Answers! ANSWERS!!!!

I had another fairly intense Tuesday morning.  Following a run and a gym session at home, I went down to the river and did a threshold workout: two sets of three (3 minutes on, 3 minutes off) with small resistance (one golf whiffle ball) on the boat.  Each "on" piece was done at 80 strokes per minute.  It was a tough one, but my stamina held up for the duration of the workout.  The worst part was that my left biceps and forearm were hurting a lot.

Tuesday afternoon I went to the orthopedist's office to get the news from my M.R.I., and at last I got some answers regarding all the aches and pains and struggles of the last couple of years.  It seems that in several vertebrae, I have "severe neural foraminal narrowing" on my left side and the beginnings of the same problem on my right side.  What that means, as far as I can understand it, is this: as nerves branch off from the spinal column and extend out into my shoulders and arms, they pass through holes in the bony material of the vertebrae, and these holes have shrunk and are putting pressure on ("impinging") those nerves.  That's what's been causing so much pain and discomfort in the muscles of my left arm, and if left untreated I'll have the same issues in my right arm soon enough.

The doctor asked me if I also have felt weak in those muscles, and as a matter of fact, I have.  I've noticed it just in the past week while moving those logs around in my shop, especially when I had to lift something over my head.  I also have noticed in the last year or so that it's harder to do certain exercises than it used to be: for instance, I used to be able to do 30 pushups without a second thought, but lately I've found it hard to do even 20.  Pullups seem harder, too.

As the doctor put it, with a condition like mine the muscles can stop responding to what the nerves are telling them to do.  It had never occurred to me that muscular weakness could be related to all this impinged-nerve business.  It's hard to know for sure, but maybe my condition is even responsible for the decline in some of my race performances in the last several years.

Whatever the finer points may or may not be, I'm elated to know that all my woes are not just my imagination.  And while I'm sure I'm no more immune to the impacts of aging than anyone else, I'm pleased to know that maybe I'm not all done yet as an athlete.

As for what happens next, I'll be seeing a surgeon to determine my options.  Basically, there are two: I could have surgery to enlarge those holes that the nerves pass through; or I could have a "nerve block," in which I'd be injected with some stuff that would make the nerves shrink so they wouldn't be getting pinched where they pass through the holes.

I didn't do any specific training today, but I was back in the shop dealing with those logs some more, and the arm pain was a nuisance.  My appointment with the surgeon is next Wednesday, and I hope to move a step closer toward some kind of relief.

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Monday photo feature

Here she is: the new (to me) whitewater boat I acquired last week.  Thanks again to William Ashton of Whittier, North Carolina, for helping me make this big step toward being a whitewater paddler again.

It's the same make and model as the boat that was stolen from behind my building in 2016.  The design originated in 1996 or '97, so that makes it an antique, and I suppose if I did a more serious search I could find a more modern design and look like a 21st-century paddler out on the river.  But I always liked that old boat I had--to me it felt like the perfect all-purpose river-running craft, doing well on everything from small creeks to big water.  And I found this one in very good condition at a reasonable price.  And, I really don't have lofty ambitions for my whitewater boating at this time.  I'm still quite invested in open-water paddling in surfskis, and for now I think I'll be happy if I can just hop on a Class III stream now and then.

I was worried that my paddling had become too one-dimensional.  I've been paddling a surfski almost exclusively for the last seven years or so.  I think it's good to have some variety and give different muscle groups some work once in a while.  My whitewater boat is a C1 (one-person decked canoe--note the single-bladed paddle in the photo), so that will definitely hit my shoulders, lats, abs, and legs in a different way.

This post contains some of the best photos I have of me paddling my last whitewater boat.  Will I be able to re-create some of that magic in this new one?  Keep on tuning in to this blog, and maybe we'll find out together.

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Sore but still in motion

I woke up sore Friday morning, definitely from the logging work I'd done Thursday afternoon, and probably also from the unfamiliar movements I'd done in my new whitewater boat Thursday morning.  But as the morning went on I loosened up a bit, and before lunch I did a run and a gym session that felt good.

I did some more logging work Friday afternoon, and as a result I was very sore again yesterday morning.  My lower back was killing me.  When I got down to the river I spent a long time stretching on the dock and did a long, relaxed warmup in the boat, and that helped a lot.  I paddled for 70 minutes, and for the 40 minutes from 0:15 to 0:55 I aimed for a stroke rate of 70 strokes per minute and tried to put good power into each stroke.  I'm wondering whether 75 spm might be on the high side for my more-than-two-hour race coming up in July, but I figure adjusting downward will be easier than adjusting upward.  In any case, it was a pretty good session and my back felt a lot better afterward than it had felt before.

