The author of this blog wears several hats, and he spent most of last week wearing the hat of a woodworker. (Yes, I know that's an Outdoors, Inc., hat I've got on, but I'm referring to figurative hats here.)
Woodworking can be quite an athletic endeavor in its own right, as I demonstrate here while drawknifing a bevel on a Windsor chair seat.
Photo by Kenneth Kortemeier.
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My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School is complete, and while it was a good experience, I'm glad to be moving back south at last.
I can say for certain that I'm really ready to be back home. By the time I get there I'll have been away almost four weeks, and that's the longest time I've been away from home in over 20 years.
I do have a race scheduled for next Saturday, August 5: I'm signed up to participate in the Three Rivers Regatta at Knoxville. I'm doing the 6-mile event, so I need to get back in the boat in the next few days and try to rediscover some speed. There will be some other good racers there, but almost all of them have opted for the 24-mile race, something I would have no desire to do even if I weren't at the tail end of a long trip.
It would be very easy to skip the Knoxville event altogether and just go home, but it's good to have a reason not to rush. For instance, I'll be seeing my buddy Rob in the Hudson Valley of New York, and I think I'll spend a couple of nights there and get a good visit rather than drop in for a quick hello and push on.
This past week was primarily consumed by my class, but I did get to paddle a couple of times. The school property is on the shore of Boyd Pond, which, unlike our "lakes" down South that are really just dammed-up reservoirs, is a natural feature of a river system (the Pemaquid River). One evening I paddled my surfski along the perimeter of the pond (which is really a decent-sized lake), and another evening I played around in my whitewater boat. The water was very pleasant.
So in the space of ten days or so I did some pretty good paddling in the state of Maine: some flatwater, some whitewater, and some open water, using both the boats I had with me.
I'm spending this evening in Portsmouth, the largest city on the very brief New Hampshire coast. I hope to get out and paddle in the morning. I did paddle in New Hampshire when I was in New England in the summer of 2016, but it was a rather cursory outing where the Connecticut River forms the border between New Hampshire and Vermont, so it'll be nice to pad my Granite State paddling resume a bit.
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Okay, here's one more quick post before I disappear into offline oblivion. Greg Lesher, who took second place among male single surfski paddlers in last weekend's Blackburn Challenge race, has posted his race report. You can read it here. I appear in one of the photographs--the first time I have broken into Greg's blog. Greg's posts tend to soar in a higher literary plane than mine.
Also: this afternoon I paddled my surfski in Middle Bay, located south of Brunswick, Maine, in the big mess of islands and peninsulas where the Androscoggin and Kennebec Rivers flow into the sea. So in the last two days I have thoroughly removed Maine from the list of states in which I have never paddled.
I'll see you after my class ends.
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I've spent this week wandering--sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with great purpose--around New England.
The summertime daylight hours up here are rather interesting. Because this locale is farther north than my home, the daylight lasts longer each day, and because this is the absolute easternmost reach of the United States (Maine's capital city of Augusta is nearly 5 degrees farther east than New York City, and nearly 11 degrees farther east than Miami), that extra daylight is "front-loaded" into the early morning hours. Dawn occurs around 4:30 AM EDT, and it's broad daylight by 5 o'clock.
I've paddled twice this week. On Tuesday evening I attended the weekly "sandlot" race at the Boston suburb of Beverly, Massachusetts. Eight or nine other people were there, including (but not limited to) Greg Lesher, Matt Drayer, Mary Beth Gangloff, Bernie Romanowski, and Eli Gallaudet. We raced a triangular course of nearly 5 miles (my G.P.S. device measured it at 7.96 kilometers). We did it in staggered starts, and as a result I was all alone out there until very late in the race when Eli caught me and then we both caught a guy who had started before us. It might have been fun to see who I could hang with in a head-to-head start, but I can understand why they like to do the staggered starts, too. My time (not counting the sprints on the beach at the start and finish) was 44:43, with an average speed a little under 11 kph. That's slower than I've been doing on flatwater in the harbor at home, and even though the conditions there near the mouth of the Crane River were pretty calm, I guess they were bumpy enough to slow me down a bit.
