Seeing what I can do on the water and on land

This weekend has brought cooler temperatures to the Mid South, with Fahrenheit highs in the 80s.  But it's been somewhat rainy and very humid, so it's not as delightful outside as you might think.  The rain is part of the same system that has caused catastrophic flooding in eastern Kentucky, but we've been spared such misery here, as the heaviest precipitation has gone north or south of Memphis.

The floodwaters of Kentucky and other parts of the Midwest will eventually find their way to the Memphis riverfront.  Several days ago the Mississippi River was flowing below a foot on the Memphis gauge, but it's now rising toward a predicted crest of 9.6 feet.

The level was almost 3 feet when I went down there to paddle yesterday.  These days my sessions are totally unstructured: I plan to paddle for 60 or 70 minutes and just see what's going on.  When I reached the mouth of the harbor yesterday there was a small barge rig heading upriver, and I went out to see what kind of surfing could be had.  It turned out the waves were small and hard to stay on for any length of time, and I found myself doing lots of hard sprints without much reward.  After a while I returned to the harbor, where I did a couple of long surges before easing back to the dock.

This morning I was back on the bike, riding almost 37 kilometers.  My route was about the same one I rode this past Thursday and Sunday: eastward on the Greater Memphis Greenline to Shelby Farms, and then a loop around Patriot Lake before returning to Midtown on the Greenline.  Today I took a couple of different trails in Shelby farms, and that accounts for the longer distance.

My G.P.S. device is set to alert me every time I complete 5 kilometers.  I never set it that way on purpose; it might just be a default setting.  Anyway, it's gotten me familiar with my 5K times on the bike this year.  It typically takes me a little under 14 minutes to cover 5 km, and that seems pretty good to me until I remember that there are a few dozen runners in this world covering it as much as a minute faster than that.

This past Thursday I thought I'd see just how fast I could ride a 5K, just for fun or to satisfy my curiosity or whatever.  I gave it three tries, the fastest one being about 11 minutes, 3 seconds.  I continued the experiment today, and this time I did it on a section of the Greenline with no street crossings.  Heading out toward Shelby Farms I was slowed several times by people walking their dogs, but I managed to clock 10:26.  After riding an easier pace around the lake, I returned to that uninterrupted stretch of Greenline and rode another hard 5K, lowering my time to 10:14.

I'm sure these times are unimpressive to more accomplished bike riders.  A 10:14 5K works out to an average speed of less than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) per hour.  But let me remind you that I was riding my 25-year-old low-tech mountain bike, dressed in gym shorts and a cotton tee shirt.  And I have no particular training goals as a bike rider; I was out there just seeing what I could do.  And that's what sports is all about, isn't it?  From world-class athletes down to the least-talented masses, each of us is just seeing what he or she can do.

I got rained on during the return leg of today's ride.  It really started pouring right as I got home.  It was nothing to worry about: whenever a kid at the summer camp I attended started whining about having to do something in the rain, the standard retort from the counselors was "Skin is waterproof."

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Nothing lasts forever

I'm definitely in a regrouping phase now.  I did a 34-kilometer bike ride Sunday morning, a mostly-easy 70-minute paddle Tuesday, and a 33-km bike ride today.  That's the nature of my physical activity these days.

It's tempting to think that this has been a "light" year, seeing as how I haven't attended but three races.  But the reality is that I've spent the last eight months working very hard.  It started last December, when I got going in earnest to prepare for my trip to South Africa at the end of January.  When I returned from that trip on February 1, I turned my attention to the race at Ocean Springs in late March and laid down a solid body of work.  I backed off a bit during the month of April, but then spent May and June building the fitness, power, and speed I would need for the race in the Columbia Gorge.

It hasn't been easy.  I've struggled with feelings of low energy, and my weight continues to be down a bit.  Tests I've had done at the doctor's office have revealed no problems, and I wonder if I'm not just getting old and past my prime... tough to accept for any athlete who's spent his life looking at times and speeds and so on.

I recently heard an interviewer say to Jasper Mocke, "Complete this sentence: 'I am a paddler because...'"  Jasper replied, "'...I need to be.'"  I think that's as good a reason as any for why I'm a paddler, too.  And maybe this sounds weird, but I've spent my life thinking things "need" to be a certain way.  When I started running track and cross country in high school it had been a few years since any distance runners from my school had advanced to the state meet, and I felt that I "needed" to correct that.  Later on, once I'd moved back to my hometown and gotten more serious about canoe and kayak racing, I saw that my city was not exactly a hotbed for racers, and I felt a "need" to remedy that, too.

And so that's what I've been trying to do for the last several decades.  I wouldn't say I've had brilliant success--I'm not a world-class talent and I've never been a contender to make national teams or anything like that.  But I've had a modicum of success in regional races over the years and I've made sure there's at least one person down on the Memphis riverfront paddling a boat with all the effort, technical precision, and wisdom he has in him.

