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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