I'd hoped to meet up with old slalom-racing friend John Kazimierczyk for some whitewater paddling in western Massachusetts on Wednesday, but that morning he told me that the water levels over there were not cooperating and he was going to stay in. So I decided to head on up to Maine, a state I had not visited since we took a family vacation there when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and a state I had never paddle in. Having studied the river flow situation on the American Whitewater website, I decided the Kennebec River drainage might be my best bet for some whitewater paddling. I drove up to a town called The Forks, right at the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, and found myself in a campsite right on the bank of the Dead. The area had just received some two and a half inches of rain, so all the rivers and creeks had good healthy flows.
Camping nearly was a group of paddlers from upstate New York who were planning to run the Kennebec Gorge, and they kindly welcomed me along. The Kennebec Gorge is a mostly Class III run with a little bit of Class IV, and it's one of the standard summertime whitewater runs in Maine because of its dam-released flows. I felt pretty good out there, albeit still not as sharp as in my much more dedicated whitewater days.
The Gorge run is only three miles or so, with a takeout that requires carrying your boat up a long, steep set of stairs. I chose to continue paddling the additional six or so miles down to the confluence with the Dead. As the river emerged from the gorge the whitewater gradually calmed down, but there was still plenty of fun Class II-III to mess around on.
This morning I'm feeling surprisingly not too sore. Maybe my body is actually getting used to that stuff again.
My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School begins tomorrow, so my main plan for today is to make sure I've got the food and supplies I'll need for the next week. I've never visited the school before, so I won't know what the exact situation will be until I get there, but I reckon it's better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. The school officials tout the place as being somewhat off the grid, so readers probably shouldn't count on any more posts here until July 29 at the earliest.
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It's always great to see smiling faces after several brutal hours of racing. Here we have Greg Lesher, Rob Jehn, and Mary Beth Gangloff after they'd finished the Blackburn Challenge on Saturday. Greg took second place and Rob first in men's single surfski, while Mary Beth teamed with Igor Yeremeev to paddle the third-fastest double surfski. Photo by Wesley Echols.
Just in case you're thinking the Blackburn Challenge is just a canoe and kayak race... it's not. It's put on by the Cape Ann Rowing Club, and there was no shortage of oar-powered craft on the water: sliding-seat, fixed-seat, shells, dories, workboats... all kinds of boat-propelling athletes were out there Saturday.
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I was up bright and early yesterday morning for my big trip around Cape Ann in the annual Blackburn Challenge. After some breakfast in my hotel room I headed over to Gloucester High School, which is situated on a cove off the Annisquam River. I went to the school's cafeteria and got myself checked in, scouted out a good access to the water, and soon enough I was in my boat awaiting the 8:35 AM EDT start.
As I've said in the past, I like a good hour-or-less race. But this one was likely to take me around three hours, and so I had no illusions of being a hero. My plan was to go out relaxed and controlled and let the race develop at an intensity level I could withstand for a long time. I wasn't familiar with many of my fellow surfski racers, but I did know that two of them, Rob Jehn of New Jersey and Boston area resident Greg Lesher, were among the top athletes in the Northeast. So when the gun went off and they moved right out front, I let them. There were plenty of other people to settle in with, and as we moved up the Annisquam River I found myself sitting on the stern wake of a tall tattooed chap whose stroke rate was nearly double mine in this early stage of the race.
I'd set my G.P.S. device to show me only the elapsed time and the distance covered. I figured knowing my speed would only be a distraction, seeing as how nature would be throwing all kinds of conditions at us that would slow us down. On the Annisquam River we were working against some current, for instance. So if I was moving significantly slower than I'm used to going on flatwater, I didn't want to know.
One reason I've done poorly in long races in the past is that I wasn't disciplined about having a good plan for in-race hydration and nutrition. This time I was ready, with two camelback pouches (one on my back deck, one in the back pocket of my PFD) full of a carbohydrate-rich drink that I'd researched back home. I made sure to take a drink every ten minutes as the race went along, and as we emerged from the river into Annisquam Harbor and Ipswich Bay, I was still feeling really, really good. Keeping my stroke rate nice and low, I was having no trouble staying on the guy's wake. After a while I moved up onto his side wake and occasionally took the lead so he could ride my wake for a bit. That's what a gentleman does in our sport, after all.