Now I'm wondering if I still have the desire to go out and do hard workouts and make myself hurt for diminishing results.  Certainly I should have known all along that I won't be able to go out and clock certain times forever, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept that maybe the aging process is slowing me down to a noticeable degree.  The reality is that the world will keep going about its daily business regardless of whether Elmore Holmes can average 5 minutes per kilometer, and somehow I need to find a way to get over myself and keep enjoying those aspects of the sport that remain accessible.

I do have a race coming up pretty soon, August 20 on the Cumberland River at Burkesville, Kentucky.  My friend Scott from Louisville has invited me to do it with him in a tandem surfski.  I certainly plan to give it my best--I never want to let a tandem partner down--but I'm not likely to put as much pressure on myself as I do when paddling solo.  Hopefully we'll just have a lot of fun, and I need that more than anything right now.

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Monday photo feature

During my week in the Columbia River Gorge I had fun getting to know the guy to the right in this photo. Adrián Carpente is a native of northwest Spain who now lives in Palo Alto, California.  The photo is a screen shot from some video footage Adrián shot while we rode the wake of the sternwheeler on the 11th of July.  That's me in the white Epic surfski in the middle; to the far left is another resident of the southeastern U.S., John Wellens of Prosperity, South Carolina.

You can see more of Adrián's video footage in an edit I put together and posted here.

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Settling back into life at home

I've sort of crashed since my return home on Sunday.  Aside from several bike rides around the neighborhood, I did nothing athletic all week.  On Wednesday I thought I was getting sick--I had a hint of a sore throat all day.  I wondered if perhaps the COVID-19 virus had gotten me at last: every airplane and airport I'd been in was packed, and I found myself in a couple of dense crowds during the race week, too.  I went down to the drugstore and picked up one of those home test kits.  The kit consisted of two antigen tests, and I took one of them on Wednesday and the other Thursday.  Both registered a negative result.  Since Wednesday I've been feeling fine, so I guess I evaded that virus once again.

A couple of chores have kept me from being a complete shut-in.  One of those was going to the doctor Tuesday morning.  My cholesterol level has been on the high side my whole adult life, and when I visited the doctor in May my LDL had shot up high enough that she decided it was time to put me on one of those "statin" drugs.  The purpose of Tuesday's visit was to re-check the level and see if the drug was doing any good.  My LDL was down dramatically, so I guess I'll be popping that pill each day from now on.

Another chore was dealing with a crew that removed a couple of trees over at my rental property yesterday.  They of course did all the work while I just stood there and watched.  We've had another few days of triple-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, and fortunately they seemed to be well-acclimated to such conditions and experienced in dealing with them.  They made quick work of the two trees, wrapping up the whole job in less than five hours.

This morning I finally got back in the boat for the first time since my last downwind session in the Columbia Gorge last Saturday.  It was hot and getting hotter outside, but I was glad to be back on my home water.  I felt rusty and sluggish in the boat.  I wasn't used to the tippiness of my V12 after spending the week in the Gorge paddling a V9.  I was even having to brace a little on some of my strokes, and that put some stress on my left wrist.  If I had gotten in the boat maybe 20 minutes earlier I would have had some barge wakes to try to surf; as it was, the barge traffic was well off in the distance to the north by the time I reached the mouth of the harbor.  I ended up playing around in some bumps and otherwise paddling easy for 70 minutes.

It felt good to take my hose bath back at the dock.  For anybody who wonders how I stand these hot, humid summers, that's as good an answer as any.

I'm not sure what remains for me in terms of racing this year, and at the moment I don't really care.  I'll start caring again soon enough, but for now my focus is on getting a little exercise and surviving another hot summer.

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Sternwheelin' freewheelin'

Last Monday (July 11) was a not-so-windy day in the Columbia Gorge, so Adrián and I paddled out to see what fun we might have behind the sternwheeler that's based at Cascade Locks.  Here's a bit of the footage that Adrián shot on his Go Pro camera:

 

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Americana fun (2022 edition)

As I mentioned before, I have now visited every one of the United States of America.  Going to Alaska from the 7th to the 10th of this month enabled me to add it as the 50th and final state on my list.

It is now my goal to paddle a boat in every state, and I have done so in 44 of the 50 states.  The six outstanding states, in alphabetical order, are Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Maine, Minnesota, and New Jersey.

A trip down the Grand Canyon seems an obvious way to pick up Arizona.  I've never been good at getting myself included in big groups of people, and that's really what you have to do to run the Grand.  If you're reading this and are involved in an upcoming trip that needs another person, I'd love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, a paddling trip in Alaska is something I'll have to dedicate more time and energy to than I was able to do this month.  Similar effort might be required for Maine because of how far away it is.  Perhaps I'll plan a trip up the Eastern Seaboard during which I pick up Delaware and New Jersey and end up in Maine.  Maybe next year I'll skip the Columbia Gorge race and focus on one of these trips.

