Even though I'm not doing anything super-organized, I do hope this will be a good training week down here at Dauphin Island. Even in calm weather, the beach and the ocean throw all kinds of little things at me that I just don't quite get at home on the Mississippi.
Back home in Memphis it's very hot, with daytime highs pushing 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm pleased to say that it's a good ten degrees cooler here on the coast. It's plenty humid, though, and the sun beats down... it's certainly as warm as it needs to be. It appears that the oppressive heat is going to be around for the foreseeable future at home, so I should savor what we've got here.
I started yesterday morning with a gym session. As I said last week, I'm doing my Smart Bell workout now, and I skipped the pushups because I think that's what aggravated my shoulder/biceps pain last weekend. Meanwhile, I'm hoping the workout's other movements might have some therapeutic value: one thing I've learned over many years of nursing ailments is that strengthening the supporting muscles around an injured one can be helpful.
As soon as I was done with the Smart Bell I grabbed my boat and carried it several hundred meters to the beach. Once I was paddling I realized how tired I was from the lifting. Even though the wind was light, there were some ridable-looking swells coming in from the south-southwest--ground swell, I guess. After paddling a couple of kilometers out I worked on riding the swells coming back, and I definitely didn't have my top gear for the short, hard sprints. I was gasping for breath at times and having to stop and rest. The breeze was blowing in, so I was comfortable paddling out from the beach but felt very hot while coming back in with the wind at my back. After 50 minutes in the boat, I'd had enough.
I'm my own harshest critic, of course, and I felt a bit disheartened that I didn't have the energy for more, but the fact is that those conditions out in the gulf were small, and therefore required a lot of work even for brief rides. The whole time I was paddling I could hear the voice of Coach Dawid Mocke saying "Little ones lead to big ones," but the fact is that the "big ones" just weren't there. I was out there trying to get what I could from little bumps, and in fact that's something I need to get better at.
I'd originally planned to paddle yesterday afternoon, but the morning's activities had taken so much out of me that I decided that some extra recovery would help me have a more productive week overall. So I just did some light swimming instead.
This morning I launched into the shore break and paddled easy until I was a couple of kilometers offshore. I definitely felt fresher since I hadn't done a gym like I had yesterday, and this time I was determined to relax and take what the conditions gave me and not force anything and enjoy whatever I did get and just be more zen about it all. I caught little runs here and there, even managed link a few together once or twice, sprinted hard and got my heart rate up, and generally enjoyed being out on the water. Once 60 minutes was up I took out and returned to our rental house for some lunch and rest.
I was back in the boat in the mid afternoon, once again paddling a couple of kilometers offshore and seeing what I could get from the conditions coming back in. I felt really tired in the boat, and this time I think the reason was that I hadn't had enough to eat. I'm pretty set in my eating routine back home, but tear me away from home and I have a hard time treating my body the way it likes to be treated.
So I was running on fumes this afternoon. I went out and back twice, and I think I got my best runs coming back the second time. I was dead tired and loath to paddle any harder than I had to, so I focused on efficiency and reading the conditions as well as an inland dweller can do. And I found myself having some actual success. So I finished in higher spirits than I might have otherwise.
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