Friday morning I did a gym session. Then, after lunch, I went to have my M.R.I. done. And when I got to the place, I was informed that my insurance company had rejected the procedure. I was supposed to get a phone call in advance, but apparently somebody in the office had written down my phone number incorrectly.
So I came back home. There's a process by which my doctor can persuade the insurance meisters to reconsider, but that won't happen until a new business week is underway. And so, thanks to an industry whose overlords have dedicated their lives to making the world a worse place to live, I'll have to grin and bear my discomfort a little longer.
Yesterday I went down to the river to paddle on a cool, overcast morning. I wanted to do some long-ish sprints for pace work, and I decided to do several 1000-meter pieces downstream out on the Mississippi, starting a new one every 10th minute. My goal was to do each one in 3 minutes flat (a 20-kilometers-per-hour average pace). As it turned out, my times were 2:57, 3:34, and 3:13.
There was a good reason for that broad variation in times. At 24.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, the river had a strong flow; and a brisk north breeze was helpful for speedy times as well. But there was another variable: the topography of the water surface. During the first piece the surface was glassy smooth, and my speed rose as high as 21 kph a couple of times. But during the recovery interval before the second piece, a big barge rig driven by two towboats came charging upriver, churning the river into a sloppy mess. That slowed my hull speed during the second piece and disrupted my rhythm, but more significant than that, it wrecked my concentration and tensed my muscles. The water is still very cold at this time of year, and my desire not to swim made it impossible for me to relax. And so the second piece was a full 37 seconds slower than the first. The water had calmed down some by the start of the third piece, but not enough for me to get locked back in. I finished the workout frustrated, but I knew there was no reason to write it all off as a failure. Unexpected disruptions are just a fact of life for any outdoor wilderness sport. My arms and shoulders were aching from the de-tuned half-stroke-half-brace strokes I'd done in the second and third pieces, and once I was back in the protected waters of the harbor I tried to calm down and get back to good solid strokes.
This morning it was time to do something longer, and I elected to leave the harbor, paddle up the Mississippi, paddle up to the Wolf River to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge, and turn and come back. The wind was light, and there was very little barge traffic to interfere with the proceedings. Just like I like to break two hours when I paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar, I like to break 110 minutes when I do what I did today. Such is the way my regimented, obsessive-compulsive brain works. As I came back down from my turnaround point I reached the mouth of the Wolf at the 81-minute mark, meaning I would have to hoof it to be back at my dock by 110. I pushed the pace down the Mississippi and when I re-entered the harbor with 12 and a half minutes to go, I knew I would make it but not without keeping the power on for a few more minutes. Once I was north of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge I finally let myself back off the intensity so that my heart rate could settle down the rest of the way. I was back at the dock about 20 seconds shy of 110 minutes. I'm now spending the rest of the day thoroughly tired as a reward for my effort.
Tomorrow will be a rest day, and I'll be spending some of it seeing what I can find out about my chances of an affordable magnetic resonance image.
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