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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