I'm not sure why I've never paddled in Minnesota; there's nothing that complicated about it.  It's far from where I live, but not insanely far.  Part of the problem is that it's not on my way anywhere unless I want to go to Manitoba or Saskatchewan or someplace like that.  Maybe I'll go to the Boundary Waters, though I've got to say I'm not a fan of mosquitoes.

Oh well, there's plenty of time to think about all that.  Here's the updated list.  States marked with an asterisk (*) are the ones I have merely visited.  States marked with a pound sign (#) are the ones I have visited and paddled a boat in.

Alabama#
Alaska*
Arizona*
Arkansas#
California#
Colorado#
Connecticut#
Delaware*
Florida#
Georgia#
Hawaii#
Idaho#
Illinois#
Indiana#
Iowa#
Kansas#
Kentucky#
Louisiana#
Maine*
Maryland#
Massachusetts#
Michigan#
Minnesota*
Mississippi#
Missouri#
Montana#
Nebraska#
Nevada#
New Hampshire#
New Jersey*
New Mexico#
New York#
North Carolina#
North Dakota#
Ohio#
Oklahoma#
Oregon#
Pennsylvania#
Rhode Island#
South Carolina#
South Dakota#
Tennessee#
Texas#
Utah#
Vermont#
Virginia#
Washington#
West Virginia#
Wisconsin#
Wyoming#

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Monday photo feature

Here I am less than a minute into the Gorge Downwind Championships race on the Columbia River on Friday.  The race is so young, so mysterious, so full of possibilities...

That it would develop into the slowest and most painful of my four Gorge races is just how it sometimes goes in our sport, and probably every sport.

I'm not sure who the photographer is for this photo.  Possibly Sandy Yonley, but I wouldn't take that to the bank.  In any case, it's one of very many nice shots.

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Home at last

There's no question I was beat to the socks on Saturday, but as Adrián and some other paddlers I knew headed out on a run from Stevenson to Home Valley in the afternoon, I decided to join in.  And I'm glad I did.  After a calm morning the wind was picking up, and the conditions, while not huge, were very enjoyable.  It felt good to link some runs and make the boat go fast for about 10 kilometers.

Yesterday morning Adrián and I checked out of our Air B&B and headed toward Portland in Adrián's rental car.  Along the way we stopped and looked at some sights along the Historic Columbia River Highway, including Ponytail Falls, the Oneonta Tunnel, and Multnomah Falls.  We got the rental car returned by the noon deadline and took an Uber to the Portland airport.  We got there just before noon, and my flight wasn't scheduled to leave until a minute before midnight, so what I hoped to do was check my bags and then take public transit into downtown Portland, where I might walk around for a bit.  But the airline agent informed me that it wasn't possible to check one's bags more than four hours before a flight.  I told her I didn't want to be stuck with my bags all day, and she suggested I put myself on standby for an earlier flight.

In short, I ended up on a one o'clock flight that arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth around 7:45 Central Time, then made a dash to a distant wing of the airport to board a plane to Memphis a half hour later.  I wasn't interested in hanging around the airport any longer than I had to, but the downside is that I had no time to find anything decent to eat.  Because the airlines seem to be feeding passengers next to nothing on domestic flights these days, I ended up eating very little all day yesterday.

I touched down in Memphis around 10:15 PM Central Time--more than two hours before my originally-scheduled flight out of Portland would take off.  My friend Rob very kindly came to pick me up.  We waited an absurdly long time for my baggage to emerge on the carousel, and spent another eternity in line to pay for the short-term parking, and then a trip up Airways Boulevard delivered me home at last.

And I am so glad to be back.  So glad.  I don't care how beautiful the places I visit might be, or how awesome the paddling might be; after a few days away from home all I want is to be back there.  The weather forecast here in the Mid South looks terrible, with the temperature currently predicted to hit 103 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, and I suppose I'll be missing the cooler, less humid Pacific Northwest weather, but still... I'm home, and that outweighs the discomfort of the coming weeks.

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Sort of a death march in the Gorge

The Pacific Northwest is in a somewhat unusual weather pattern this year.  The late spring was wetter than usual, and their normal summer is only just now settling in.  Among other things, that means (a) the Columbia River is at an above-normal flow as the dams at The Dalles and Bonneville work to move the extra moisture in the watershed, and (b) those westerlies that make the Columbia Gorge a destination for wind sports are not yet blowing reliably.

Those factors combined to make for some tough racing in yesterday's Gorge Downwind Championships.

When the race started around noon we had conditions that were not great, but pretty good.  I was actually quite pleased with how I handled them.  I might have even been ecstatic with my performance if I hadn't flipped violently as I was carving down the face of a wave a couple of kilometers in.  The boat banged against my left temple and put a bloody gash there, and it also knocked the left lens out of my cheap sunglasses (a fact I didn't realize until after the race when I took my glasses off).

