Winter camp!

After a couple of weeks out of the boat due to holiday travel and various preoccupations, I'm shocking my body back into a more serious training mode at a camp in sunny Florida.

I left home Friday morning and arrived yesterday afternoon at the Rainbow River, a lovely spring-fed stream that flows through the town of Dunellon just above its confluence with the Withlacoochee River.  A few friends--Steph Schell, Royal McDonnell, Chris Norbury, Chris Hipgrave--had been here several days already and were doing a time trial from KP Hole to the Route 484 bridge.  Not ready for that kind of stress, I put in at the bridge and paddled upstream until I saw these athletes coming down, and I followed them back to the finish.

Yesterday was more substantial.  In the morning was a long (100-120 min.) session at a "conversational" pace, which is to say that it was supposed to be a good solid training paddle, but not at such high intensity that you couldn't chat with your companions.  I spent most of it alongside Chris H. and Royal, and I had to work pretty hard to keep pace with them.  I tried to take good strokes and keep the stroke rate in a reasonable range, and not exceed that "conversational" pace.  We paddled from the Route 484 bridge up to Rainbow Springs and back; in the last mile back to the bridge my form was sort of falling apart and I fell off the pace, so I concluded my paddle at an even 100 minutes.

Yesterday afternoon we did a power-building workout: six times (2 min. on/1 min. off at 50 strokes per minute and 3 min. on/1 min. off at 60 spm).  Both cadences are quite low, but 60 spm felt really fast after doing 50 spm.

After the two-week break from paddling my arms had felt as good as they'd felt in a long time.  But now they're sore again, especially my forearms.  I've got a couple of blisters on my left middle finger, too.  Tomorrow is a scheduled day off, and I'm as grateful for it as anybody even though I just got here.  There are some tough days coming up this week and I hope a day will be enough for me to regroup.

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Monday photo feature

As I was leaving the riverfront yesterday I saw this barge rig carrying a load of wind turbine blades up the Mississippi.  It was the first time I'd seen this particular cargo out there.

I think most of the barges I see on the river are carrying agricultural products--grains, primarily.  That's the biggest economic impact of extreme low-water periods like the one we're having this fall: it's more difficult for farmers to get their harvests to market.

Products of the sand and gravel industry--piles of rock, Portland cement, stuff like that--are a common sight on barges.  I also see a lot of coal being shipped by barge, though maybe not as much as I once did now that TVA's Allen Fossil Plant downstream of downtown Memphis has been converted to natural gas.  Sometimes I see barges that appear to contain some variety of fuel in liquid or gas form.

But that's about it for what I routinely see being shipped out on the river.  So it was interesting to see something new yesterday.

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Staying in motion, if only just barely

I suppose my life wouldn't be complete without some aches and pains, and not to worry: I've got some.  That discomfort in my right collarbone that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is still present; it just so happened that I had my annual physical scheduled for this past Wednesday, so I mentioned it to my doctor and she ordered an X-ray.  Fortunately the bone came out looking just fine.  The doctor said it could be just a bruise, or even a weird virus that she's heard is going around that causes such pains.  Or maybe it's just the latest manifestation of my impinged nerves.

Meanwhile, my left hip flexor has been bothering me as well.  I started noticing it during one of my runs the week before last, and after I ran last Wednesday it seemed to feel worse.  My original plan was to run again on Friday, but I decided to skip it and see if the extra rest made any difference.  As of this writing it's still hurting about the same.  It sure seems that whoever controls the universe simply doesn't want me to run.

So I'm feeling pretty beat up these days.  I guess the bright side is that right now I'm still just maintaining some general fitness and don't have anything on the horizon that I need to be in top competitive shape for.  And at least I can still paddle without any severe discomfort.  That's what I did yesterday and today.  Yesterday it was overcast with a chilly breeze, and I felt sort of sluggish in the boat.  I basically just got in my hour... punched the clock, as it were.  I felt better today, and I expect having some sunshine had something to do with that, though it was still breezy and chilly.

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If you want it, attain it!

"Attainment" is a paddling term for moving one's boat upriver, against the current.  On a slow-moving Class I river, attaining is as simple as paddling upstream faster than the current is carrying you downstream.  As the degree of whitewater complexity rises, you might have to seek help from features in the river to get your boat upstream: hopping from one eddy to another, for instance, or surfing a wave that slants upstream.

I come from a whitewater background, and I've always enjoyed looking for clever ways to move upstream in a rapid.  Attainment is also a great exercise for developing fitness, technical efficiency, balance and control, and a deeper understanding of whitewater features and how they can help you get your boat from one spot in the river to another.

As I moved more into boats designed for flatwater and open-water paddling, I found that my attaining skills often came in handy when paddling those boats out on the Mississippi River.  Again, it's typically a matter of paddling upstream faster than the current is flowing downstream, but sometimes little things like stroke timing and angle of approach matter, too.

One old slalom racing friend of mine recently created a group on Face Book dedicated to attainment, and he invited group members to share their thoughts and their videos on the topic.  I knew right then I had to make a short film about attainment out on my home river.  You can now view it below.  I threw in a few cinematic tropes just for fun, but I hope the viewer ultimately will appreciate the important role attainment plays in the life of a paddler.

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A few thoughts about running

As some readers might know, I was a runner when I was younger.  I ran track and cross country for my high school and college teams.  I was a decent runner, if not a great one.  In high school my times were around 2:02 for 800 meters, 4:34 for 1600 meters, 10:12 for 3200 meters--good enough to win a few races in my area, but nowhere near good enough to attract the attention of college coaches.  I went to college with academics in mind but decided I might as well participate in the crummy no-scholarships running program the school had.  There I managed to raise my performance a level or two--still far from stardom but good enough to hold my head high as a respectable collegiate runner.  I broke 27 minutes a couple of times on 8-kilometer cross country courses, and my greatest achievement was probably clocking 8:52 in an indoor 3000-meter race in Louisville's Broadbent Arena.  Not long after that, I went down with a severe iliotibial band injury and was never able to return to that kind of form.

I graduated from college in 1990, and in the ensuing years I ran sporadically as my involvement in canoe and kayak racing increased.  I did an occasional road race, and while working as a high school teacher I assisted with the school's cross country program and ran with the kids a good bit.  I stayed in pretty good shape, albeit nowhere close to the peak form of my college career.

But by the early 2000s my efforts to run sort of petered out.  I was spending a lot of time training in the boat, and seeing as how I enjoyed paddling more than running, I just didn't see much reason to keep doing the latter ("Runners don't paddle, so why should paddlers run?").

I'd hardly run a step for some 20 years when, at about this time last year, I decided to buy a new pair of running shoes and give it another try.  Why did I decide to do that?  Nostalgia, mostly.  I'd been watching some You Tube footage of Olympic and world championships races of the last decade, and decided that I sort of missed being able to go out and run a mile or more and have it feel good and smooth.  I also wanted another cross-training activity in the mix as my tolerance for cold-weather paddling diminishes.

For my first time out a year ago, I figured 20 minutes was a reasonable length of time to run.  Anybody can run for 20 minutes... right?  But it was no more than a couple of minutes in that I realized just how out of running shape I was.  All the cardiovascular infrastructure that I'd built up from high school into early adulthood was gone.  I tried to settle in for 20 tough minutes, but I ended up stopping well short of that because of pain in my Achilles tendons.

