Here's an old favorite William Nealy cartoon that laments the maturation of our sport from its "salad days." It was actually the early 1980s when Nealy drew this cartoon, and the situation hasn't gotten any better since then.
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The week had been unseasonably warm, but Friday morning it was 48 degrees Fahrenheit and raining, and I was happy to stay in and do a gym session.
The weather wasn't much different yesterday morning. But I had an in-the-boat workout to do, so down to the river I went. After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did twelve 30-second sprints starting every third minute. I've done this workout two or three times a year for the last eight or nine years, since I read on Ron Lugbill's old blog that studies had shown that such workouts make a better aerobic session than long, steady paddling. Sometimes this workout feels hard to me, and other times it's not bad. Yesterday it was not bad at all: by the time I was done I was ready to be done, but I wasn't falling apart. Maybe all the cross-training work I've done this winter is helping me that way. Once again I felt some tenderness in my lat area, but in the end it held up well.
This morning I had a dry-land obligation, so I didn't get down to the river until the late afternoon. I prefer to paddle in the morning because my energy is typically flagging later in the day, and that was the case today. I fought through it to paddle for 80 minutes, keeping the stroke rate low but focusing on a good catch and solid power. The nice thing about this afternoon is that the temperature had risen into the low 60s. It's supposed to be warm and windy in the coming days.
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I started Tuesday with a gym session. Then I went downtown to paddle for 60 minutes. As I left the harbor and paddled up the Mississippi there was a barge rig moving upstream making some nice waves, and wistfully I looked forward to late spring and summer when I can surf without being doused with frigid water. For now I would have to settle for daydreaming, because not only is the water too cold but also I'm easing back into paddling from this lat muscle injury and don't need to be throwing down a bunch of hard sprints.
The Mississippi River is on a big rise right now. Just a few days ago the Memphis gauge reading was around 10 feet, but the heavy rain that we had here last week moved eastward into the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio watersheds, and the current forecast says we'll be up around 22.5 feet by early next week. With more rain and snow moving across the nation this week, that figure could be revised upward soon.
Yesterday the Fahrenheit temperature rose into the mid 70s... most unusual for late February. It was also very windy and rain was on its way, but I managed to get out for a relaxed bike ride in the early afternoon before the precipitation arrived.
It was still very warm this morning. There's a fierce winter storm moving across much of the country right now, but you wouldn't know it here in the Mid South. There was a layer of fog over the water down on the riverfront this morning. I warmed up for 15 minutes and then did a set of three 8-stroke sprints for the first time since injuring my lat muscle over two weeks ago. This time the muscle held up okay even though I could feel a hint of soreness there. My sprint form felt very rusty, though; in fact I felt generally tired in the boat for some reason, but after doing the sprints I settled into a tempo piece for about 25 minutes. My stroke rate was between 70 and 75 strokes per minute and I tried to stay relaxed and not wear myself out with the semi-taxing pace.
My first race of the year is four weeks from this Saturday. Hopefully my body will continue to be healthy enough for some increased intensity in the coming days.
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William T. (Bill) Endicott coached the U.S. whitewater team (slalom and wildwater) from the mid 1970s through the early 1990s. As I mention in my film "A Paddler's Journey," one of the first things I did in an effort to learn more about whitewater racing was buy some books that he'd written about the sport: The River Masters, To Win The Worlds, The Ultimate Run, and The Danger Zone. (Later, when I started to get interested in flatwater technique, I picked up The Barton Mold, Endicott's case study of world and Olympic champion Greg Barton.) Because technique and equipment designs are constantly changing, much of the information in the books was already somewhat out of date by the time I got them; but the books contain over-arching ideas that are timeless. Though I was never coached by Bill directly, his writings have had a profound influence on how I approach the whole business of being an athlete.
In the last couple of decades Bill has written more sparingly on athletic topics, but whenever he does drop an article I make sure to read every word of it. Recently, he has shared his thoughts on his experiences with the Olympic Games as an athlete, a coach, a team leader and manager, and, especially, a TV commentator. I don't think the article has actually been published anywhere; I found it as a downloadable document in the "Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends" group on Face Book. It offers fascinating insights on why network television coverage of smaller Olympic sports like canoe and kayak racing is the way it is.
The excerpt shared below is actually sort of a digression from the main point of the article, but I think it contains excellent advice for coaches and athletes of all kinds, and I hope readers of this blog will find it valuable.
