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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