My arm was still hurting Tuesday morning, but I would have to wait until this afternoon to see my chiropractor. Because I haven't been to see her in over a year, I'm required to go through her "new patient" intake process all over again, and this afternoon was the soonest such an appointment was possible. So on Tuesday I was still grinning and bearing it. At least I was somewhat eager to get moving again after four days out of the boat.
After a gym session, I headed down to the river. The break in the weather we'd had over the weekend was quickly becoming a memory: under bright sunshine, the temperature was rising toward a high in the high 90s Fahrenheit. I guess it's only fitting that Tuesday was the first day of summer. I warmed up and did a set of three 8-stroke sprints, and turned my attention to the day's workout: four bridge-to-bridge sprints. The distance from the monorail bridge to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge in the harbor is very nearly 450 meters; my best time ever for this sprint is somewhere around a minute 52 seconds, but anything around two minutes flat is a very good effort for me.
The best news from Tuesday is that my arm ailment hardly bothered me at all. I do think it's a threat more to my everyday happiness than to my ability to paddle. As for the workout, well... it hurt. My quadriceps muscles throbbed in the second half of each sprint, and my wrists and forearms were really going numb in the last one. It was tempting to despair, to declare it the latest example of my decline in energy and power of the last couple of years. But the fact is that this workout has never not hurt. And the consistency of my times--2:02, 2:03, 2:02, 2:03--suggests that I might actually be more fit than I thought these days.
As to recovery: I started the second sprint 7 minutes after I'd started the first one. That recovery didn't quite feel adequate, so I gave myself an extra minute before the third and fourth sprints.
The day was definitely becoming a hot one, and as I paddled back toward the dock I flipped a couple of times to cool off. Once back on the dock I took a bath under the hose, and that's one of those simple pleasures of these hot summer days that I mustn't to forget to savor as I deal with my arm pain and other struggles.
It's continued to be hot this week, but not unbearably so. I think the humidity is still down a bit. On the worst summer days here even the lightest outdoor chores have me drenched in sweat, but a couple of times this week I've broken only a mild sweat while riding my bike around the neighborhood. So I'm actually enjoying this week's summer weather a lot.
This morning I returned to the river and did 60 minutes of unstructured paddling. I paddled steady out of the harbor, chased some waves out on the Mississippi that a distant barge rig had left behind, and then returned to the harbor and paddled steady back toward the dock, stopping a couple of times to pick up some litter. Back on the dock I took another hose bath and drank some cold water and ate a protein bar and a peach. Most of the time after I paddle I eat an apple in the car on the way home, but apples are out of season while peaches are in season, and a peach is too juicy to eat in the car, so I brought it down to the dock. I don't think anybody will care if I drip some peach juice into the harbor.
I finally got in to see my chiropractor this afternoon, and she seemed to think my arm soreness was something she could treat without too much trouble. She massaged it with the same butter-knife-lookalike tool that she used on my plantar fasciitis some five years ago. I'm scheduled to go back next week, and she doesn't think we'll need too many sessions to get this taken care of. I sure hope she's right.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment