The first slalom race I ever did was one of those "citizen" races the Nantahala Racing Club used to put on. You could enter in whatever boat you had and do an easy course on the gates down near Worser Wesser Falls. Here I am racing my old Dancer kayak. Every time I look at this photo I want to say I'm 11 or 12 years old, but the year was in fact 1992, at which time I was 24 and going on 25. Photo by Michael Stout.
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This was a week of ups and downs in terms of how I'm feeling and what sort of physical activity I've managed to do.
I spent Monday dealing with logs, trying to gather some material for my job at the Pink Palace Crafts Fair next weekend. No matter how careful I am, I always manage to tweak some muscles when I do such work, usually in my lower back.
I woke up Tuesday feeling really stiff and sore from Monday's work. But I got myself down to the river and paddled for an hour, and that seemed to loosen me up very nicely. I can say that in my four-plus decades of paddling there have been countless days in which I felt better after paddling than I'd felt before.
Meanwhile, I was trying my best to keep my left arm in the "neutral" position to keep the stress off my rotator cuff, and doing the strengthening exercises that Rob had shown me. By Thursday the area was feeling as good as it had felt in a long time, and that lifted my spirits. I had a good bike ride Thursday morning, and then saw my chiropractor that afternoon. I told her of the improvement in my left rotator cuff area, joking that I was almost afraid to say it out loud.
As it turned out, I was right to be afraid. I spent Friday doing more log-hunting, and while I can't think of any specific thing I did to aggravate any particular muscles, by yesterday morning my left arm was back to feeling as bad as ever. I went down to the river and got in the boat, and as I warmed up in the harbor, the pain nagged me with every stroke. Eventually I got warmed up enough for the discomfort to move into the background, but today the area continues to hurt.
Lately Sunday has been a bike-riding day for me, and that was the plan again today. But I was delayed by the latest of what has been a rash of flat tires in the last month. I got it fixed and did a good ride out to Shelby Farms and back by way of the Greater Memphis Greenline. As I carried the bike back into the garage to the spot where I hang it on the wall, I heard a sudden hissing noise: for some reason all the air was running out of the tire once more. Sigh... at least it waited until I was back home. I was too tired to deal with it right then, but I'll be fixing yet another flat tire before my next ride.
If I need a reminder of how small my problems are, then I guess I should look at the current catastrophic phenomena around the planet. The remnants of a Pacific typhoon walloped the west coast of Alaska, another typhoon is hitting Japan, Puerto Rico is bracing for Hurricane Fiona, a series of earthquakes has rocked Taiwan, and wildfires continue to burn in the western U.S. Oddly enough, it's as calm as can be around here. The sun is out, breezes are light, and we're in for several days of near-100-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures.
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When my friend Rob came to visit last week, it was the first time I'd seen him in person in six years. Back in 2016 I visited his home in New York's Hudson Valley during my trip to the USCA Nationals in western Massachusetts. One day Rob and I put on the Hudson River at Peekskill and paddled up toward the Bear Mountain Bridge.
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My best friend Rob came to visit for a few days this past week. We visited a couple of local museums, went out to eat, explored the outdoors... the sort of things good friends do.
But Rob's visit has some actual relevance to this blog, too. Rob is a chiropractor based in Pawling, New York, and he had a lot to say about my current skeletal-muscular issues. He had me go through a whole bunch of movements and concluded that my deltoid/biceps woes are the result of inflammation of tendons in my rotator cuff. He said that only once this inflammation is calmed down will any other treatments really work. He urged me to do my best to keep my left arm in the "neutral position" (i.e., as if it's in a sling) as much as possible to minimize stress on the area. He also showed me some exercises that target the rotator cuff area specifically. While he was at it, he showed me a whole slew of core exercises (mostly on the stability ball) that I now want to incorporate into strength work this fall and winter.
All this advice is what one would expect from a chiropractor. But Rob is also quite knowledgeable of internal health in general, and while he was here he gave me advice on my diet and the vitamin supplements I should be taking. My cholesterol level has been somewhat high my whole adult life, and after a particularly high test result back in June, my doctor finally put me on a prescription statin drug. My LDL level has come down a lot as a result, but Rob thinks I can achieve the same thing with a natural over-the-counter statin (red yeast rice). He explained that the prescription statin has an oversized impact on other nutrients in my body that is less severe with the natural statin. So I'm looking into possible changes there. I'm scheduled to visit my doctor again in December, so I'll probably wait until then before making the switch.
Since Rob was here on vacation, I took sort of a vacation of my own from most chores (both athletic and non-athletic) this past week. But we found ways to get out and be active. On Tuesday we took my plastic sea kayak down to the river for Rob to paddle, and the two of us paddled out of the harbor, up the Mississippi above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and across the river to a bunch of sandbars, where enjoyed a little beach time. On Wednesday afternoon I was hoping to find a bike for Rob to use so we could go for a bike ride together, but the closest thing we could find was one of those app-activated electric scooters. So we got that running and Rob rode it out east on the Greater Memphis Greenline while I rode my bike; once we were out at Shelby Farms we switched mounts for the trip back.
Rob departed after lunch on Thursday, and I turned my attention to catching up on some of the chores I'd ignored while he was here. The annual crafts fair where I demonstrate bowl carving is just two weeks off, and I need some material for the job, so on Friday afternoon I set out on a scouting trip on my bike, looking for good logs that people had cut in their yards and put out on the curb for the city sanitation service to collect. I rode all over sections of the Evergreen, Vollintine-Evergreen, and Speedway Terrace neighborhoods and made a mental note of any promising material I saw.
Yesterday I did some stretching and started some of the rehab exercises Rob had shown me. Then I went down to the river and paddled for 60 minutes. I felt surprisingly good in the boat and even got some good rides on the wake behind a fuel barge that services the tour boats that pass through Memphis on the Mississippi. All the while I tried to keep my left arm in the neutral position as much as possible; since good paddling form involves keeping the elbows close to the body, I was able to do so without much trouble. On the way home from the river I stopped and picked up several logs I'd spotted during Friday's bike ride.
This morning I did some more bike scouting, focusing on a couple of the neighborhoods south of the Greenline that I usually ride out to Shelby Farms. I didn't see much bowl-carving material today, but I live in a big city with lots and lots of trees, so I feel pretty sure I can find what I need in the next few days as long as I keep at it.
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Last week was much like the weeks that preceded it: I paddled Tuesday and Saturday, did a bike ride Thursday and yesterday, and did lots of rehab exercises the rest of the time. The chiropractor showed me a couple of new exercises to add to the routine, and suggested we do some dry needling the next time I go in. I'm scheduled to do that this coming Thursday.
I've more or less packed it in as far as racing goes this year, though there's at least one event that's tempting: there's a downwind race on Lake Michigan the weekend of October 8-9. That's a long trip for me, and I'm nowhere near race-ready, but I'm not immune to those FOMO urges. I'll most likely stick to my guns and pass it up unless I experience some very quick and significant improvement in the ailments department.
For now, I'm putting my athletic life on the back burner because my friend Rob has come down from New York to visit, and I'm going to show him around town.
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