Performing right up to your ability: this is another psychological aspect to racing that is fascinating to explore because it’s transferable to other aspects of life. As a coach I used to tell my athletes that all they had to do on the big day was to perform right up to their level of ability as defined simply “by a good day in practice.” They didn’t have to do more than that; they didn’t have to perform better than they had ever performed on a good day in practice, which a lot of athletes think they have to do on the big day, and which causes them to blow it.
And if they only performed right up to their level of ability on the day, they would probably do really well. That’s because most of the other competitors out there would not perform right up to their level of ability because they would be worrying instead about who was going to win the race, which was out of their control.
But performing right up to their level of ability was something my athletes could control, and that made all the psychological difference. We also reasoned that if they did perform right up to their level of ability and still got beat, it only was because the other guys were just better than they were on that day.
We found that by worrying about just performing up to their level of ability, which we practiced thousands of time in training, was something they could control and that alleviated a great deal of the stress of being in the Olympics.
The secret, of course, was to have a large amount of good days in practice, which we did.
Finally, I told them that no matter what the outcome of the race was, if they performed right up to their level of ability, as defined by how they had done it many times before on a good day in practice, then they were the winner in my book because you couldn’t ask for anything more than that.
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Here'a a map of Arkabutla Lake, where I paddled Saturday morning. This reservoir, whose main purpose is flood control, was formed in 1940 with the construction of a dam on the Coldwater River. It's located in northwest Mississippi some 25 miles south of the Tennessee state line.
On Saturday I accessed the lake at Bayou Point and did a big loop in that area. It was an easy paddle, so I probably didn't cover more than 7 or 8 kilometers. I mostly just wanted to check out the area.
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On the aches-and-pains front, my lat muscle injury seems to be doing a lot better, but a couple of other stubborn issues remain. My left forearm and biceps muscles are better some days and worse some days, and I've got a bad spot in the right side of my neck that came on about a month ago. My chiropractor has been working on that latter spot, and she has said that it might take several adjustments before we can get the tension to release in that area. I'm dreaming of the day when we achieve that magic crack! that makes everything better.
Meanwhile, I'm wondering whether that neck pain is somehow related to the recent problems in my right lat muscle. I've noticed that when I tense that part of my neck I can feel it down into the lat. Hmm.
Friday morning I dared to get back in the boat for an hour of easy paddling. It would have been nice of Mother Nature to cooperate, but instead she presented me with a cold north wind and a temperature around 38 degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was mostly cloudy, but as the hour went by the sun began to take over. I could feel some mild soreness in the lat muscle--not just the injured part near my armpit, but the whole muscle. But it never got any worse than that: I wasn't feeling any stabs of pain when I stressed it. So that was encouraging, and I was hopeful that a couple more days of moderate-intensity paddling would bring me closer to full health.
Yesterday morning I took a rather wild notion. Here at home I do almost all my paddling on the downtown Memphis riverfront because I keep a boat at a marina down there. But yesterday I found myself wanting to check out Arkabutla Lake, a reservoir in northwest Mississippi some 25 miles south of Memphis. I loaded one of the surfskis in my garage onto my truck and headed south. Having scoped out the lake on the Google map, I chose to access it from the Bayou Point public use area on the western shore.
It was chilly as I carried my boat to the water, but the sun was shining bright and the temperature was rising toward a high in the 50s. I embarked on another 60-minute paddle, heading out on a loop around the heart of the lake. Situated in an economically-modest region, Arkabutla has a reputation as a somewhat lower-rent recreational spot than Sardis and Enid reservoirs to the southeast. But I found it a perfectly pleasant setting for a Saturday morning paddle. Even though I'm a lifelong Memphian, I had spent almost no time there before yesterday, and I'm glad to have gained a modicum of familiarity with this neighboring body of water.
This morning I returned to my home water on the Memphis riverfront. It was no more than partly sunny, but the temperature was 50 degrees and rising toward a high in the low 60s. As usual for this time of year, the warmer temperature was accompanied by a south wind, and that wind seemed to get stronger as I paddled for 90 minutes. I left the harbor long enough to paddle up to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, but then I went back and spent the rest of my allotted time doing a full lap in the harbor's more sheltered environs. My lat muscle felt fine, and while I tried to keep the stroke rate low, I put more power into my strokes and got a solid training session out of it. I'll probably wait until next weekend to do a "real" workout, but it felt good to be paddling strong again.
