Aside from a gym session Tuesday afternoon, I took a few days completely off. I felt like I needed to clear my head a bit. I didn't get back in the boat until Thursday morning.
One of my big challenges is relaxing my body in the boat. It's not a new challenge. I've always been sort of a tightly-wound, spasmodic mess. But I think it's been more of an issue in recent months, and I think it's at least part of the cause of all the muscle soreness and aches and pains I've been dealing with.
Why can't I relax? Well, I reckon I'm no more immune to all the things that cause stress than anybody else. I think my own angst might be rooted in the state of our society where it seems more and more people dislike one another and a global oligarchical cabal that's leveraging that animosity to chip away at democratic institutions, all while the planet careens toward uninhabitability... not to get too specific about it or anything. Oh, and let's not forget this pandemic that's been thrown in just for yuks.
I was tense again during my 60-minute paddle Thursday morning. Once I'd re-entered the harbor and was heading back to the dock, I made a conscious effort to settle down with a little drill. Basically, I just started taking ten strokes at a time while keeping my body as relaxed as I could make it. After a while I bumped that up to fifteen strokes, then twenty; then I was back at the dock.
I stayed home Friday and did another gym session. Yesterday morning I did some stretching at home, trying to focus on breathing deeply and keeping my muscles relaxed, and then went to the river and did some more relaxation drills while warming up in the boat. Then I did three 8-stroke sprints and commenced a hard-but-not-too-hard workout: six 5-minute pieces in which I paddled at medium intensity for 3 minutes, harder intensity for 90 seconds, and sub-maximal intensity for 30 seconds. I kept the stroke rate below 70 strokes per minute during the medium-intensity parts, between 80 and 90 spm during the harder-intensity parts, and above 100 spm during the sub-maximal-intensity parts.
This morning I paddled a steady 80 minutes, going out of the harbor and up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Wolf River before returning to where I'd started. As I paddled I pondered what I might be doing to cause the muscle soreness in my left shoulder/biceps area. I doubt there are too many kayakers out there who are truly symmetrical in how they paddle, and I paid close attention to how well I was using my larger muscle groups as I stroked on my left side.
Yes, I'm doing a lot of thinking about all this: my physical struggles, my mental struggles... all of it. And maybe that itself is part of the problem. This afternoon I read this article in the Memphis newspaper about Memphis Redbirds shortstop Paul DeJong. DeJong (pronounced "de-young") broke into the major leagues with the Saint Louis Cardinals in 2017 and was one of the team's rising stars; but in the last two seasons his batting prowess has abandoned him and now he's been sent down to the minors, where he's trying to rediscover the magic. The last part of the article contains some advice that maybe I should heed:
DeJong was a pre-med student who majored in biochemistry at Illinois State. He’s intelligent. Maybe too intelligent. His mind, and the instinct to overthink, became his worst enemy in recent years.
“They say a lot of dumb guys are good at baseball, and that’s very true because you’re not questioning yourself,” DeJong said. “For me, I think when things go wrong, I go searching for video fixes or mechanical issues, and I think that’s just a trap. It’s having that plan and sticking to it, and then letting my natural ability take over. That’s the biggest thing. Getting out of my own way.”
So when DeJong joined the Redbirds, [manager Ben] Johnson just told him to have fun. He told him this is what you’re supposed to be doing, even though you’re also supposed to be the Cardinals’ shortstop. He told him to find “joy for the game to start” because only then can DeJong find what he’s searching for in Memphis.
Can I get out of my own way? I don't know, but I'll try.
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