I quickly remounted and worked to regain my concentration.  Soon I was linking runs once more, just like the Mocke brothers taught me to do in South Africa.  But then the conditions began to peter out.  I kept sprinting hard after what I thought were promising runs, but the runs just didn't blossom like they were supposed to.

A similar thing happened in last year's race: some 10 kilometers in the conditions went away for a while.  But around Viento State Park they began to rebuild and I ended up having huge fun all the way to the finish.  I was hopeful that the same thing might happen today: as I approached Viento (viento just happens to be the Spanish word for "wind," by the way), I could feel the breeze strengthening against my back and for a brief moment it seemed like there were some good runs forming again.  But just as quickly, those conditions vanished.  For the last 10 kilometers of the race I was mired in a flatwater marathon, only worse, because I was fighting the Columbia's stronger-than-normal current and the water surface was bumpy and finding any kind of rhythm was difficult.  At this point in the race I had exhausted myself with all the hard sprinting and didn't have much left.

And then there were the weeds.

The Columbia almost always has some floating weeds, making a weed deflector necessary.  And in fact my rental ski is equipped with a deflector just fore of the rudder.  But this year there are weeds in massive clumps than can overwhelm even the best weed deflector.  I was doing my best to steer around them, but they seemed to become more abundant in the second half of the race.  At one point a fellow racer came over to me and asked me to check his rudder; his rudder turned out to be clear, but he checked mine and found a big wad of weeds.  No wonder I felt like I was working so hard, I thought.

I could see Hood River from at least eight kilometers out, but I paddled and paddled and paddled and it didn't feel like I was getting any closer to the finish.  By now I wasn't particularly even racing anymore; it was obvious I wouldn't be breaking two hours, and I just wanted to get myself to the finish as painlessly as possible.  As I approached Wells Island, which sits near the Oregon side some 2000 meters from the finish, I decided to go between it and the Oregon shore.  In a normal year a racer wouldn't do that because the water is shallow there and there aren't any good downwind runs to catch.  But with the higher river flow I figured it should be deep enough there, and that I wouldn't be fighting the full force of the current.  So I went that way, feeling very smart and expecting to blow by dozens of racers who'd opted for the normal route on the other side of the island.  But then I realized there was one factor I hadn't thought of: weeds.  The place was teeming with mats of them.  I steered around them through most of the channel, but eventually I found myself in a spot where there was no choice but to plow through them and hope for the best.  "The best" is not what I got.  Suddenly it felt as though the water had turned to molasses.  Knowing that my race was pretty well shot, I flipped the boat and swam back to my rudder and cleared off a massive glob of weeds.

With just a couple of kilometers left I found a bit of a second wind and paddled a stronger pace toward the finish.  If there had been any racers within striking distance in front of me I might have laid down the hardest sprint I could manage, but as it was I just surged at a respectable intensity and glided across the finish line.

In all, 494 boats finished the race.  I was the 214th fastest at two hours, 10 minutes, 22 seconds.  I was 16th out of 36 racers in the men's 50-59 age group.  The complete results are posted here.

The overall winner was Kenny Rice of Cape Town, South Africa.  His time was one hour, 31 minutes, 21 seconds--about 10 minutes slower than what his time would likely be in a "normal" year.  Rice has now won four titles in the seven years that the Gorge Downwind Championships has taken place, and it seems more and more like this is "his" race.  Last year's winner, Austin Kieffer of Venice, California, finished third just under a minute behind Kenny Rice.  I was pleased to see that Jasper Mocke, one of my coaches over in South Africa, had landed in the top five: he was fifth in 1:33:23.

On the women's side, the Kiwi Danielle McKenzie clocked 1:39:55 to continue her current dominance of international surfski racing.  Defending champion Ana Swetish of Bellingham, Washington, took second place 59 seconds back.

On the bank at the finish, it seemed to be the consensus among everybody from the elite athletes to the plodders that it had been a thoroughly punishing day both physically and mentally.  I found Adrián and he gave me a ride back to our lodging, where I took a shower and tended to the gash above my left eye.  I biked down to the race site and got a really good (and really big) burrito from the food truck there, socialized with some other racers, and watched the awards.

I slept reasonably well last night, but I remain dead-dog tired this morning.  Any paddling I do today will probably be of the recovery-session variety.

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Well... it's time to race again

Yesterday my arms were tired from my two downwind runs on Wednesday.  I did just one run yesterday and tried to back off the intensity as much as I could.  But that's hard to do on a downwind run: if there's a good run in front of you, just within your grasp, sometimes you just have to sprint!  In any case, I think it was good for me to go out and get some blood flowing.

I'm up early this morning.  Adrián is giving me a ride to the race start at Home Valley Park.  The race doesn't start until 11:15, but we've got to get there several hours before that so Adrian will have time to drive his car to the finish at Hood River and get himself back to the start.

