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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