I attempted two or three more runs last December, with similar results.  Finally, after injuring one of those Achilles a bit more severely, I decided to give it up until the arrival of warmer weather.

At the end of April I gave it another try, and this time I radically lowered my expectations of the distance I could handle.  I did just a short lap around the block here in my neighborhood--a distance of maybe 800 meters or so.  For the next couple of months I used this around-the-block run as my warmup for gym sessions.  The main thing I remember about those runs is that they never seemed to get any easier; each one felt like just as much of a chore as the first one had felt.

In July I took my trip up to New England, and once I was back home in early August I didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond some unstructured weekend paddling.  By November I was starting to feel like a slug and decided it was time to get back in motion.  If you've been reading this blog lately, then you know that my current routine includes some paddling, some bike riding, several exercises with a medicine ball, and some running.

Twice a week, I've been going over to the park just west of my home and running the perimeter of a big grassy field (we call it the "Greensward").  A lap around the Greensward is probably somewhere around 1000 meters, and over time I've been nudging that distance up by cutting fewer and fewer corners.  Each time out I've run a lap, done a couple of sets of medicine ball exercises, done a couple of sets of runs up the front stairs of a nearby building, and finished with a run of maybe 500 meters.  While I haven't been setting any speed records, it finally seems like running is getting a bit easier for me--a tiny bit, at least.  For a while I was having doubts about whether I would finish each run, even with less than 50 meters to go; but in the last week or so I've noticed that I'm feeling less that way.

I have no lofty plans to resurrect my running career; as I noted above, I enjoy paddling more than running and I think I will continue to satisfy my competitive urges that way.  But maybe... just maybe... I can get back to thinking of running as "something that I do."

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Monday photo feature

Can you see them?  CAN YOU???  They're right there in front of that pile of rocks on the far bank: a pair of big canoes taking some customers on a tour of the Mississippi River at Memphis on a blustery, overcast morning a couple of weeks ago.

I was in the Greenbelt Park at the time, doing my running and medicine ball routine.  When I noticed the canoes out there I zoomed in as close as my cellular telephonic device's camera would allow, and snapped the picture.

The canoes operate under the auspices of Mississippi River Expeditions, and I expect Mr. Matthew Burdine was out there leading the tour.

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Not moving freely, but moving just the same

As I said a few weeks ago, for now I'm just living with the discomfort brought on by the vertebrae that are impinging the nerves running through my shoulders into my arms.  The pain seems to wander around.  For the last month or so it's been mostly in both forearms, and at times I've lain in bed at night and felt them throbbing.  Now, just in the last couple of days, I've been feeling a rather sharp pain in the area of my right collarbone; it's almost as if I've fractured the bone somehow, though I can't think of anything that's happened that would have caused such a thing.

Since my last post I've continued with my variety of training activities.  I'm riding my bike a couple of times a week and doing my little running/medicine ball routine twice a week.  I've saved paddling for the weekends, usually paddling for 60 minutes each time out.  I'm just doing whatever I feel like as opposed to any specific workouts.  If I'm feeling good I'll throw in some long surges.

This weekend I paddled on Friday, and it was yesterday that I woke up feeling that pain in my collarbone area along with a lot of stiffness and soreness.  I went out and did a pretty leisurely bike ride: the annual Memphis marathon was in progress, and I spent as much time coasting or standing along the course and watching the runners as pedaling in any sort of deliberate way.

When I returned to the river this morning I was worried that the collarbone pain would bother me in the boat, but it turned out not to be so bad.  It was all the more reason to paddle with my leg and lower abdominal muscles as much as possible.

Enquiring minds want to know: what has the Mississippi River been doing lately?  Well, it continues to be various degrees of low.  Last weekend, when the river was flowing around seven and a half feet below zero on the Memphis gauge, I was unable to paddle southward from my dock, as I usually do:

But there was just barely enough water for me to paddle out to the north.  I had to thread my way through those water and electrical lines beneath the ramp:

During the last week the river crested at about -4.5 feet.  By this morning it had dropped back down to -6.3 feet, but I still had a sliver of water allowing me to depart to the south:

My river is never the same thing two days in a row, and I'd say that's a good thing.

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Monday photo feature

Roy Roberts, a racing friend of mine from Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been canoeing the entire Mississippi River with his friend Rich.  They've been doing it in segments over the last couple of years as their work schedules allow.  On the last day of October they embarked on their latest segment, and I shot this picture of them as they paddled out of the harbor here at Memphis.

The latest I've heard is that they're nearing New Orleans, and they plan to end the segment shortly because of work commitments and impending bad weather.  They'll return later to paddle the last stretch of river to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Best practice

"Good performers practice until they get it right.  Great performers practice until they can't get it wrong."

The director of the handbell group I play in shared this saying recently.  In his context the "performers" are musicians, but I think the saying applies to just about everything that requires skill, and paddling is certainly one such thing.

Why do professional athletes and Olympic hopefuls put in the unbelievable number of hours of training that they do?  Sure, each athlete wants to be the fittest and the strongest and the toughest, but ultimately it all comes down to being able to step out on the big stage in front of television cameras and huge crowds and just do what he or she does every day.  A pro basketball player doesn't know how not to dribble and pass and shoot.  A major league baseball pitcher doesn't know how not to throw a major-league-caliber pitch.  And an elite-level canoe and kayak racer doesn't know how not to get the boat up to speed quickly and efficiently and take good strokes and make good moves.

Bill Endicott, the U.S. whitewater team coach from the 1970s into the 1990s, pushed his athletes to do not just a healthy volume of training, but as much of that training as possible in their race boats to achieve the maximum possible sensation of what they would be doing in competition.  Other activities like running and lifting weights were all well and good, he said, but they should be done in addition to, never instead of, one's in-the-boat training.  So I would say Endicott was a believer in the above saying.

*          *          *

If you've been following this blog lately, then you know that I've been taking a long training break, paddling on weekends but doing very little else.  The reasons include exhaustion from my summer trip to New England, ongoing muscle and nerve woes, a pile of work to do at my rental property, renewed enthusiasm for projects in my woodworking shop, and philosophical questions about my whole athletic identity as I push ever closer to the end of my sixth decade on this Earth.

This is not really anything new.  I've taken a training break almost every year around this time, albeit not as long as this one.  And every year I've found it in me to get moving again by and by.  Even though I believe the rest is something my body and brain need, eventually I start feeling like a slug and miss the positive energy that physical activity gives me.  So, having wrapped up several other items of business, I picked this past week to get a new routine going.

What does this new routine entail?  Mostly out-of-the-boat stuff, in spite of Bill Endicott's advice.  Keep in mind that Endicott was working primarily with athletes in their physical prime who were hoping to compete in the world championships and Olympic Games.  At this point I am not that kind of athlete, if I ever even was.  No, considering my age and my spinal/orthopedic challenges, I think general fitness is what I need to focus on at this time.  This past week that included some bike riding--60 to 70 minutes of medium-intensity riding on Monday and Wednesday.  On Tuesday and Thursday I went over to the park near my home and did some running (just a few minutes on grass, plus a few intervals up stairs) and some medicine ball work (a couple of abdominal exercises and some power tosses).  By the end of the week I was tired and a bit sore, but elated to be doing something again.  Getting started is always the hardest part: it isn't until the second or third session that you have a really good feel for the activities you're doing, how long it will take, how hard it will be, and so on.  We had some unseasonably warm weather early last week, and that made getting started feel a little easier.  Now that I've got a routine locked in it'll be easier to get out and get it done even on days when the weather isn't so inviting.