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In recent times I've been in the habit of making Monday a day off, but this week my mother needed me to drive her to and from the hospital for a small procedure on Tuesday. The procedure was the kind of thing that could take anywhere from a couple of hours to all day, so I decided to do some training work on Monday and let Tuesday be my day off.
I did a gym session Monday morning. Then in the afternoon I rode my bike to the park just west of my house, where there's a paved loop of maybe 2000 meters. I did the same workout I'd done last Thursday, riding the loop hard three times, stopping in between laps to do a couple of sets of Hindu squats.
Just as I'd anticipated, the trip to the hospital took the better part of the day on Tuesday. I spent that period sitting in a chair and reading a book, and once I was back home I didn't do much else for what was left of the day. So by the evening I was feeling as though I'd spent the whole day sitting around like a slug. But I reminded myself that it was a scheduled day off and I wasn't supposed to be doing any major physical activity.
We've had a warm spell for the last several days, with the daytime temperature exceeding 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Not surprisingly, it's been accompanied by chances of stormy weather. Yesterday the news was full of warnings about the possibility of severe storms, but by afternoon it looked like they would hold off until the evening. I got on my bike and rode the Greater Memphis Greenline out to Shelby Farms. My intention was to do a loop around Patriot Lake out there, but I was hit with a little digestive-tract emergency, and ended up spending a while in a restroom out there instead. Once that episode had run its course I just came back home on the Greenline. So what would have been a 34-kilometer ride was probably more like 29 or 30 kilometers.
The storms arrived after 9 o'clock last night, and the sky was lit up with one of the more impressive lightning displays I've seen. I think it was pretty windy overnight but I haven't heard of any major damage in the Mid South.
I did another gym session this morning. Now, as I write this, one last line of thunderstorms is about to move through. The temperature is supposed to drop the rest of the day, and this weekend will see temperatures in the 40s and 50s. I'm hoping to get back in the boat tomorrow and see how my right lat muscle responds to some easy paddling.
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When I did several sets of Hindu squats on Thursday, it was the first time I'd done so in quite a few months. So it was no surprise that my quad muscles were sore on Friday. I stayed home and did a gym session, but skipped the row exercises I'd been doing that I think contributed to my muscle injury.
I was still very sore yesterday. The weather was not terrible, but not very nice either. It was mostly cloudy and windy, and the temperature just barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon. I really was not eager to get outside, but I dragged myself out in the afternoon for a 40-minute bike ride.
I could tell as soon as I got up this morning that today would be a much nicer day: I could see bright sunshine dawning in the eastern sky. I waited until afternoon, when the temperature was reaching its high in the mid 50s, to get on the bike. It was still cooler than I like to ride in, but when you're out of the boat for a while you have to do what you can. I felt sort of tired, and my thighs were still sore, but I got in a decent 90-minute ride on my usual course out to Shelby Farms and back via the Greater Memphis Greenline.
I'm pleased to say that my injured lat muscle (or whatever it is) under my right armpit is feeling a lot better. I've been babying it, heating it up in the bathtub and then icing it, stuff like that. I probably won't try to paddle again until late this coming week, at the earliest. The worst thing you can do with an injury is try to come back too soon, and with my first race still six weeks off, there's no reason at all to rush it. I feel good about my cross-training work and I can keep that up for a few more days.
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Last weekend I noticed some soreness in my right lat muscle. It wasn't terrible, and I figured it was just a mild strain that would work itself out in a few days. By the end of the weekend I'd forgotten about it, but then on Tuesday morning I did a gym session, and as I did a set of dumbbell rows chest-down on the stability ball, I felt discomfort in that area again.
After the gym session I went down to the river and got in the boat. After a 10-minute warmup I intended to do three 8-stroke sprints, but on the very first stroke of the very first sprint I felt something pop right under my right armpit. I think it's part of my lat muscle, and I either pulled it or tore it, I'm not sure which. I knew right then that I couldn't do any more sprints, and the spot continued to hurt as I paddled easy back to the dock.
Whatever this injury is, it's clear that it's going to keep me out of the boat for a few days. I'm not happy about it, but I'm trying my best to take it in stride and do some alternative workouts while I nurse it back to health. Tuesday was a lovely warm day, so I wasted no time: that afternoon I rode my bike for about 90 minutes, doing the 34-kilometer course I often do. Today isn't quite so nice--it's around 50 degrees Fahrenheit with a stiff west-southwest wind--but I got back out and did sort of an interval workout on the bike. I did three hard laps of a paved loop in Overton Park just west of my house, stopping to do some Hindu squats in between laps.