I'm telling myself that today should be fun and to treat this like "just another downwinder," but I can't help getting amped up when a race is on.  We'll see how it goes.  Maybe I'll get a report up this evening, but it'll more likely be tomorrow.  If you're following this blog, thank you.

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Searching for some downwind prowess

I'm getting all settled in to my lodging in the Columbia River Gorge.  I'm sharing the house with another paddler in town for the race: Adrián, a native of northwest Spain who now lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

The agenda for Monday morning was to go down to the race site and pick up my rental ski and get checked in at the registration table.  Those processes went smoothly enough.  After that it was time to contemplate paddling, but it didn't appear that the wind was cooperating: it was from the east, blowing in the same direction as the river current, meaning no big swells were likely.  The race organizers did decide to run the shuttle buses in reverse so that racers could do practice runs from Home Valley to Stevenson rather than the other way around.  But that would be more of a downriver run than a true downwind run, and I do that kind of thing all year long at home on the Mississippi.

Instead, I availed myself of the sternwheeler that takes tourists out on the river from its dock at Cascade Locks, across the river from the race site.  Adrián joined me and we paddled over in time to see the vessel heading downriver toward the Bridge of the Gods.  We paddled in that direction while the sternwheeler made its way to its turnaround point at the Bonneville Dam, and then we caught it as it came back upriver to where we were.

The waves behind the sternwheeler are smooth and defined and easy to surf.  It's not a true downwind simulation, but it's ideal for practicing skills like carving turns.  It was also a good chance for me to familiarize myself with my boat, a V9 surfski.  Even though this design is ultimately more stable than the narrower skis (a V10L, a V10 Sport, and a V12) that I have at home, its secondary stability is different, and playing around on the sternwheeler's wake allowed me to test its limits and get good and comfortable in it.

Adrián and I had the sternwheeler all to ourselves as it moved back upriver to its dock at Cascade Locks.  Once there, it sat while one group of passengers disembarked and a new group filed on.  Then it moved out again, this time heading upriver.  Adrián and I hopped on its wake once more, but soon we had a lot of company: a group of paddlers had gathered on the water near the race site to join in the fun.  When there's a larger crown surfing behind the sternwheeler you need to be much more on guard, because when a paddler flips or otherwise slips off the wave in front of you, there's the potential for a nasty collision and damage to one or more boats.  I did see some carnage and I had to make elusive moves a couple of times, but I avoided any particularly close calls.

The sternwheeler eventually turned around near the mouth of the Wind River and headed back toward its dock.  I rode its wake until I was back near the race site, and tore myself away from the fun.  All told, I think I had a pretty good "first paddle" here in the Gorge on Monday.

When I got up yesterday morning the wind was light, but at least it was blowing from the west.  As the morning moved into the early afternoon the breeze continued to build, and in the mid afternoon I decided it was time to try the run from Stevenson to Home Valley.  Once I was out in the deeper water I found conditions that were perhaps not "epic," but plenty good.  And so there I was doing my first downwinder since my trip to South Africa in January.

When I haven't paddled downwind in a long time I always worry about how quickly I'll be able to pick it back up, but I felt comfortable enough with it yesterday.  I was linking some runs together and getting my speed up into 14-15-16 kilometers per hour territory.  But then I would always stall out and have to start all over again building speed.  I have a feeling that the really good downwind athletes don't stall out very often: they get their speed up and they keep it up.  All that re-starting took a toll on me physically, and by the time I reached Home Valley I was worn out.  It's about 10 km from Stevenson to Home Valley, and somehow I must find a way to pace myself on race day, when the course will be 22 km.

The last couple of afternoons have been very hot here, and I think part of my struggle yesterday was the result of dehydration.  The heat wasn't nearly as harsh today; this morning it was almost chilly.  I got down to the race site early so I could do a run in time to catch the first shuttle bus at Home Valley at 11:30.  I did that run, got shuttled back to the race site, and did a second run in quick order.  I definitely felt fresher in the boat and once again had some good moments of linked runs, but I worked plenty hard, too.  Two runs was definitely enough for me today.

The event organizers have announced that Friday will be race day.  So it's time for me to start getting some rest.  It's likely I'll do just one run tomorrow unless I'm feeling particularly good.

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Monday photo feature

The most taxing stretch of my hike up Flattop Mountain on Friday featured hundreds of steps made from railroad ties.

If the railroad had never been invented, perhaps the greatest loss to humankind would be that we wouldn't have railroad ties to use for stuff like this.

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A boy needs nourishment

Today I was reminded how difficult it can be to have some control over your diet while traveling, especially when you're traveling by air, and super-especially when you've elected not to rent a car.  I had to be at the airport at 3 AM Alaska Daylight Time, at which time the airport restaurants were all closed (and I don't like to eat in those places anyway because they're ridiculously expensive).  I couldn't even find myself a cup of coffee until I got served one on the plane well after 5:30.  Meanwhile, the food offerings on domestic flights are as meager as I can ever remember: all they gave me for "breakfast" was a small package of cookies and a bag of pretzels.