Of course, paddling will always figure at least a little bit into what I'm doing, and I'm still getting in the boat on the weekends.  Last weekend I had a work-related event Saturday and couldn't paddle, but I made it to the river Sunday.  The Mississippi had come up to -5.60 feet on the Memphis gauge--still a very low level, but about six and a half feet higher than the record low set last month.  For the first time since August, my dock was usable:

But I'm not expecting super-high water anytime soon.  The Corps of Engineers said this week that it expects the low river stages to last well into the winter.  Apparently one of the effects of the El Niño pattern we're currently having is dry conditions in the Midwest, and that's where most of the water comes from that flows by Memphis.

At least there's enough water for paddling a boat.  I was back out there yesterday, doing another typical 60-minute paddle.  I kept the intensity moderate and thought a lot about stroke mechanics, particularly keeping my core muscles involved.  I aimed for a low-ish stroke rate, but did so by feel rather than count strokes or use a cadence sensor.

And that's just how it is right now, and how it's likely to be for the foreseeable future: lots of medium-intensity base work, technical practice, and general fitness.  Right now I can't say what my goals are for the coming year: I have a couple of ideas floating around in my head, but it'll be several months before I have a better idea of what the year 2024 has in store.  As long as I build up some good base fitness, it won't be too hard to get myself in a higher level of shape once the picture becomes more clear.

I paddled again this afternoon, when I was tired from a long day.  I thought for sure I was going to feel awful in the boat, but once I got moving I felt remarkably good.  Once again I tried to take good strokes with all muscle groups firing in unison.  As is so often the case, paddling turned out to be the best thing I did all day.

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Monday photo feature

When the Mississippi River is very low, it's a long, steep hike up the ramp from my marina to the parking lot.  No matter how tough a session in the boat I might have had, going back up this ramp often seems like the hardest thing I have to do when I go down to the river.

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Physical health and environmental health and robust river flows: somehow they're all connected

After a very warm September followed by some unseasonably chilly temperatures, we're finally having a few days of near-perfect fall weather.  Yesterday I got in the boat and headed out of the harbor to see what was happening on the big river.

Right at the harbor's mouth I found a barge rig moving upriver and producing some of the nicest surfing waves I'd seen in a while.  I went out and got at least a half-dozen nice rides.  My downwinding skills are anything but sharp these days, and barge wakes are rarely a true downwind environment anyway, but I managed to link runs a couple of times, and that lifted my spirits a bit in this tough chapter of my athletic life.

I visited the spine surgeon last Monday, and we concluded that my best option for my arm and shoulder achiness is simply to live with it for the time being.  As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, surgery would restrict the range of motion in my neck, and I consider that worse than what I've currently got; but the doctor pointed out that over time my current condition might worsen, making surgery a more appealing option.

So I'm choosing between bad and worse, and that's a rather disheartening state of affairs.  But getting after those barge wakes cheered me up a bit: not only was I able to coax the necessary sprints out of my sore body, but also my cardiovascular fitness seemed up to the task even though I've done just a minimum of paddling and other exercise for the last two months.

I should also note that as tempting as it is to write myself off as an over-the-hill has-been, I've in fact got some good paddling performance still in me.  Back on July 15 I raced pretty well for the first half of the Blackburn Challenge, and the trouble I had in the second half wasn't because of my nerve and muscle woes.

As I re-entered the harbor yesterday, a small boat with an outboard motor came zooming in along with me.  I quickly moved over to see if I could catch its wake, and when the two guys in the boat saw what I was doing, they shouted their approval and cooperated with me.  We cruised up the lower stretch of the harbor around 8 miles per hour (12.9 kilometers per hour) until we hit a no-wake zone and had to knock it off.

The Mississippi River dropped below -12.0 feet on the Memphis gauge for the first time ever in the middle of last week, but it had risen to -10.5 feet by the time I got back down there this morning.  It's forecast to be up to -9.4 feet by a week from now, and that's some serious high water compared to what we've had lately.  I could no longer see the bottom in that spot I posted photos of last weekend.

I paddled out of the harbor hoping to find some more good wakes to surf, but the barge traffic was idle.  So I settled for an hour of steady paddling.

There was a lot of floating litter in the harbor, largely because of the rising water level, I expect.  As I went along I picked up bits of trash until the space just fore of my footboard was nearly overflowing.  Do such deeds of good citizenship make me feel smug and superior?  Maybe.  But I would submit that my main motivation is my desire to paddle on water that's not all littered up.

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Monday photo feature

I'm a sucker for wilderness adventure nonfiction.  The best-known titles I've read include Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Into The Wild, as well as Ernest Shackelton's diaries from his Endurance expedition to Antarctica in the early 20th century.  I've read lots of stuff you're less likely to have heard of, too.  And nothing gets my juices flowing like a story that involves canoeing and kayaking.

Wickliffe W. "Wick" Walker was among the top whitewater racers in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Following a career in the elite military forces, he became one of the world's leading organizers of wilderness whitewater expeditions, his best-known of which was a foray into the forbidden Tsangpo Gorge in the eastern Himalaya in the fall of 1998, an undertaking that ended in the tragic death of kayaker Doug Gordon.  Walker's account of that expedition, Courting the Diamond Sow, was published in 2000.

I had a chance to meet Wick Walker in 2007, when we both attended the whitewater slalom nationals at Deep Creek, Maryland.  I don't think we spoke for more than a few minutes, but I made sure to share my appreciation of Courting the Diamond Sow.  I found him to be quite an unassuming, down-to-earth soul and it was hard to believe I was speaking to a giant of global exploration.

Walker now has a new book out, and my copy is pictured above.  Torrents As Yet Unknown is a collection of accounts of adventures in remote river gorges that took place in the second half of the 20th century, including Walker's own Tsangpo expedition.  It's a fascinating look into the personalities, the challenges they faced, and the evolution of the technology used in the exploration of Planet Earth.

You can find Torrents As Yet Unknown in the usual online places--Amazon and Borders and so on.  Of course, I encourage everyone to support his or her cool local bookshop whenever possible.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Dealing with aches and dealing with mud

The quest for a pain-free existence goes on.  I finally got in a follow-up visit with the spine surgeon after my second transforaminal (nerve block) injection, which seems to have brought no lasting improvement.  The doctor reiterated his reluctance to resort to surgery, and he made a point that I'd previously been unaware of: if I do go through with a surgical procedure, I can expect to lose quite a bit of my neck's range of motion.  To me, that sounds worse than my current state of being.

The doctor referred me to a clinic that ran some electrical current through my arms to test for any nerve damage.  I'll see him again tomorrow morning to go over the results of that test, and discuss what options I've got left.

In the meantime, I remain achy and sore.  Anybody who's ever lifted weights knows that when you start a new routine that your muscles aren't used to, you'll experience soreness for several days until the muscles adapt.  Well, these days I'm feeling like that all the time, and I haven't lifted a weight in several months.  When I paddled yesterday morning, the soreness was quite burdensome even though all other aspects of my fitness checked out okay.  Once again I focused on leg drive and rotation, getting my core muscles involved as much as possible.