This morning I paddled for 120 minutes.  I didn't go for a particular stroke rate or intensity level, but I did try to take good precise strokes the whole time.  In the first half hour I surfed some waves behind an upstream-moving barge rig; the rig was going pretty fast and the waves were hard to catch, but I did get a couple of decent rides.  So there were a few hard sprints included in my otherwise steady paddle.  I was definitely feeling some fatigue in the second hour and was tired the rest of the day.

The weather has been quite nice the last few days: partly to mostly sunny and not too warm or humid.  I'm trying to savor it as we move ever closer to another Mid South summer.

As I mentioned in my last post, I got my M.R.I. done on Tuesday.  I have an appointment with the doctor this coming Tuesday to find out what it tells us.

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The devil finds work for idle hands, I suppose

The first half of this week has been crazy, with all kinds of things to deal with in both my athletic and non-athletic lives.

I spent most of Monday putting out a (figurative) fire that a tenant of one of my rental properties was experiencing.  At the same time, I found myself with a couple of new woodworking projects to do for clients.  And, the opportunity opened up for me to have that M.R.I. done on Tuesday afternoon.  Remember that?  I haven't talked much about it lately.  If you were thinking that all my ailments had magically disappeared, don't worry.  They haven't.

With all these things suddenly heaped on my plate, I could have been forgiven for putting the canoe & kayak training on the back burner for a while.  But Tuesday morning I knew I needed some time to myself amid all the other stuff going on.  I remember my high school cross country coach urging my teammates and me to put the schoolwork and other teenage worries aside for the 90 minutes or so we spent in practice, and now, decades later, athletic pursuits continue to be my time to do that.

I started with a short run and a gym session at home.  Then I went down to the river and got in the boat.  With all the other stuff going on I hadn't really planned what I would do, and I had to make it up on the fly.  I ended up doing ten 30-second sprints starting every 3rd minute.  This is a good aerobic workout while also providing some practice at a higher stroke rate.  It was fairly taxing, and I thought of another thing my high school coach used to say.  Whenever we did an interval workout he urged us to focus hard on the next-to-last interval because mentally it was the toughest; the last interval was always easier to push hard on, he said, because of the knowledge that the workout would be over when it was finished.

I left the river feeling good about what I had done.  Just doing some hard physical work relieved a lot of the stress I'd built up in the previous day.  In the afternoon I went and had my M.R.I. done, and while I didn't enjoy the mild claustrophobia in that tube, I was glad to be making this step toward what I hope will be some relief.

Yesterday was a day off from training but was plenty busy nevertheless.  I spent the day tying up the last loose end of the rental property emergency and picking up some logs for one of those woodworking projects.

There's one other thing that happened on Monday that I haven't mentioned yet.  As I announced in this post seven years ago, my good old go-to whitewater boat got stolen from behind my building, and for a long time I lacked the motivation to replace it and simply didn't do much whitewater in the years since.  But just several months ago I came across a Mr. William Ashton on social media who was selling that same model of boat at a reasonable price.  I'd always liked that boat of mine that was stolen, so I got in touch with William and we worked out a deal.  William lives in western North Carolina and I didn't know when I could make it over there, but he told me that if I could wait until late May he would be passing through Memphis on his way out to the Rockies, and he would bring it to me.  And it turned out Monday was that day.  He came through in the early afternoon, and I now have a whitewater boat again!

That brings me to this morning's session on the water, in which I took the new whitewater boat out in the harbor and did some stroke drills to see how my body would respond.  I was pleasantly surprised by how well my arm muscles handled the open-blade draws and compound reverse strokes and stuff like that.  My plan for the coming weeks is to paddle this boat once a week, and I hope that by the time I head out on my trip up the East Coast I'll be ready to paddle some easy whitewater along the way.

I'll just add that I spent the afternoon splitting those logs I picked up yesterday.  If you're looking for back-breaking labor, you can't go wrong with some logging.

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Monday photo feature

It was January of last year when I made my second trip to South Africa to attend a downwind paddling camp hosted by surfski legends Dawid and Jasper Mocke.  One afternoon I partnered up with Jasper to paddle a double ski on the Miller's Run.  In this photo it appears that Jasper is absolutely thrilled to get to paddle with the likes of me while for me it's just another day at the office.  Photo by either John or Tamsin of Cape Town Sport Photography.

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Thinking about stroke power while doing some surfing and stuff

On Friday morning I took a run around the block and then did a gym session.  I was still fairly sore from my first iteration of the new gym routine, but I got through the exercises okay.  Being sore just means your muscles are responding to the new stress and fortifying themselves accordingly.