I didn't eat anything once I reached Portland because I was in a hurry to catch the light rail to the bus depot, where I got on the Columbia Gorge Express bus.  I got off that bus in Cascade Locks, which sits just across the river from the town of Stevenson where the race event is headquartered and my Air B&B is located, but then I had a hard time making that last hop across the river.  There's supposed to be a bus, but I'm not sure it runs on Sunday, and when I gave up on that and tried to book an Uber, it took a long time for the app to locate a driver who was willing to take that assignment.  If I didn't have my heavy bags with me, I might have given up on the Uber and started walking, hoping to spot somebody with surfskis on the car with whom I could hitch a ride.

Anyway....... when I finally got to my Air B&B I was plenty hungry, but I still had to make a run to the grocery store.  Fortunately, the landlord of my Air B&B has very kindly loaned me a bike to use, and I rode into town and loaded up a backpack with some food.  The ride back was a bit of a bear: the Air B&B is located a good ways up the mountain from town, and I granny-geared it all the way, telling myself to relax and not be in a rush.  I cooked a pretty good supper of red beans and rice and sausage with a side of green beans.  Good stuff.

I think the hardest part of the trip is behind me, and now that I'm here in the Gorge I hope I can settle into a routine and get the practice runs I need and be rested and ready for race day.  But it's taking a lot more planning and thought and focus since I don't have as much autonomy in getting myself around.

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The Last Frontier

Thursday was a 21-hour air travel marathon, but all flights ran on time and I made it to Anchorage around 8:40 PM Alaska Daylight Time.  I have now visited all fifty of the United States of America.

One of the first things I realized is that it might have been a better idea to rent a car than to rely on Uber: the fare to get from the airport to my Air B&B was ridiculous.  I guess it's not a great surprise, considering the gasoline prices around here seem to be around $5.70 for a gallon of regular unleaded.  But once I had reached my lodging Thursday evening, I resolved to save all such worries for later, because at that moment what I needed most was SLEEP.  I got my bearings in the apartment, grabbed a quick shower, and bedded down.  And I proceeded to sleep very well.  I woke up for a brief while around 3:00 AM (at which time it was no darker than dusk outside--thankfully my bedroom was equipped with blackout curtains), but otherwise got a solid eight hours.

Once I was up Friday morning I went about the business of learning my surroundings a bit.  I was pretty sure that Anchorage would not be a particularly cosmopolitan town, and indeed it is not.  It looks like a place that's frozen solid for quite a bit of the year.  Outside of the small core city, it's spread out and car-centric and not very walkable.  It took me a lengthy walk on a couple of stroads to find a place that served breakfast.  (If you don't know what a "stroad" is, this video explains it.)  But one must look only at the beautiful Chugach Mountains west of town to know that some incredible wilderness is out there, and that would be the biggest challenge of this trip.

I had no delusion that I could truly "do" Alaska in two days.  You need no less than a week for even a modest wilderness adventure around here.  I'd gotten no shortage of advice from everybody I'd talked to--"You gotta get outside of Anchorage if you wanna see what Alaska is really about!"--and all I can say is, yeah, yeah, I get that.  But in the end I decided to stick with stuff in or near town that any old tourist can do.

Yesterday I did a hike to the top of Flattop Mountain just outside of town.  Flattop is both the most-climbed mountain in Alaska and the most popular day hike.  One of the main reasons I decided to do it is I stumbled upon a local bike shop that offers a daily shuttle out to the trailhead and back.  The shop was downtown, not a bad walk from my Air B&B.  I'd looked into taking an Uber from my place to the trailhead and found that a one-way fare would be around $36, but the bike shop's shuttle was a mere 24 bucks for a round trip, complete with a really nice guy named Pete for a driver.  Pete gave us passengers all kinds of pro tips for the hike, not to mention a bit of Anchorage history as we made our way out of town.

The hike itself was doable for any able-bodied person, but strenuous nevertheless.  The heart of it involved walking up hundreds of railroad-tie steps, and as I neared the summit I found myself doing not quite pure rock-climbing, but closer to it than I'd expected on this hike.  In any case, I made it to the top and beheld some gorgeous views:

As you can see, it was not a clear day.  I don't think they see too many crystal-clear blue skies in this part of the world.  And it was chilly and windy atop the mountain.  But I took the time to take it all in.  The water stretching to the horizon in the left half of the photo is the Cook Inlet.  The city of Anchorage occupies sort of a peninsula defined by the Knik Arm coming in from the right and the Turnagain Arm coming in from the left.  The downtown core is over in the right side of the photo.  On the left you can see Fire Island, and it's not to be confused with the one off New York's Long Island: I don't think there's much on it besides a wind farm.  In the foreground you can see the trail system that I hiked to get to this place.