There's a new low-water record for the Mississippi River here.  Last Wednesday the level bottomed out at 11.52 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge.  The previous record, set last year, had been -10.81 feet.  Nowhere is the low water more apparent than at the marina where I keep my boat.  When I went down there yesterday, the river flowing right at -11.0 feet, the entire end of the facility closest to the bank was up on dry land, and most of the houseboats were sitting in the mud.  I snapped this photo from the main pier:

Those ridges you can see through the sky's reflection are mud, under just a couple of inches of water.

When I got back down there this afternoon, the water was about half a foot lower (-11.48 feet).  I took another photo of approximately the same spot:

The forecast for the coming week says the river will be on a gradual rise.  That's a good thing, because we paddlers are about to run out of easy dock access to the water.  This photo shows the one low dock for human-powered craft that's still on some water:

That water that's within reach of the dock is only maybe four inches deep.  Once I was in my boat I had to sort of pole my way out to deeper water.  I stayed in the harbor and paddled fairly easy, checking out the parts of the bottom that I'd never seen exposed before.  I saw all manner of refuse that's been hidden underwater for who knows how long.  Under the Hernando DeSoto Bridge I saw the bottom half of a department store mannequin, and that brought back a vague memory of a film that was shot in Memphis years ago with a scene in which a body was thrown from the bridge.  I wonder if the mannequin could have been the prop for the body.  If so, shame on the filmmakers for not policing their litter.

By and by I paddled up toward the north end of the harbor.  As I moved along, a couple of times I hit submerged objects with my paddle.  I checked the depth with my paddle and discovered the water was only maybe two feet deep even though I was still over a half-mile from the harbor's north end.  I decided to turn around and stay in deeper water.  There's no telling what kind of industrial debris has been hiding on the bottom for decades, and all I need is to bash my rudder on something like that.

At the end of an hour I slid into the shallow water back at the dock.  I wasn't feeling great, but I think I was less achy than yesterday.  In any case, I'm glad to be keeping a little something going as I wait for my desire to get after it more seriously to return.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

Low water continues to be the top story down at the Memphis riverfront.  As you can see here, my dock is pretty useless these days for the purpose of putting a boat in the water.  My boat is the long one in the white cover, and I've been carrying it around to the side of the marina facing away from us, where there's a dock that still has access to the water.

I took this photo yesterday, when the Mississippi River was flowing at -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That's just eight tenths of a foot higher than the lowest level ever recorded, which occurred last October.  The river was even lower Saturday: -10.2 feet.  I guess the good news at this moment is that the river is rising a little: the current forecast says it'll be all the way up to -9.4 feet by tomorrow evening.  But it isn't expected to go any higher than that in the near future.

To me, the most interesting thing about this photo is the grass that's growing on dirt that's normally deep underwater.  The water has been low for quite a while now.

One point I always feel obligated to make to people who don't live near the Mississippi is that the river is not "dry," as media coverage often leads one to believe.  Even at these near-historic-low levels, the Mississippi is still a very big, very powerful river.  Most of the national news coverage focuses on the economic impact of low river stages--the disruption to commercial barge traffic, primarily.  I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't be concerned about this problem--we should--but the reality is that the shipping industry is not why the river is there.  For that matter, paddling canoes and kayaks like I do isn't why the river is there, either.  The river is there to drain the continent and perpetuate the hydrologic cycle, like it was doing for millennia before we got here and like it'll be doing for millennia after we're gone.

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I'm still paddling a little

Yesterday I went down to the paddle for the first time in two weeks.  Paddling was out of the question last weekend because of my involvement in the Pink Palace Crafts Fair here in Memphis.  My weekdays continue to be occupied by work in my woodworking shop and at my rental property.

There was a succession of downstream-traveling barge rigs out on the Mississippi yesterday, and I went out to see what kind of surfing I could do.  The waves behind downstream-moving towboats are usually less solid for surfing than those behind up-bound rigs; and because of the way the pilots have to maneuver beneath all the bridges at downtown Memphis, the water is typically swirling and confused.  Nevertheless, I did manage to get several good surfs yesterday.

Throwing down the sprints to get on those waves definitely taxed my body.  My breathing held up just fine, but I could feel it in my muscles.  Both my deltoids were sore this morning, and when I returned to the river and found it free of barge traffic, I was happy to do just some steady paddling.  During this period of weekend-only paddling I'm trying extra hard to take the best strokes I can when I'm in the boat.  This morning I focused on doing most, if not all, of the work with my abdominal muscles, letting my arms be nothing more than the connection between the paddle and my core body.  Of course, it's hard not to employ the arm muscles at least a little, especially in unstable conditions out on the river.  But just the same, I tried to use the core muscles as exclusively as possible.  That meant intense leg drive--after all, torso rotation starts at the feet!

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Monday photo feature

For the first time in 2023, my dock has run aground.  This is the scene that greeted me Saturday morning.  The Mississippi River was flowing at about 8.4 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge--nearly five feet lower than the previous Saturday when I had last made it down to the riverfront.  By yesterday afternoon the level had dropped to 9.7 feet below zero.

Last year the river dropped to the lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded: -10.8 feet.  That was late last October; now it's just early September, but here we are flirting with such levels once more.  Unless some rain falls higher in the watershed soon, I expect we'll start to see some reporting in the national news about the extreme drought conditions in the lower Mississippi basin.

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Getting what I can out of this period of doldrums

Since I last put up a post here I've done a little bit of paddling but spent a lot more time doing non-athletic stuff, including working in my workshop, working on my rental property, and being sick for a few days.  I've also received another transforaminal (nerve block) injection.

Paddling continues to be a Saturday and Sunday activity.  The sessions have all been steady 60-minute affairs.  As always, I've tried to take good strokes and move the boat as effectively and efficiently as possible.  I've taken it easy at times and pushed the pace at other times.  I would have liked to do some barge-wake surfing, but until this morning the river has been deserted when I've been out there.  Today I found three or four barge rigs moving upriver, but they weren't generating any surfable waves.

My second nerve block was performed back on Wednesday the 30th of August.  The doctor asked me to keep a diary of how I'm feeling in the days since, and while that's a perfectly reasonable request, I hate trying to quantify pain.  Whenever the doctor says "How is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?" I never know exactly what I should say.  I always think, "Okay, I've got this annoying pain and discomfort, but is it really bad, or just 'normal' bad?"  It's kind of frustrating.  But since the procedure I think I've been feeling quite good or having just some hints of the pain I'd had before.  While paddling, I sometimes feel some mild stress in my arms and shoulders, and I sometimes feel nothing at all.  So that's where I am in this long saga of aches and pains.

It was last weekend that I got sick.  It was basically a bad cold.  When I went down to the river last Saturday I had the mild sore throat that always seems to signal the onset of a cold for me, but I paddled anyway and felt pretty good in the boat.  But the throat soreness got worse and my energy level plummeted for the rest of that day, and by Sunday morning I knew it was time to stay in and get some rest.  I felt pretty lousy for several days and didn't feel like rejoining the functioning world until Wednesday.

So... that's what's going on these days.  It's definitely some time off from any serious paddling.  For any readers who have bigger plans for training and competing this fall, I hope they perform well and have lots of fun.  I wish I could share in it a bit more, but there's no reason for alarm.  I've always come back around in the past, and I reckon I eventually will once more.

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Monday photo feature

In my country the sport of whitewater slalom had its heyday in the 1980s, when the U.S. team won a big pile of world championships medals in men's single canoe (C1), men's double canoe (C2), and women's kayak (K1W).