We rounded the northernmost tip of Cape Ann at Halibut Point State Park, and here the conditions began to change. Up to this point we'd been paddling in very manageable waves and chop, but now the ground swell was presenting us with bigger cross-beam waves, and even though it wasn't particularly windy, there was a bunch of wind chop coming in at weird angles and I was starting to get tossed around. I'd been hanging very comfortably with the tattooed guy and one or two other paddlers, but suddenly they'd opened several boatlengths on me as they handled the conditions slightly better than I did. As we moved through Sandy Bay toward Straitsmouth Island I told myself to stay in striking distance so that once we were in Gloucester Harbor I'd have a chance to run them down.
Straitsmouth Island gave us a brief bit of shelter from the conditions, but then we were out in the open Atlantic, and it felt like paddling in a washing machine, especially in the areas close to shore where the waves were reverberating off the rocky coastlines. Paddling my least-stable surfski, the one I use for mostly-flatwater races closer to home, I realized that I had underestimated the conditions I would be seeing in this race. I have a friend at home who has done this race a few times, and his description of the conditions led me to believe that the swells would be glassy-smooth and just like paddling on flatwater except for the bobbing up and down. I'm not blaming him for my troubles; I very well may have mis-interpreted what he said. And I do have my own cockiness to blame: I'd been thinking, "Hey, I've paddled the Miller's Run in South Africa, the Columbia Gorge in the Pacific Northwest... I shouldn't have any problem with anything New England can throw at me!"
Oh, how wrong I was. As the Atlantic tossed me right and left and every which way, I began to doubt whether I even belonged out there. My paddling rhythm had been wrecked, and I was glad my G.P.S. display didn't show me my speed because to know would have been more than I could bear. The conditions just got worse and worse in the later stages of the race, and I flipped three times. As my elapsed time approached and then exceeded three hours, the only thing on my mind was "Where is the harbor???"
As a first-timer in this race I didn't know all the landmarks, but at last I saw racers ahead of me making a turn to the right after what turned out to be the Dog Bar lighthouse. We were at Gloucester Harbor at last, and maybe I could salvage a shred of respectability. But after all that wasted energy on the ocean I had practically nothing left. There were actually some nice clean surfable waves moving past the lighthouse, but I couldn't really manage the sprints to get on them, and I got minimal help. Then in the harbor I realized I didn't know the landmarks as well as I should have, and it was a long time before I was sure where the finish line was.
I crossed the line with a time of 3 hours, 23 minutes, 32 seconds. My G.P.S. device measured the course at 31.67 kilometers (19.68 miles). My average speed for the race was 9.3 kilometers per hour. That's not even 6 miles per hour... ouch. Frankly, I'm surprised I was even that fast.
Rob Jehn took the win for men's single surfski in 2 hours, 54 minutes, 3 seconds. Greg Lesher was second in 2:58:42, and Jakob Van Dorp finished third in 3:03:35. The fastest time of the day was turned in by a 6-person outrigger canoe: 2:42:15. The complete results are available here.
I actually felt slightly less crummy once I'd heard those guys' times. They'd been already out of my sight when I reached the rough part of the course, and as my pace slowed to a crawl I was sure they were pulling ever farther away and would beat me by close to an hour. To learn that I'd finished "only" 29 minutes and 31 seconds behind Rob, and a mere 19:57 out of the medals, softened my disappointment at least a little.
Now, a day later, I'm still processing my feelings about it all. I knew coming in that I wasn't likely to win the thing, but I really was hoping to make a good showing. For the first hour of the race it seemed that I was doing that beautifully, that my planning and preparation were paying off. But then my lack of preparedness for the ocean conditions was brutally exposed. And that's the main thing that makes me think I failed: out on the Atlantic I wasn't really even racing, but just surviving.
My fellow racers were very kind and supportive. Greg Lesher remarked that my time was in fact perfectly respectable. Rhode Island resident Tim Dwyer, who had won the men's double surfski class in 3:00:40 with partner Wesley Echols, told me "Give it a few days. You're gonna feel like such a badass for getting through this thing!"