It's frustrating to have something like this happen, seeing as how just in my last post I was talking about how well things seemed to be going. But this gives me a chance to incorporate some leg work that I hadn't been doing much of lately, and strong legs are an asset both for paddling and for good general fitness. And hopefully this ailing muscle won't take too long to heal and I'll be able to paddle again soon.
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These photos show what I think is beautiful about ice storms. There's something mesmerizing about the glistening ice-coated tree branches here in my forested city.
Of course, ice storms are known primarily for the headaches they cause: that beautiful ice can sometimes accumulate to a greater weight than many trees can support. Fortunately, the one we had here this past week was not all that bad in terms of tree damage and power outages. Just last year we had one that was quite a bit worse: somehow I was spared a loss of electricity at my house, but the neighborhood where my rental property is lost power for close to a week.
And then there was the truly catastrophic storm in February of 1994. I remember waking up thinking my neighborhood was being shelled as the branches of large trees cracked off and crashed onto roofs everywhere. I think it took the better part of a month for our local utility to get power fully restored to its customers. I was a high school teacher at the time, and school was out for a week. That might have been nice at the moment, but we paid a steep price later: the school board, in its profound wisdom, decided to make up the missed time by extending the school day an hour for the entire month of April. Each class period was lengthened from 55 minutes to 65, and considering that I could barely hold those students' attention for even 20 minutes, it's little surprise that that was the most painful month of my teaching career.
We also had a very bad storm back in the early 1970s. I remember considerable tree damage and long power outages, but I don't remember caring all that much about it. I think my main source of anguish was that the ice wasn't as much fun to play in as snow. Meanwhile, school was out, and I didn't really mind the heat going off in our house because we got to have fires in the fireplace along with hot chocolate and all that stuff.
Oh, to be a kid again, with no particular worldly worries.
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My first race of the year is seven weeks away. Right now I'm concentrating mainly on strength and power and endurance, doing a lot of workouts like the resistance session I did Friday. Over the next few weeks I'll move gradually into doing more speed work.
Regular readers of this blog know that in the last couple of years I've struggled with energy, motivation, and desire. I'm happy to say that I'm doing a lot better in those respects these days. I'm excited about the race that's coming up next month, and I'm having some fun getting out there and putting more and more good work in the bank.
Of course, I'm hoping that this work will result in my racing well this year, and it remains to be seen how that will go and how it will affect my attitude toward the sport. Two or three times in the last several years I was very disappointed in my performance at a race, and that dealt a huge blow to my enjoyment of this whole business. And that's something I'm going to have to reckon with. As I get older I can only expect to get slower, not faster, and I have to remember the things about this sport that are rewarding beyond just beating this person or that person.
When it comes to competing while aging, the main person I've looked at as my "ideal" is Greg Barton, a winner of four Olympic medals (two of them gold) in the 1980s and 90s. Now, Greg might not be the best person to model myself after--at age 63 he's still faster than I ever was at my athletic peak. But I admire his attitude toward his athletic decline. There are a couple of current U.S. flatwater team members in western Washington where Greg lives, and Greg seems to savor the challenge every time he races them. They're beating him, but not without a good fight. Greg also seems genuinely happy whenever he ends up on the podium for his age group at the Columbia Gorge race.
For now, I'm just happy to be feeling some "giddy-up" each day as I go out and paddle or do some gym here at home. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of simply getting out and paddling hard felt very intimidating; the hard sprinting that a downwind run requires seemed all but impossible. Now I'm beginning to look forward to that kind of thing again. Even though my left arm woes continue, I'm even feeling better about that: when I was in my funk my aches and pains gave me all the more reason for pessimism, but now I'm more inclined to believe I will work through them.
Yesterday morning started sunny, but a thin layer of clouds had moved in by the time I got down to the river. Even after a sunny, above-freezing day on Friday, there was still quite a bit of ice at the marina, so I had to move around gingerly. Once on the water I did a steady 60-minute paddle, focusing on the same catch and early-phase-power aspects of my stroke that Friday's workout had been intended to address.