Since then the U.S. has had some international success here and there, but nothing like in those glory days.  Meanwhile, participation has plummeted at domestic events.  When I raced C1 in the 1990s, my boat class typically had 20 to 25 entrants at the national team trials; I understand that was down from the numbers of the 1970s and 80s, and in the decades since there have sometimes been fewer than ten C1s racing at the trials.

As far as international success goes, in recent years the U.S. team hasn't had any dominant athletes like it did in the 80s, but it typically has had one or two people capable of finishing on the podium at the biggest races.

Right now that person appears to be Evy Liebfarth (whose father Lee was a K1 racer back when I was racing).  This past weekend, at the Under-23 world championships at Krakow, Poland, Evy claimed the gold medal in K1W and the bronze medal in C1W.  The not-very-good photo above is a screen-grab from the video of her winning K1W run.

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Trying to keep something going as we move into late summer

Paddling has been minimal since I got home from my trip two weeks ago.  I've had a big pile of nuisance chores to deal with, and I've spent what little spare time I've had in the midst of that doing stuff in my woodworking shop, because that's what's been speaking to me lately, to be honest.

But I've gotten in the boat several times in the last two weeks.  Last Sunday I went down to the riverfront and paddled for an hour, and felt perfectly awful in the boat.  My energy was low and my muscles were aching in all the usual places, and I couldn't wait for those 60 minutes to be over.

On Wednesday I went to the doctor to follow up on the nerve-block injections I had before I left town.  I explained to him that I'd experienced very little improvement from that treatment: the neck stiffness and ashiness in my shoulders and biceps areas seemed as bad as ever.  He recommended another round of injections, targeting vertebrae the first treatment missed.  Seeing as how I'm not in excruciating pain, I think that's reasonable.  He wants to perform surgery only as a last resort, and even though this surgery wouldn't be as invasive as, say, open heart surgery, that seems wise to me.  So his office is going to call me to schedule another nerve-block injection, and we'll see if it takes this time.

This weekend I paddled both yesterday and today.  Though I'm still achy, especially in my left biceps area, I felt quite a bit more energetic in the boat than I did last Sunday.  The Mississippi was flowing this morning at 4.7 feet on the Memphis gauge--a low level, but not alarmingly low.  A few storm systems have moved across the Missouri and upper Mississippi and Ohio and Tennessee watersheds in the last six weeks, and that's kept the river hanging in there well above the super-drought levels that we saw last fall.  Of course, if that region doesn't continue to get some rain in the coming months, then the river will be making the national news once more.

The past week has been quite nice for the month of August.  For a few days we had high temperatures below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity has been down.  By yesterday the temperature had returned to the mid 90s, but the humidity was still low enough that it didn't feel that bad outside.  I believe more oppressive heat will be returning this coming week.

I have a feeling my racing might be over for 2023.  In addition to the continuing physical woes, I'm feeling tired and preoccupied with a lot of out-of-the-boat stuff.  I've been giving some thought to the period of the year in which I focus my more ambitious training.  For decades I've always ramped things up in December so I'll be in good form by spring.  It almost feels like part of my D.N.A. at this point.  It dates back to when I raced slalom, in which the biggest domestic races were in the spring.  It continued as I moved more into flatwater/open-water racing because once upon a time the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race was one of my biggest events and it was in the spring.  In more recent years I've worked to be in good shape for races like the one at Ocean Springs in March and the one at Vicksburg in April.  But now the Vicksburg race is no more, and lately my biggest events have seemed to be in mid-summer.

Meanwhile, many of my best racing friends are focusing their training on the big 32-mile race on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.  I'm really just not interested in doing a race that long, but even if I were, by August I always seem to be exhausted and not up to embarking on another training block.  Maybe the dog-day heat is part of the reason, but I think I need to take a hard look at how I periodize my year in the future as well.  Maybe I need to be more of a six-months-per-year paddler so I can pay more attention to my woodworking and other interests while delivering a good-quality effort at two or three carefully-selected races.

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Americana fun (2023 edition)

The big trip I just got home from brought me tantalizingly close to achieving my goal of paddling a boat in all 50 states.

On July 13 I picked up the states of Delaware and New Jersey by paddling my surfski on the Delaware River at Delaware City, making sure I paddled on both sides of the state line.

Then, about a week later, I was up in Maine.  First I paddled my whitewater boat on the Kennebec River from Harris Station Dam to The Forks.  The next day I drove back to the coast and paddled the surfski in Middle Bay near Brunswick.  And the following week, while mostly occupied with my woodworking class, I found time to paddle both the whitewater boat and the surfski on Boyd Pond near Bristol.

I paddled in New Jersey again as I headed back south, stopping at Spruce Run Reservoir near Clinton.  I paddled the surfski there.

So what's left?  Three states.  Minnesota, Arizona, and Alaska.  Minnesota shouldn't be too hard; I just have to make the time to go up there.  I actually was looking at doing that this summer before a spot opened up in that class and lured me northeastward instead.

I guess there are a number of ways I could paddle in Arizona, but it sure would be nice to get into the Grand Canyon.  I need to seek out people I know who know about the whole permit process and pump them for information.

Alaska will be tough.  If I want to have complete control over what boat I paddle, I'll have to drive there with my own boat, and driving to Alaska is an undertaking of a higher order of magnitude than anything I've ever done before.  The alternative is to find an outfitter from whom I can rent a boat and paddle as much on my own terms as possible.

Oh well... for now I'm just resting on my laurels.  Here's a list of the fifty states of the United States, and this time I'm marking with an asterisk (*) just those states in which I have not paddled:

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

It was good to see a pair of Arkansans racing all the way over in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Saturday.  Stephen Lynn (stern) and Don Walls took second place in a hotly-contested men's OC2 (tandem outrigger canoe) class in the 24-mile (38.6-kilometer) Three Rivers Regatta race.

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Showdown(s) in East Tennessee

I was up by 5 AM EDT yesterday, and after some coffee and breakfast I headed to Governor Ned McWherter Landing Park on the bank of the Tennessee River.  The Three Rivers Regatta is so named because it occurs in the area where the Holston and French Broad Rivers come together to form the Tennessee.  It features a race of 24 miles (38.6 kilometers) that starts and finishes on the Tennessee and makes loops up into both the Holston and French Broad.  I, meanwhile, was entered in the 6-mile (9.66-kilometer) race, which would be contested mostly on the Tennessee while arcing into the Holston for only the briefest of moments.  I suppose if I were in the mood to stir up some trouble I could have lodged a complaint over being done out of one of my "three rivers," maybe even demanded a refund of a third of my entry fee.  But I was in no such mood.  I've paddled the French Broad (higher upstream in North Carolina) more times than I can count anyway.

I got to the race site in time to see a few of my friends take off on the 24-mile journey at 8:30.  My own race would start an hour later, and I spent the time readying my boat and gear.  Soon enough I was on the water, at the starting line facing upstream beneath the South Knoxville Bridge.

The river had a strong flow as a result of Thursday's heavy rains, and the first half of the race would be spent looking for the best lines to avoid paddling right into the teeth of the current.  Mostly that meant sticking close to one bank or the other.  The most interesting part of the whole race was the first couple of kilometers, in which we had to paddle up the Tennessee from the bridge (at the left edge of the photo) into the river-left channel next to Dickinson Island (indicated with pink arrows):

Once in a blue moon I have a good idea, and the one I had yesterday was to line up as far to the river-left end of the starting line as possible.  Once the gun had fired, I moved quickly to the river-left bank seeking shelter from the current.  Meanwhile, Knoxville locals Hannah Rubin and Joe Stibler, who had lined up closer to the river-right end of the starting line, did the same thing along the river-right bank, and for the first few minutes they moved a good several boatlengths ahead of me as they apparently had a better eddy to work with over there.