At the training camp in Florida that I attended in January, one of the things we worked on a lot was concentrating our power into the early phase of each stroke.  That's one of the main purposes of the workouts with resistance on the boat.  Since then I've tried to practice that a lot, even during otherwise relaxed steady paddles.  Sometimes during such paddles I tend to let the paddle just move through the stroke without much power on it, and I've noticed that my speed goes up several tenths of a kilometer per hour whenever I make a point of applying that early power.

So yesterday I went out to paddle for 90 minutes and put good power on each stroke while keeping the stroke rate under 70 per minute.  I stuck to the plan except for a couple of brief bouts of barge-wake surfing.  There was a rig moving upriver as I paddled out of the harbor and onto the Mississippi; it was moving fast, and the waves weren't very tall, so I really had to sprint hard to get on a wave and the ride was short-lived.  But it was fun to do for a few minutes anyway.  After that I paddled up into the lower reaches of the Loosahatchie Chute, and as I paddled back into the main channel there was a barge rig coming downstream.  It was making some decent waves, but they were wandering all over the place because the pilot was making a large-radius turn to maneuver under the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and get pointed toward the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges downriver.  The water was like a washing machine at times and several times my footwell and seat bucket got swamped entirely.  Fortunately the water out there is starting to get warmer and I didn't feel like I was sitting in ice like I would have a few weeks ago.

All told, I had a very enjoyable paddle yesterday.  It was a nice mixture of "work" workout (working on stroke power and mechanics) and "play" workout (surfing the waves).  I got back to the dock feeling pleased about the whole state of affairs.

Today was a day off.  That's because the handbell group I play with had its final performance of the season this morning.  With the Blackburn Challenge looming in less than two months I still need to get in some volume, but there's no reason to be obsessed with that.  I'll log the mileage I need soon enough.

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Hard labor on and off the water

Tuesday was a pretty beefy training day.  It started with a run around the block, followed by a new gym routine I'd drawn up.  This one includes lunges with dumbbells and several core exercises.

Then I went down to the river and did some more work on stroke power.  I did 8 x (2 minutes on, 1 min. off) at 60 strokes per minute with small resistance (one golf whiffle ball) on the boat.  Then I took an 8-minute break, during which I removed the resistance from the boat, and then I did 6 x (2 min. on, 1 min. off) at 70 spm.  In the first set the resistance damped the boat's glide, making me put more power into the early phase of each stroke; the idea for the second set was to continue that concentration of power with no resistance.

I didn't do any training stuff yesterday, but it wasn't a rest day.  I spent the morning getting a few logs from a big white oak tree that had been taken down a couple of neighborhoods over, and then back at my place in the afternoon I did some splitting and cutting on them.  My legs were already sore from the lunges I'd done Tuesday, and wrangling those logs made the rest of my body sore as well.

I woke up this morning feeling beat up and sore all over.  I went to the river hoping that some easy paddling would loosen me up a bit.  I think it did me some good.  Once I was warmed up I felt good enough to surf some nice-looking waves behind a downstream-moving barge rig.  I didn't have to work that hard to get on them, so I didn't wear myself out and I returned to the dock in an upbeat mood.

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Monday photo feature

Native Memphian Boyd Ruppelt has been spending some time paddling Canadian big water this spring.  Here he runs a gauntlet of semi-truck-sized holes on the Mistassibi River near Dolbeau, Quebec.  Photo by Heidi Walsh.

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Work continues as we move into late spring

On Friday morning I took another run around the block and then did a gym session.  I backed way off from the bent-over rows I'd been doing for the last few weeks: I mentioned last week that I'd felt a little pop in my left biceps while doing those, and though the muscle had been feeling better this past week, I could feel it threatening to pop again Friday.  So I cut the first set short and skipped the second set.  It's about time for me to come up with a new gym routine anyway.  For the last few weeks I've been doing dips, situps, bent-over rows, and stability ball backups.

Muggy is the word for what the weather has been for most of the past week.  It hasn't been terribly hot--mid 80s Fahrenheit, mostly--but the humidity has been up and there's been a lot of rain in the area.

Sunday is usually when I do a long paddle, but I decided to do it yesterday because of the obligation to take my mother to brunch today.  With the Mississippi flowing around 16.5 feet on the Memphis gauge there was enough water to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar, though I knew I wouldn't be doing it in record time because there would be a sizable sandbar exposed up at the north end.  I decided to make the circuit in a clockwise direction, the opposite of what I usually do.  It turned out to be a slog, partly because the water was lower than I'm used to, and partly because it was warm and humid out there and I think I was getting a bit dehydrated in the second hour.  I got back to the dock about 126 minutes after I'd started, and I felt completely whipped the rest of the day.