The hike back down was less taxing than the hike up, but it was tough on my toes as they kept getting shoved into the fronts of my shoes.  I had to take it slow to avoid blowing out a knee.  By the end of the day I was feeling the hike's effects in all of my leg muscles.

I slept well again last night.  For two nights in a row I've gotten eight good hours, something I rarely manage at home.  I had breakfast and considered what I might do today.  I explored every possibility for paddling: long-time readers of this blog know that I have a goal of paddling a boat in every state.  But in the end my lack of a car and my short window of time were obstacles too big to scale.  The truth is that I'm going to have to dedicate an entire trip to some kind of longer paddling tour, and there are better places than Anchorage from which to base it--Seward or Whittier, for instance.

I'd had such a good experience with Pete yesterday that I decided to patronize his business, Downtown Bicycle Rentals, again today.  For a very reasonable price I was able to rent a road bike and get lots of good advice on where to ride in the greater Anchorage area.  The main part of my trip took me on the Coastal Trail that runs along the shoreline around the Anchorage airport, affording great views of Cook Inlet and the Knik Arm.  I covered some 40 kilometers in several hours of mildly intense riding.  During that time I managed to take exactly one photo:

That's part of the Alaska Range in the background.  Large mud flats seem to border the entire waterfront here, and I'm not familiar enough with the tides here to know how often they're submerged, or how deep.  One interesting piece of area history is that the bluff I was standing on to take this photo used to extend farther out, but collapsed into the sea during the massive earthquake of March 27, 1964.  Centered near Valdez, this earthquake was the most powerful ever recorded in North America and the second most powerful in recorded world history.

Well, that's all for now from Alaska.  I have to be up in the wee hours of tomorrow morning to catch a 5 AM flight back to the Lower 48.  The next stop is Portland, from which I'll make my way into the Columbia Gorge and resume the main topic of this blog, canoe and kayak racing.  With any luck my sore leg muscles will be ready to go when I pick up my rental boat Monday.

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Final preparations before I set sail

Yesterday morning I did my last gym session before I race in the Columbia Gorge next week.  The side effects from my COVID-19 shot last week were more or less gone by then.

After the gym session I headed down to the river.  Another spell of oppressive summer heat is upon us: the temperature hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, with heat index values up around 110.  It wasn't that hot yet when I got in the boat, but it was well on its way.  It was definitely a day to go out and do my planned workout without any dilly-dally, and come in out of the heat.

After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did basically the same workout I did last Saturday: three sets of 20-second sprints with the recovery intervals decreasing from 60 seconds to 10 seconds.  This time I didn't add any resistance to the boat like I did for the first set on Saturday.  I did the first set out on the Mississippi, and the other two sets in the harbor.  The workout was tough, and this time the heat was the main reason.  The sun beat down relentlessly.  I flipped the boat to cool off after the first and second sets, and after the third set I headed back to the dock and took a cool hose bath and drank lovely cold water from my insulated bottle.  There was a pleasant south breeze blowing, and I was able to cool back down quite a bit in the shade of the marina's roof.  While I exchanged a couple of text messages with my friend Scott in Louisville (he was asking me about my race next week), I ate a nectarine, a protein bar, and a peach.  The peach wasn't fully ripe, but the nectarine was perfect... just one of the reasons I really like summer training in spite of the brutal heat.

It was another hot one today, and I had a list of chores to do before I get out of here in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.  It took me a while this morning to make up my mind whether to paddle at all, but in the end I did go down there and get in the boat for 30 minutes.  I paddled easy, got some blood moving to help my muscles heal from yesterday's workout, did some stroke drills and relaxation drills, and, lacking any firm plans to paddle before next Monday, logged a bit more muscle memory into my brain.

I hope that I will be in Anchorage the next time I check in here.  As I mentioned before, tomorrow's flights must go off on schedule for that to happen.  So... we'll see.

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Monday photo feature

Here we've got a satellite view of the city of Anchorage, Alaska, and environs.

I've been talking a lot about my upcoming trip to the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington state line, but what I haven't mentioned until now is that I've got a little side trip planned.  Once my plane has touched down in Portland this Thursday, I'm going to get on another plane and fly to Anchorage by way of Seattle.  I'll spend Friday and Saturday in Anchorage, and then on Sunday morning I'll fly back to Portland and proceed with the regularly-scheduled activities in the Columbia Gorge.  Of course, the fate of my side trip counts heavily on no flight cancellations on my route to Portland this Thursday.  Just about every day as I listen to the news I hear reports of that being an ongoing industry-wide problem this summer.  And there's not a thing I can do about it but hope for the best.  I did purchase trip insurance, but I'd just as soon not have to use it because getting an insurance company to pay up is always a hassle.