An important thing I need to remember--I actually have to remind myself of this fairly often--is that how well or how poorly Elmore Holmes is doing has no bearing on the vitality of the sport. None at all.
As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, South African surfski legend Oscar Chalupsky was in town to conduct a clinic and promote his book No Retreat, No Surrender. I was happy to buy a copy and get Oscar to sign it. Oscar didn't know how I'd done in the race, but the inscription he wrote contains exactly the advice I need right now:
This morning I am sore and achy and tired, not surprisingly. Some kind of recovery paddle is in order, and I reckon I'll go back down to Gloucester High School and paddle in the protected water there in a little while.
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I mentioned in my last post that I was feeling sore in my upper back Wednesday morning. Well, by the time I was departing my sister's house my lower back was hurting too, and my legs felt incredibly tight as well. It made a long day of driving that much tougher. All I know is I'm very glad I took the time to do those drills on flatwater in my whitewater boat for the last few weeks. While they didn't prepare me for all the stresses that whitewater puts on my body, I hate to think how bad I would have been hurting if I hadn't done them.
I spent some nine or ten hours in the car on Wednesday, driving across North Carolina and up into Virginia, over to Norfolk and through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, up the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland. Finally I made camp in a state park near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The park was near the mouth of the Delaware River, and that's a very important detail. You see, the Delaware River runs along the state line between Delaware and New Jersey, and I had never paddled a boat in either of those states before. My goal yesterday morning was to remedy that situation.
An obvious course of action would have been to paddle right there at the mouth of the Delaware, from Cape Henlopen in Delaware to Cape May in New Jersey. The problem was that those capes are are some 15 or 20 miles apart, and being still sore from Tuesday's whitewater paddling and having a big race in just two days, I didn't need an epic endurance trek on my hands. So after studying the Google map on my cellular telephone device, I decided to drive upriver to the town of Delaware City, where the distance across the river appeared more manageable.
Here's a look at where I paddled:
I put in on the Delaware City waterfront and started paddling across the river, which was maybe 2500 meters across. Because the state line runs right along the New Jersey bank, I had to paddle up into one of those tributary creeks over there to make sure I did in fact paddle within the boundaries of New Jersey. I did a few 12-stroke sprints while I was out there, but because I was still feeling the effects of Tuesday's paddle I kept the intensity very low otherwise. Though I was hoping to paddle for 60 minutes, it ended up taking me more like 75. But I accomplished my mission, and I have now paddled in all but four states in the United States. One of those four is Maine, and with any luck at all I'll be crossing it off the list later in this trip.
It was not an easy paddling session: on top of my soreness and fatigue, it was hot outside and the sun was beating down, and I had to deal with a pretty strong headwind as I paddled back toward Delaware City. I had to make myself relax and not fight it. But by the time I was back in the car continuing the journey north, I could tell that I was feeling better than I'd felt before paddling. Getting some blood flowing through my muscles had done some good. I worked my way up through New Jersey on both the Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, and the traffic was heavy in this most densely-populated region of the country. I stayed west of New York City and crossed the Hudson River at Newburgh, New York.
I spent last night at my buddy Rob's house in a little village called Holmes (yes, really). We had fun catching up last night and this morning, and now that he's gone to work I'm preparing to make the three-hour drive to the greater Boston area, where I've got a hotel room reserved in Gloucester. By the next time I post here I should have completed the Blackburn Challenge race around Cape Ann.
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The big summer trip of 2023 is underway. I spent Monday night in Nashville, and yesterday I continued east to the Tennessee-North Carolina state line, across which the Pigeon River flows.
My friend Amelia is a guide for one of the rafting companies there, and right as I arrived she had a trip preparing to leave for the putin. I threw my whitewater boat in the bus and tagged along.
I'm pretty sure the last whitewater paddling I'd done was back in 2016, when I ran a section of the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts. Seven years... would I even remember how to paddle whitewater here on the Pigeon? Well, I basically did, it turned out, but I felt rusty. My timing was off, more than anything else. I was blowing straightforward front-surfs and other little things I once did in my sleep.