I kept today's paddle much shorter because of the aforementioned brunch appointment.  I also needed some recovery, although once I was paddling I felt surprisingly good in the boat.  When I got out to the river there was an upstream-going barge rig well upriver, and I tried to surf the residual waves.  By now the waves were subtle, but I still got a few tenuous rides.  They carried me only as long as I kept sprinting, but the boost felt good.

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Some mid-week variety

I started Tuesday with an around-the-block run and a gym session, and then I headed down to the riverfront to paddle for 60 minutes.  It was a lovely morning to be out there: it was sunny and the temperature was between 80 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was just enough of a breeze blowing to keep me cool.  I did a series of power drills: very short efforts with high resistance (all three golf whiffle balls!) on the boat.  I did a rep every five minutes starting at 0:15 and ending at 0:45; for each rep I paddled as hard as I could for six or eight strokes, and then I brought the golf balls up above the waterline and paddled easy until the next rep.

Yesterday I did some relaxed bike riding in the afternoon.  This morning I returned to the river for some unstructured paddling.  There was a fairly strong south wind blowing, and with the help of an upstream-moving barge rig that had passed through a while before I got out to the river, it was generating some small but rideable downwind conditions.  I spent a half hour or so working the waves before I headed back to the dock, and that was fun.  I expect I'll do something a bit more substantial in the boat this weekend, so it was nice to have something not so serious to do today.

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Monday photo feature

It was four years ago today that I delivered a lecture to a small audience at Outdoors, Inc., in Memphis.  And a stern lecture it was!  There's no topic more serious, after all, than the paddling of canoes and kayaks.

The content of the lecture ended up being a big chunk of the material for my film, "A Paddler's Journey," that came out early last year.  I think the film is better than the lecture was, seeing as how I was able to edit out all the "ums" and "uhs" and throat-clearings and digressions.

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Nudging the volume up a bit

I did another run around my block Friday morning.  My body might be getting a bit more used to it.  I don't have any particular running goals other than just a desire to be able to run again, so there's no reason to push it.

The run does make a good warmup for a gym session, and I knocked out a mostly good one after running on Friday.  However, I did irritate my left biceps while doing bent-over rows.  The muscle had been feeling pretty good for quite a while.

Yesterday I went down to the river and paddled for 70 minutes.  After a 10-minute warmup I did some backpaddling-then-forward-paddling drills, and then paddled a strong tempo for the next 50 minutes.  I aimed for a stroke rate of 70 strokes per minute; that's in the neighborhood of what I hope to maintain during the Blackburn Challenge in just over two months.  The left biceps muscle gave me some nuisance pain as I went along.

It was time for a longer paddle today, and I went out this morning intending to go for 120 minutes.  The plan was to paddle at 70 spm from the time I left the harbor to the time I re-entered it.  I paddled down the Mississippi not quite as far as the Harahan Bridge and then did a long upstream paddle along the Arkansas bank.  I felt good for most of the first hour, but by the end of it I knew the second hour would be tough.  I paddled all the way up to the north end of the Loosahatchie Bar before turning back downstream.  I tried my best to take good effective strokes as I paddled into a rather stiff south wind.

Blackberry winter is over and the forecast for the coming week is showing highs up near 90 degrees Fahrenheit.  I wouldn't say the heat was oppressive this morning as I paddled the last two kilometers up the harbor back to the dock, but it might have been high enough to contribute to my fatigue.  It'll probably take me 30 minutes to an hour longer than I paddled today to finish the Blackburn, so I need to put some thought into my in-race hydration and nourishment in addition to the usual endurance training.

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A goal to shoot for

I signed up for the Blackburn Challenge on Monday, so I guess that made Tuesday the official start of training for it.  I started Tuesday morning with another run around the block: I mentioned last week that the distance is somewhere around 800 meters, but right now it feels like 8 kilometers to me.  Baby steps.  Baby steps.

After that I did a gym session, and then headed down to the river for a power session in the boat.  I did 8 x (2 min. on, 1 min. off) at 60 strokes per minute with a light resistance (one golf whiffle ball) on the boat.  Then I took an 8-minute break, during which I stopped by the dock and removed the resistance.  Then I did 6 x (2 min. on, 1 min. off) at 70 spm.

After all that I was thoroughly worn out for the rest of the day.  Maybe a few more such days will have me ready for the big race around Cape Ann.

I've been out of the boat since then.  I might have paddled yesterday if I hadn't been stuck waiting on a contractor who never showed up at my rental property.  I did do some relaxed bike riding Wednesday and yesterday.  With any luck I'll be back in the boat this weekend.

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Monday photo feature

I'm looking forward to summertime, when it's actually fun to get wet.  That's what I'm doing in this photo, shot by my friend Clay Barbee while I tried to pop some enders at Frank Bell's Rapid on the French Broad River near Hot Springs, North Carolina.  It's August of 1994.

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