out of the boat all week until Friday.  I had an overabundance of nuisance matters to deal with, and trips to the river moved to the back burner for a while.

I was sort of ready for a break anyway.  The fact is that I'd been working pretty hard since late November.  First there was the effort to be fit for my trip to South Africa, and then there was the training block I did for the race at Ocean Springs last weekend.

And there's just not much in the way of racing events anytime soon--not within a reasonable drive of Memphis, anyway.  Sadly, many events that used to be staples of my schedule have faded away: the Outdoors race here at Memphis, the race on the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, even the Little Rock race. These days there seem to be no events within five hours of here.  It's a six-hour drive down to Ocean Springs, and I just don't have the energy or desire to do that too many times in a year.  The current high price of gasoline doesn't help.

So I'm sort of hitting the reset button.  After a few days off from athletic stuff I'm settling back into some base training for a while.  On Friday I did just an easy 40-minute paddle.  Wanting to incorporate some more bike riding into the mix, yesterday I rode about 24 kilometers (15 miles) out the Greater Memphis Greenline and back.

This morning the weather was cool but lovely, and I decided to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  I think my stamina is definitely up these days--I felt really good during the entire upriver leg, and didn't start feeling some fatigue until I was leaving the Loosahatchie Chute and heading back toward the harbor.  A good bit of the sandy northern end of the Bar was exposed at this morning's level of 19.8 feet on the Memphis gauge, so my course was about 400 meters longer than it was when I paddled around the Bar back on March 6 when the level was 30.3 feet.  My total distance today was 20.09 km (12.5 mi.), and I completed it in one hour, 56 minutes, 50 seconds.

I've been tired the rest of the day, but it's generally a good tired.  I'm looking forward to some fun relaxed activity for the next little while.

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