But of course, they were going to have to cross the river to enter the correct Dickinson Island channel, and soon they were giving their lead right back to me as they ferried across against the river's full current.  By the time we entered the channel I had several boatlengths on them.

There was no time to relax, of course, because I had to assume they were capable of reeling me in.  For the remainder of the race I paddled as strong and efficiently as I could manage, at between 70 and 80 strokes per minute.  Fighting my way upriver for the first half of the race was tough, not because I was dealing with anything my competitors didn't have to deal with, but just because of the mental stress of looking down at my G.P.S. display and seeing that I was moving two or three kilometers per hour slower than I could be going on flatwater.

At last I reached the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers, and the turning buoy was just a slight distance up in the mouth of the Holston.  I rounded the buoy and finally got a good look at where my nearest challengers were.  I'd built a pretty good lead on Hannah and Joe, but of course no lead ever feels big enough to me, so I kept the power on as I made the journey back downriver toward the finish line at the bridge.  Now I had some help from the current, and most of the time I was traveling well over 13 kph.  I had to navigate a couple of large bends in the river, but eventually the bridge came back into view about 1000 meters distant.  By now I was pretty sure the race was mine as long as I didn't flip or do anything else stupid.  I stayed as strong and smooth as I could and finished with a time of 51 minutes, 47 seconds.

I paddled back up to watch my fellow racers come in.  Hannah Rubin took second overall and first place among women with a time of 54:29.  Joe Stibler finished 17 seconds later.

I knew that my victory would attract little notice, as the still-in-progress 24-mile race was, rightly or wrongly, the marquee event of the day.  To be honest, I've always thought that offering more than one race at a canoe and kayak event is a dumb idea.  Our sport simply isn't big enough to be dividing the participants into different competitions at one event.  If it could be like a track meet, where you've got races from 100 meters to 10,000 meters, that would be wonderful; after all, some athletes have the gift for sprinting while others are better suited to the more endurance-oriented events.  But running is a much bigger sport than paddling.  Meanwhile, many paddlers seem afflicted with the attitude that longer is better, and so at an event like the Three Rivers Regatta, the shorter distance always ends up being treated like the "kiddie race" and everybody who's anybody is expected to sign up for the longer distance.  I've caved to this peer pressure a few times in the past: "All the cool kids are doing the longer race, so I guess I'd better do it too!"

But no more!  I'm almost 56 years old, and I'm going to live life the way I want to live it.  If nobody notices when I do well, fine.  I wouldn't be still doing this sport after 42 years if my only motivation were recognition.  For the record, most of the time I try not to support events that have more than one race distance because like I said, I think it's a stupid idea.  But this one was right on my way home, and I had a few friends participating, so, well... there I was yesterday.

Just to be clear, there were definitely some superior athletes doing the 24-mile race yesterday, and if we'd all been in the same race, I'd have had to perform really well just to finish in the top five.  But hey, it's been a long time since I've finished first in a race regardless of the quality of competition, so I'm going to allow myself to savor yesterday's "kiddie race" victory.

As for that 24-mile race, Joe Crnkovich kept the title in Knoxville by crossing the finish line first after a grueling three hour, 14 minute, 12 second contest.  He'd spent the race locked in a tight battle with Scott Cummins of Louisville, Kentucky, before breaking free late.  Scott was still close behind at the end, finishing in 3:14:26.

Alessia Faverio of Erwin, Tennessee, was the first female across the line while racing a single surfski like Joe and Scott.  Her time was 3:29:40.  Other class winners were Sven Jonsson and David Stevens (tandem kayak, 3:23:37) and Jeff Schnelle and Jereme Dees (tandem outrigger canoe, 3:26:02).  The complete results for both the 24- and 6-mile distances are posted here.

I hung around for a while and enjoyed catching up with some folks I don't see that often.  It would have fun to settle in and make a day of it.  But I'd been away from home for almost four weeks, and the yearning to be back under my own roof was stronger than any other urge.  I got in the car and headed west on Interstate 40, gaining an hour as I re-entered the Central Time zone.  I was as happy to see Memphis, Tennessee, as I can ever remember as I arrived home around 6:30 PM.

What's next?  Right now I really don't know.  I don't think that nerve block I had before I left has done me much good, so I might have to explore the surgical option.  But that can wait until later.  All I know right now is that I'm dead-dog tired, but home... HOME!!!!

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Taking a meandering course toward home

I said goodbye to Rob Wednesday morning and headed south.  By late morning I was in the western reaches of northern New Jersey, and I stopped to paddle on Spruce Run Reservoir near the town of Clinton.  I paddled for 50 minutes and did another six of those 12-stroke sprints.  Just in case there's anyone out there who thinks that my outing on July 13 shouldn't count as a paddling session in New Jersey, I have now paddled exclusively in The Garden State.

I continued west and south and spent the night camping next to the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.  Apparently this region hasn't had the sort of wet summer they've had up in New England, because the Potomac appeared quite low.

Up to this point the weather had been lovely, but as I moved down Interstate 81 in Virginia yesterday it began to rain, and the rain only intensified as I continued on into Tennessee.  It was utterly torrential by the time I was branching off on a little side trip.

My friends Drew and Louise live high up in the mountains between Johnson City, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina.  This is another reason I'm glad I'm sticking to my plan of racing in Knoxville this weekend: if I'd decided to skip the Knoxville race, I likely would have had a shorter visit with Rob and then raced to get home by yesterday or today, not taking the time to pay Drew and Louise a visit.  As badly as I want to be home, I know that in the long run I'll be glad I took things a little slower and spent some time with friends I don't see very often.

Drew and Louise very kindly gave me some supper and put me up for the night.  I bade them goodbye this morning and came on to Knoxville, the site of tomorrow's Three Rivers Regatta.  Drew and Louise live in the headwaters of Big Laurel Creek, and the creek and its tributaries were pumping full of water as I drove toward Hot Springs.  There were many paddlers at the putin for the creek's main run, and I was tempted to stop, get my whitewater boat off the car, and join them.  But duty called, and on to Knoxville I went, where I paddled for 40 minutes, doing four 12-stroke sprints along the way.  I'm now holed up in a motel at an unremarkable interstate exit, hoping to get a good night's rest so I can do my best in the 6-mile (9.66-kilometer) race in the morning.  Then, with any luck, I'll drive six more hours and be home.  Home at last.

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Moving homeward and back into paddling mode

The northeastern United States is enjoying a very pleasant weather pattern right now.  It moved into the area of Maine I was staying in Sunday morning after heavy rain the night before.  The weather had previously been sort of humid and not as nice as one might expect Maine to be in the summertime.

Yesterday morning I found a public boat launch near the mouth of the Piscataqua River at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and soon enough I was in the boat paddling along on a lovely sunny day.

With a race coming up this Saturday, there's not any training I can do at this point that will make any difference.  I do in fact have solid base fitness after all those weeks of training for the Blackburn Challenge, but having spent the last couple of weeks paddling only sporadically, what I lack is the higher-intensity gear I might need in a six-mile race.