Even though Friday had been a hard day, I woke up this morning feeling more tired and beat-up than I'd felt yesterday. I went down to the river hoping more steady paddling would help. The sun was out, and the forecast said today would be our warmest in a long time. It was already about 50 degrees when I got in the boat. Not surprisingly, the warmer air was accompanied by a fairly strong south wind, and since I try to be cautious in the wintertime, I didn't venture far from the harbor. I paddled on the big river long enough to go up to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and back, and did the rest in the harbor's sheltered environs. I paddled for 90 minutes, and while I've certainly had more grueling sessions, this one felt tough. I was tired, like I said, but I again tried to focus on taking effective powerful strokes as opposed to letting the whole thing be just an easy jog.
So I've now had several days in a row of rather tedious, grinding work. It's definitely not the most fun part of training, but I'm glad to have it in the bank, and I'm hoping that after a day off tomorrow I'll be feeling strong again.
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The biggest news of this past week is the ice storm that hit the southern United States from Texas to Virginia. Here in Memphis it was nowhere near the worst ice storm I've seen, and I'm grateful for that. But it still managed to cause me some grief.
I've paddled in sub-freezing weather many, many times over the years. I think I've paddled when the temperature was as low as 16 or 17 degrees Fahrenheit. But at age 55 I've decided that those days are over. When forecasters announced an imminent ice storm at the beginning of the week, I planned to ride it out with perhaps some extra gym work but otherwise a bit of a training break.
Some freezing rain fell in the early hours of Tuesday, and much of the outdoors was coated in ice. I planned to stay in for the day. I fully intended to do a good, vigorous gym session that morning. But then one of the tenants of my rental property called and told me the central heat wasn't working over there. And just like that my plans were foiled as I ended up spending most of the day at the rental property while a repairman groped around trying to get the system running right again. The infuriating thing was that there was nothing wrong with the actual heating machinery; the problem was with the electronic components that make the machinery respond to whatever instructions the user types in at the thermostat. That's pretty much how all modern machinery works.
The repairman installed a new control board (at no small expense to the author), and I expected the problem to be fixed right then and there. But my optimism was short-lived. One hour after another slipped away while the repairman fussed and fussed, trying to get the electronic components synchronized so the system would click on and off when it was supposed to. One thing I'd discovered on the drive over there was that the streets weren't bad, but more precipitation was on its way, and my mood became increasingly sullen as the repairman labored away with no apparent success. I'd thought about running to the grocery store for a few key items while the streets were still clear, but I eventually realized that was not going to happen.
By the early afternoon the freezing rain had arrived, and I could see the streets worsening by the minute. My tenant got home from work in the mid afternoon, and since I'd already paid the repairman I took my leave so I could get home before the conditions got any more dangerous than they already were. Slipping and sliding the couple of miles home, I felt as though my entire day had been wasted. I had accomplished exactly zero of the things I'd hoped to do, and I went to bed that night thoroughly defeated.
By Wednesday morning the streets were covered in new ice. This time I did manage to stay in all day. I did that gym session I'd been so keen to do on Tuesday. Yesterday the temperature eclipsed the freezing point ever so slightly--I think the high for the day was 33 degrees--and the ice began to melt. By the end of the day the streets were mostly clear.
The sun finally came out this morning, and the temperature was predicted to rise into the high 30s. I did another gym session and then headed for the river. It was still slightly below freezing when I got down there, and though quite a bit of melting had taken place yesterday, a lot of ice remained, and the ramp down to the marina looked like this:
I walked on the ground next to the ramp until I reached the water, where the ramp becomes level. Then I climbed up onto the ramp and navigated its icy surface the rest of the way. The ropes that I use to tie my boat to its rack were still coated in ice, and it took much effort to get the knots out so I could get my boat down.
At last I was on the water, and I beheld a lovely view of ice-coated trees along the banks glistening in the sun. After a 10-minute warmup, I commenced my workout: 10 x (4 minutes on, 1 min. off) with a light resistance (just a rope) on the boat. I did each piece at no greater than 60 strokes per minute. Like all these resistance workouts I've been doing lately, the objective was to get a good catch on the water and apply strong power.
In a normal week I'd have done this workout on Saturday. But since I'd already done a gym session this morning, I decided to make this an ultra-strength day so I can do more relaxed paddling tomorrow and Sunday.
The thaw continues outside as I write this in the afternoon. There's still a lot of ice in the trees, but with tomorrow's forecast calling for a high in the 40s, I expect it'll be just about gone by the end of the day.
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