I did a run and a gym session on a not-so-hot but extremely humid Friday morning. That humidity has continued through the weekend, accompanied sometimes by rain and sometimes by bright sunshine.
I've been feeling a bit low on energy, and the humid conditions haven't helped with that. Yesterday I paddled for 70 minutes and tried to do some varied-pace work that wouldn't grind me down to nothing. I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then, starting at the 20-minute mark, I upped the stroke rate for three of every ten minutes. I paddled at 70 strokes per minute for two minutes and 80 spm for one minute; for the rest of the 10-minute period I kept the rate below 65 spm while trying to apply good power at the beginning of each stroke. It was nowhere near the toughest workout ever, but I think it's mentally tiring when I focus hard on details like that.
The Blackburn Challenge is just four weeks off now, I'm backing off the volume a bit while trying to keep the quality of each session high. Sure, the Blackburn course will take me the better part of three hours to finish, but I think lasting that long is more a matter of managing hydration and blood sugar and stuff like that. Overdistance training has its place, but I think it offers diminishing returns. Even when I do what I call a "long" paddle I rarely go for more than two hours: in an ultra-long session your stroke form is bound to break down eventually, and then you're just reinforcing poor mechanics.
With all that in mind, I went out for a mere 80 minutes this morning. I was expecting to be tired again today, but once I got going I felt surprisingly good in the boat. I think the humidity was down at least a little: a very heavy thunderstorm had passed through early in the morning, and maybe that blew out some of the moisture in the air. It definitely lowered the temperature. I didn't pay much attention to stroke rate today, but I did concentrate on good crisp strokes again.
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