So I'm trying to get out and polish up my speed a bit, and I did some of that in the first half-hour of my 70-minute paddle.  After warming up I did eight 12-stroke maximum-intensity sprints at two-minute intervals.  By the last one I could feel a bit of fatigue creeping in, so I knew that was the time to stop.  I then just paddled around, wandering out onto the Atlantic just a little, where the water was rough in places from large boats moving in and out of the harbor.  I'm pretty sure I crossed the state line at least once, so I got a bit more Maine paddling in with this primarily New Hampshire paddling session.

After paddling yesterday I continued the journey back in the direction of my home.  I stopped in the Hudson Valley region to visit my buddy Rob for a couple of more days, and that's where I am now.

Rob lives across the road from a nice-looking lake, but it's surrounded by private property and the only public access easement is a narrow, steep, rocky embankment that I wasn't sure I wanted to carry my surfski down.  So this morning I went to another lake that Rob recommended, White Pond, located some 15 minutes away.  This body of water is one of the many reservoirs that dot the suburbs and exurbs north of New York City: some are part of the big city's water supply network, others provide water to smaller towns, and some might just be for recreation.  In any case, White Pond was a nice place to enjoy another beautiful morning, and it didn't hurt that there was no access fee.  I paddled for 60 minutes and did another six of those 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

Tomorrow morning I'll get back on the road and continue working my way west and south.  I expect there will be some hotter temperatures to greet me sooner or later.

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Monday photo feature

The author of this blog wears several hats, and he spent most of last week wearing the hat of a woodworker.  (Yes, I know that's an Outdoors, Inc., hat I've got on, but I'm referring to figurative hats here.)

Woodworking can be quite an athletic endeavor in its own right, as I demonstrate here while drawknifing a bevel on a Windsor chair seat.

Photo by Kenneth Kortemeier.

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Back toward home

My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School is complete, and while it was a good experience, I'm glad to be moving back south at last.

I can say for certain that I'm really ready to be back home.  By the time I get there I'll have been away almost four weeks, and that's the longest time I've been away from home in over 20 years.

I do have a race scheduled for next Saturday, August 5: I'm signed up to participate in the Three Rivers Regatta at Knoxville.  I'm doing the 6-mile event, so I need to get back in the boat in the next few days and try to rediscover some speed.  There will be some other good racers there, but almost all of them have opted for the 24-mile race, something I would have no desire to do even if I weren't at the tail end of a long trip.

It would be very easy to skip the Knoxville event altogether and just go home, but it's good to have a reason not to rush.  For instance, I'll be seeing my buddy Rob in the Hudson Valley of New York, and I think I'll spend a couple of nights there and get a good visit rather than drop in for a quick hello and push on.

This past week was primarily consumed by my class, but I did get to paddle a couple of times.  The school property is on the shore of Boyd Pond, which, unlike our "lakes" down South that are really just dammed-up reservoirs, is a natural feature of a river system (the Pemaquid River).  One evening I paddled my surfski along the perimeter of the pond (which is really a decent-sized lake), and another evening I played around in my whitewater boat.  The water was very pleasant.

So in the space of ten days or so I did some pretty good paddling in the state of Maine: some flatwater, some whitewater, and some open water, using both the boats I had with me.

I'm spending this evening in Portsmouth, the largest city on the very brief New Hampshire coast.  I hope to get out and paddle in the morning.  I did paddle in New Hampshire when I was in New England in the summer of 2016, but it was a rather cursory outing where the Connecticut River forms the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, so it'll be nice to pad my Granite State paddling resume a bit.

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One more thing...

Okay, here's one more quick post before I disappear into offline oblivion.  Greg Lesher, who took second place among male single surfski paddlers in last weekend's Blackburn Challenge race, has posted his race report.  You can read it here.  I appear in one of the photographs--the first time I have broken into Greg's blog.  Greg's posts tend to soar in a higher literary plane than mine.

Also: this afternoon I paddled my surfski in Middle Bay, located south of Brunswick, Maine, in the big mess of islands and peninsulas where the Androscoggin and Kennebec Rivers flow into the sea.  So in the last two days I have thoroughly removed Maine from the list of states in which I have never paddled.

I'll see you after my class ends.

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More racing, more whitewater in lovely New England

I've spent this week wandering--sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with great purpose--around New England.

The summertime daylight hours up here are rather interesting.  Because this locale is farther north than my home, the daylight lasts longer each day, and because this is the absolute easternmost reach of the United States (Maine's capital city of Augusta is nearly 5 degrees farther east than New York City, and nearly 11 degrees farther east than Miami), that extra daylight is "front-loaded" into the early morning hours.  Dawn occurs around 4:30 AM EDT, and it's broad daylight by 5 o'clock.

I've paddled twice this week.  On Tuesday evening I attended the weekly "sandlot" race at the Boston suburb of Beverly, Massachusetts.  Eight or nine other people were there, including (but not limited to) Greg Lesher, Matt Drayer, Mary Beth Gangloff, Bernie Romanowski, and Eli Gallaudet.  We raced a triangular course of nearly 5 miles (my G.P.S. device measured it at 7.96 kilometers).  We did it in staggered starts, and as a result I was all alone out there until very late in the race when Eli caught me and then we both caught a guy who had started before us.  It might have been fun to see who I could hang with in a head-to-head start, but I can understand why they like to do the staggered starts, too.  My time (not counting the sprints on the beach at the start and finish) was 44:43, with an average speed a little under 11 kph.  That's slower than I've been doing on flatwater in the harbor at home, and even though the conditions there near the mouth of the Crane River were pretty calm, I guess they were bumpy enough to slow me down a bit.

I'd hoped to meet up with old slalom-racing friend John Kazimierczyk for some whitewater paddling in western Massachusetts on Wednesday, but that morning he told me that the water levels over there were not cooperating and he was going to stay in.  So I decided to head on up to Maine, a state I had not visited since we took a family vacation there when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and a state I had never paddle in.  Having studied the river flow situation on the American Whitewater website, I decided the Kennebec River drainage might be my best bet for some whitewater paddling.  I drove up to a town called The Forks, right at the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, and found myself in a campsite right on the bank of the Dead.  The area had just received some two and a half inches of rain, so all the rivers and creeks had good healthy flows.

Camping nearly was a group of paddlers from upstate New York who were planning to run the Kennebec Gorge, and they kindly welcomed me along.  The Kennebec Gorge is a mostly Class III run with a little bit of Class IV, and it's one of the standard summertime whitewater runs in Maine because of its dam-released flows.  I felt pretty good out there, albeit still not as sharp as in my much more dedicated whitewater days.

The Gorge run is only three miles or so, with a takeout that requires carrying your boat up a long, steep set of stairs.  I chose to continue paddling the additional six or so miles down to the confluence with the Dead.  As the river emerged from the gorge the whitewater gradually calmed down, but there was still plenty of fun Class II-III to mess around on.

This morning I'm feeling surprisingly not too sore.  Maybe my body is actually getting used to that stuff again.

My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School begins tomorrow, so my main plan for today is to make sure I've got the food and supplies I'll need for the next week.  I've never visited the school before, so I won't know what the exact situation will be until I get there, but I reckon it's better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.  The school officials tout the place as being somewhat off the grid, so readers probably shouldn't count on any more posts here until July 29 at the earliest.