Why do I want to make this side trip?  Well, Alaska is the one state in the United States that I have never set foot in.  I figured that since I was going to be "in the neighborhood," globally speaking, I might as well hop up there.

Now, I don't intend for this to be my definitive Alaska experience; two days is hardly enough to explore the largest state in the Union.  But I hope to gain a modicum of familiarity with its largest city, and size it up as a possible staging area for future adventures in Alaska.  And if I should croak before I'm able to make that happen, at least everybody can say that I visited all 50 states.

At the moment the weather forecast says it might be kind of rainy and chilly up there.  With any luck, that won't stop me from doing a bit of paddling and a bit of hiking and a bit of looking around, and making this experiment something more than a fool's errand.

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Peaking the intensity

I spent Thursday afternoon and evening with mild cold symptoms--a faint sore throat and a bit of sinus congestion, and maybe even a touch of fever--as my body reacted to the COVID-19 booster shot I'd gotten on Wednesday.  I always have to use the bathroom frequently when I have a cold or the flu, I guess because I'm processing more of the water in my system as I build up my defenses.  I slept fitfully overnight, having to get up and go to the bathroom three or four times.  I woke up Friday morning thinking I was in for an unpleasant day of lying around and feeling lousy.  But once I'd had some coffee and breakfast and woken up a little more, I realized that I actually wasn't feeling that bad after all.  I decided I had it in me to do a gym session.

I slept a little bit better the next night, and yesterday morning I went down to the river to do what has become a standard workout for me when I'm preparing to go race downwind.  I did three sets of this series of hard sprints: 20 seconds on, 60 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 50 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 40 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 30 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off, 20 seconds on.  I did the first set with light resistance on the boat (one whiffle ball), and the other two sets without resistance.  I paddled easy for about 10 minutes between sets.  The workout was hard, but I held up just fine and never felt like I was falling apart.  I was really starting to feel it in the last half of the third set, though, and I think I probably would have fallen apart in a fourth set.  I felt awfully tired for the rest of the day.

Yesterday's workout is about the best way I can think of to get ready for downwind while I'm here in flatwater country.  It doesn't quite capture the spontaneity of downwind--I think paddling in a downwind environment is the only way to expose yourself to all the stimuli of a downwind environment.  But I'm hoping that workouts like this will have me close to prepared, and then a handful of practice runs once I'm out in the Columbia Gorge will finish the job.

I went back to the river this morning feeling a bit tired from yesterday, but not completely done in.  I decided to paddle for an hour and see what might come my way.  Once I reached the mouth of the harbor and got a look at the river, I saw that it was an upstream-moving barge rig coming my way.  So naturally, I had to go out and surf a bit.  The waves nearest the towboat's stern were steep and hard to catch, and farther back they quickly devolved into clusters of confused bumps.  The rides I managed to get were not long-lasting, and I had to keep paddling to to get what I could from them, but a couple of times I got my speed up over 15 kilometers per hour, something I rarely do against the Mississippi's current.  It got me excited about doing more of that once I've picked up my rental ski in the Columbia Gorge a week from tomorrow.

As a final thought for this weekend, I leave you with a video of distance runner Evan Jager discussing his second-place finish in the 3000-meter steeplechase at the U.S. track and field championships this past month.  Jager has spent the last four years or so struggling to return to competitive form after an injury.  Even though I haven't been injured to the extent that Jager has, I can identify with with many of the things he says here, particularly his thoughts on regaining the confidence to push through pain in workouts and in races:

Many readers of this blog might not know it, but I did some distance running of my own back in high school and college as a member of the track and cross country teams.  For years I followed the sport at the national and international levels, but my interest kind of trailed off in the mid '00s.  Now, just in the last year or so, I've reacquainted myself with the sport through the modern miracle of You Tube, and I've discovered that U.S. distance runners have returned to prominence at the international level after several decades of futility.  Jager, an Illinois native, has been at the forefront of this surge.  African runners had held a virtual monopoly on Olympic and world championships medals in the steeplechase for more than two decades, but Jager started making finals at the biggest meets in the early 2010s and claimed the Olympic silver medal at the 2016 Games in Rio.  Along the way he lowered the American record to 8:00.45; he almost certainly would have broken 8 minutes if he hadn't tripped over the last barrier in that race.  (The current world record is 7:53.63 by Saif Saaeed Shaheen of Qatar.  I can remember pundits opining that a sub-8-minute steeple might be impossible until Moses Kiptanui of Kenya clocked 7:59.18 in 1995.)

Jager is now 33 years old, and that's pretty old for an elite-level distance runner.  Having missed out on the Tokyo Olympics last year, he decided he wanted to go to at least one more world championships, and his second-place finish at the U.S. championships (you can watch that final here) earned him that chance.  And the world championships are in the U.S. this year: they're scheduled for July 15-24 at Eugene, Oregon, during which I'll be racing just up the road in the Columbia Gorge.

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