The section of river I ran is pretty short, and I was at the takeout not much more than an hour after putting in. I rested for a while, and then in the late afternoon, after Amelia's last raft trip of the day, she and I and several of her friends got together and did another run in our own boats. I felt maybe a little bit smoother on the second run, but still way out of practice. On whitewater I don't know how to paddle any way except hard, so I was good and tired by the end of it.
I said goodbye to my fellow paddlers and continued farther east for some two and a half hours. After dark I arrived in Lincolnton, North Carolina, where my sister and her family live. They very kindly fed me some supper and put me to bed on their living room sofa.
This morning I'm pretty sore, mainly in my upper back area. A day of aggressive whitewater paddling might not have been the smartest thing to do four days before a long open-water race. But there's no point quibbling about that now. Hopefully a couple of days of sitting in the car will give my body a chance to rest.
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When I was working at camp in the early 1990s, one of the rivers we took trips on was the Pigeon River near Hartford, Tennessee. I shot this photo of Wyly Brown of Brookline, Massachusetts, and Pierre Villere of New Orleans, Louisiana, as they navigated Lost Guide rapid in the summer of 1992.
I plan to revisit the Pigeon tomorrow. It's one of several stops on my way to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for the Blackburn Challenge race this Saturday.
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Friday morning I went for my last run and did my last gym session before I leave for New England. I can't recall anything that's made me sweat more than those gym sessions have the last few weeks.
I was out of the boat for the second Saturday in a row. My 90-year-old aunt up in Jackson, Tennessee, has been in poor health, and I accompanied my mom up there to pay her a visit. Once again I feel a bit anxious about not being laser-focused on training with a substantial race just a week away, but you know how it is... certain things are more important. And at this point there's really nothing I can do to be in any better form by the 15th of July anyway.
The weather has continued to be not especially hot but extremely humid. There have been showers and thunderstorms scattered about the area for several days as well. When I went down to the river this morning there was rain in the forecast but it wasn't expected to arrive until after I'd finished paddling.
I did a pretty good 90-minute paddle, covering a bit over 15 kilometers in that time. I did a big loop out on the Mississippi, paddling down below the old bridges and then back up along the Arkansas bank above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. I used the session to test out my in-race hydration system to make sure it's working the way it should.
And... that's pretty much it for paddling before the Blackburn Challenge race next weekend, not counting a little bit of whitewater paddling and a few short sprints in the surfski. Tomorrow I hit the road at last.
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The day before yesterday I had my final "Super Tuesday" effort of this training cycle. As usual, it started with a run and a gym session at home. Then I went to the river, got in the boat, warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and commenced the workout. It was four 500-meter pieces, starting every 7th minute, paddling at 90 strokes per minute. I was tired from the gym work and I could tell I wasn't feeling sharp, but some days that's just how you feel, and there's nothing you can do but push through it. In the end I was reasonably satisfied with my efforts. They were certainly consistent: my times were 2:22, 2:22, 2:22, and 2:25. It would have been "deuces wild" if I hadn't faded a little on that last one!
I've enjoyed a nice endorphin rush after most of my workouts lately, but this time I was just flat-out tired as I put my boat away back on the dock. At least the last hard day of the training block is under my belt. I'm not sure the work I've done the last couple of months is ideal for a race of more than two and a half hours, but I've stuck with it and given it all I've had.
The weather this week hasn't been as hot as last week, but the heat index value has remained high. In other words, it's humid and not much fun to be outside. I think that's at least one of the factors making me feel a little sluggish and out of sorts right now. Another is my rapidly approaching departure. While I have had some truly wonderful experiences traveling the nation and the world, the truth is that I'm a homebody deep down, and I feel a lot of anxiety as I try to make sure arrangements are in place for everything that could crop up here in my absence. I have pets that need food and love, a rental property that requires some attention, chores here in my own household... I worry about all that.
This morning I paddled the whitewater boat for the last time before I leave. I'd been keeping it down at the marina, but now I've brought it home and I'm making sure all my gear is ready for my first whitewater paddling in some seven years. The plan is to paddle the Pigeon River in east Tennessee next Tuesday.