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Monday photo feature

It's always great to see smiling faces after several brutal hours of racing.  Here we have Greg Lesher, Rob Jehn, and Mary Beth Gangloff after they'd finished the Blackburn Challenge on Saturday.  Greg took second place and Rob first in men's single surfski, while Mary Beth teamed with Igor Yeremeev to paddle the third-fastest double surfski.  Photo by Wesley Echols.

Just in case you're thinking the Blackburn Challenge is just a canoe and kayak race... it's not.  It's put on by the Cape Ann Rowing Club, and there was no shortage of oar-powered craft on the water: sliding-seat, fixed-seat, shells, dories, workboats... all kinds of boat-propelling athletes were out there Saturday.

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New England waters making me blue

I was up bright and early yesterday morning for my big trip around Cape Ann in the annual Blackburn Challenge.  After some breakfast in my hotel room I headed over to Gloucester High School, which is situated on a cove off the Annisquam River.  I went to the school's cafeteria and got myself checked in, scouted out a good access to the water, and soon enough I was in my boat awaiting the 8:35 AM EDT start.

As I've said in the past, I like a good hour-or-less race.  But this one was likely to take me around three hours, and so I had no illusions of being a hero.  My plan was to go out relaxed and controlled and let the race develop at an intensity level I could withstand for a long time.  I wasn't familiar with many of my fellow surfski racers, but I did know that two of them, Rob Jehn of New Jersey and Boston area resident Greg Lesher, were among the top athletes in the Northeast.  So when the gun went off and they moved right out front, I let them.  There were plenty of other people to settle in with, and as we moved up the Annisquam River I found myself sitting on the stern wake of a tall tattooed chap whose stroke rate was nearly double mine in this early stage of the race.

I'd set my G.P.S. device to show me only the elapsed time and the distance covered.  I figured knowing my speed would only be a distraction, seeing as how nature would be throwing all kinds of conditions at us that would slow us down.  On the Annisquam River we were working against some current, for instance.  So if I was moving significantly slower than I'm used to going on flatwater, I didn't want to know.

One reason I've done poorly in long races in the past is that I wasn't disciplined about having a good plan for in-race hydration and nutrition.  This time I was ready, with two camelback pouches (one on my back deck, one in the back pocket of my PFD) full of a carbohydrate-rich drink that I'd researched back home.  I made sure to take a drink every ten minutes as the race went along, and as we emerged from the river into Annisquam Harbor and Ipswich Bay, I was still feeling really, really good.  Keeping my stroke rate nice and low, I was having no trouble staying on the guy's wake.  After a while I moved up onto his side wake and occasionally took the lead so he could ride my wake for a bit.  That's what a gentleman does in our sport, after all.

We rounded the northernmost tip of Cape Ann at Halibut Point State Park, and here the conditions began to change.  Up to this point we'd been paddling in very manageable waves and chop, but now the ground swell was presenting us with bigger cross-beam waves, and even though it wasn't particularly windy, there was a bunch of wind chop coming in at weird angles and I was starting to get tossed around.  I'd been hanging very comfortably with the tattooed guy and one or two other paddlers, but suddenly they'd opened several boatlengths on me as they handled the conditions slightly better than I did.  As we moved through Sandy Bay toward Straitsmouth Island I told myself to stay in striking distance so that once we were in Gloucester Harbor I'd have a chance to run them down.

Straitsmouth Island gave us a brief bit of shelter from the conditions, but then we were out in the open Atlantic, and it felt like paddling in a washing machine, especially in the areas close to shore where the waves were reverberating off the rocky coastlines.  Paddling my least-stable surfski, the one I use for mostly-flatwater races closer to home, I realized that I had underestimated the conditions I would be seeing in this race.  I have a friend at home who has done this race a few times, and his description of the conditions led me to believe that the swells would be glassy-smooth and just like paddling on flatwater except for the bobbing up and down.  I'm not blaming him for my troubles; I very well may have mis-interpreted what he said.  And I do have my own cockiness to blame: I'd been thinking, "Hey, I've paddled the Miller's Run in South Africa, the Columbia Gorge in the Pacific Northwest... I shouldn't have any problem with anything New England can throw at me!"

Oh, how wrong I was.  As the Atlantic tossed me right and left and every which way, I began to doubt whether I even belonged out there.  My paddling rhythm had been wrecked, and I was glad my G.P.S. display didn't show me my speed because to know would have been more than I could bear.  The conditions just got worse and worse in the later stages of the race, and I flipped three times.  As my elapsed time approached and then exceeded three hours, the only thing on my mind was "Where is the harbor???"

As a first-timer in this race I didn't know all the landmarks, but at last I saw racers ahead of me making a turn to the right after what turned out to be the Dog Bar lighthouse.  We were at Gloucester Harbor at last, and maybe I could salvage a shred of respectability.  But after all that wasted energy on the ocean I had practically nothing left.  There were actually some nice clean surfable waves moving past the lighthouse, but I couldn't really manage the sprints to get on them, and I got minimal help.  Then in the harbor I realized I didn't know the landmarks as well as I should have, and it was a long time before I was sure where the finish line was.

I crossed the line with a time of 3 hours, 23 minutes, 32 seconds.  My G.P.S. device measured the course at 31.67 kilometers (19.68 miles).  My average speed for the race was 9.3 kilometers per hour.  That's not even 6 miles per hour... ouch.  Frankly, I'm surprised I was even that fast.

Rob Jehn took the win for men's single surfski in 2 hours, 54 minutes, 3 seconds.  Greg Lesher was second in 2:58:42, and Jakob Van Dorp finished third in 3:03:35.  The fastest time of the day was turned in by a 6-person outrigger canoe: 2:42:15.  The complete results are available here.

I actually felt slightly less crummy once I'd heard those guys' times.  They'd been already out of my sight when I reached the rough part of the course, and as my pace slowed to a crawl I was sure they were pulling ever farther away and would beat me by close to an hour.  To learn that I'd finished "only" 29 minutes and 31 seconds behind Rob, and a mere 19:57 out of the medals, softened my disappointment at least a little.

Now, a day later, I'm still processing my feelings about it all.  I knew coming in that I wasn't likely to win the thing, but I really was hoping to make a good showing.  For the first hour of the race it seemed that I was doing that beautifully, that my planning and preparation were paying off.  But then my lack of preparedness for the ocean conditions was brutally exposed.  And that's the main thing that makes me think I failed: out on the Atlantic I wasn't really even racing, but just surviving.

My fellow racers were very kind and supportive.  Greg Lesher remarked that my time was in fact perfectly respectable.  Rhode Island resident Tim Dwyer, who had won the men's double surfski class in 3:00:40 with partner Wesley Echols, told me "Give it a few days.  You're gonna feel like such a badass for getting through this thing!"

An important thing I need to remember--I actually have to remind myself of this fairly often--is that how well or how poorly Elmore Holmes is doing has no bearing on the vitality of the sport.  None at all.

As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, South African surfski legend Oscar Chalupsky was in town to conduct a clinic and promote his book No Retreat, No Surrender.  I was happy to buy a copy and get Oscar to sign it.  Oscar didn't know how I'd done in the race, but the inscription he wrote contains exactly the advice I need right now:

This morning I am sore and achy and tired, not surprisingly.  Some kind of recovery paddle is in order, and I reckon I'll go back down to Gloucester High School and paddle in the protected water there in a little while.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.