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This is a picture of a picture that my long-time racing friend Scott Cummins has in his collection. It was taken at the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race here in Memphis back in 2004, and it shows Herman Chalupsky, Greg Barton, Oscar Chalupsky, and Scott hanging out in the park near the race's finish line.
Every athlete in the photo has a compelling story, but for now I want to focus on Oscar's. A native of Durban, South Africa, Oscar was the first true legend of ocean surfski racing, winning the prestigious Molokai-to-Oahu race a record twelve times between 1983 and 2012. But in more recent years life has dealt him a tough blow: since 2019 he has suffered from a form of cancer known as Multiple Myeloma. He achieved remission once but has relapsed and will undergo more radiation treatment soon.
But this daunting state of affairs has not stopped Oscar from traveling the globe, teaching clinics and sharing his love of the sport, and, of course, paddling his boat. Before he begins his latest round of radiation therapy he'll be up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the weekend of July 14-16 to conduct a clinic in conjunction with the Blackburn Challenge.
I'm not particularly well acquainted with Oscar, but I did get to chat with him a bit when he was in Memphis nineteen years ago and again during my visit to South Africa in 2020. Hopefully I'll have a chance to visit with him a little in Gloucester. Indeed, his is a story I would do well to remember whenever my skeletal/muscular ailments have me feeling discouraged.
Last year Oscar published a book about his experiences as both a paddler and a cancer patient: No Retreat, No Surrender.
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Friday was the hottest day of the year here so far. I'm not sure whether the actual temperature quite made it up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but the heat index value was up around 110.
That morning I went out for my usual around-the-block run, and then did a gym session. Just after noon I reported to the orthopedic/spinal surgery clinic for my nerve block injection. Such a procedure is fairly simple, and from what I understand it's supposed to make impinged nerves contract so they're not getting pinched so bad anymore. The injection hurt some, but not too bad, largely because I was sedated. They didn't put me completely under, but the anesthesia they gave me did mess with my mind a bit. I have only a cloudy recollection of what happened between the procedure and my release from the clinic. I was required to have a driver (my good old mom) to take me home.
The doctor told me I should be able to resume normal activities by the next day. But instead of paddling yesterday, I had something else to do. My first cousin is retiring from service in the U.S. Army, and his family and friends were throwing him a party yesterday on a rural property up near Columbia, Tennessee, and so my mom and I drove up there to join in the celebration.
And so by this morning I hadn't paddled in several days, and hadn't paddled my surfski since Tuesday. And there was a part of me thinking "GAAH!!!! I've got this big long open-water race coming up in just two weeks! My training should be reaching its crescendo right now, and instead I'm just lallygagging around!!"
But the measured part of me knows that this is not the most ordinary chapter of my athletic career. I've been on an Odyssey in search of a way to get my body right again, and while I've been able to keep doing some paddling and some racing, right now I should just be glad to participate, bring some competitive spirit, and enjoy the camaraderie. If I end up having a really good race too, that's just gravy.
Adding to the challenge this morning is that I didn't have the best night of sleep and I was feeling sort of sluggish and cloudy-headed as I readied my boat and gear on the dock. But my muscles were fresh, and once I was in the boat it didn't take long for my mood and energy level to come around. My plan was a calm 90-minute paddle, and I tried to make it as high-quality as possible by searching for good precise strokes and grasping for that playfully elusive feeling of utter efficiency in the transfer of energy from my paddle blades through my arms and my torso and my legs all the way to my feet that actually push the boat forward. Out on the Mississippi there was a pretty strong southwest wind blowing that kept me cool in the hot weather. My body felt good and my mood was upbeat as I worked to keep the boat gliding over the choppy water, and I thought that if I can feel the same way paddling around Cape Ann in a couple of weeks, I'll be happy with that.
I think it'll be some time before I'll know for sure if the nerve block has done me any good. The good news right now is that I've experienced no pain in the two days since I got it. Apparently some people do have pain--sometimes even enough that the doctor has to prescribe some narcotic pain medication. (I had to sign a form promising not to misuse such substances if they are prescribed to me.) But I've been feeling perfectly fine.
My departure date is a week from tomorrow, so the coming week is my last for training at home. Hopefully I can get some good work done and leave town feeling some confidence.
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