Monday photo feature

For the first time in 2023, my dock has run aground.  This is the scene that greeted me Saturday morning.  The Mississippi River was flowing at about 8.4 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge--nearly five feet lower than the previous Saturday when I had last made it down to the riverfront.  By yesterday afternoon the level had dropped to 9.7 feet below zero.

Last year the river dropped to the lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded: -10.8 feet.  That was late last October; now it's just early September, but here we are flirting with such levels once more.  Unless some rain falls higher in the watershed soon, I expect we'll start to see some reporting in the national news about the extreme drought conditions in the lower Mississippi basin.

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Getting what I can out of this period of doldrums

Since I last put up a post here I've done a little bit of paddling but spent a lot more time doing non-athletic stuff, including working in my workshop, working on my rental property, and being sick for a few days.  I've also received another transforaminal (nerve block) injection.

Paddling continues to be a Saturday and Sunday activity.  The sessions have all been steady 60-minute affairs.  As always, I've tried to take good strokes and move the boat as effectively and efficiently as possible.  I've taken it easy at times and pushed the pace at other times.  I would have liked to do some barge-wake surfing, but until this morning the river has been deserted when I've been out there.  Today I found three or four barge rigs moving upriver, but they weren't generating any surfable waves.

My second nerve block was performed back on Wednesday the 30th of August.  The doctor asked me to keep a diary of how I'm feeling in the days since, and while that's a perfectly reasonable request, I hate trying to quantify pain.  Whenever the doctor says "How is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?" I never know exactly what I should say.  I always think, "Okay, I've got this annoying pain and discomfort, but is it really bad, or just 'normal' bad?"  It's kind of frustrating.  But since the procedure I think I've been feeling quite good or having just some hints of the pain I'd had before.  While paddling, I sometimes feel some mild stress in my arms and shoulders, and I sometimes feel nothing at all.  So that's where I am in this long saga of aches and pains.

It was last weekend that I got sick.  It was basically a bad cold.  When I went down to the river last Saturday I had the mild sore throat that always seems to signal the onset of a cold for me, but I paddled anyway and felt pretty good in the boat.  But the throat soreness got worse and my energy level plummeted for the rest of that day, and by Sunday morning I knew it was time to stay in and get some rest.  I felt pretty lousy for several days and didn't feel like rejoining the functioning world until Wednesday.

So... that's what's going on these days.  It's definitely some time off from any serious paddling.  For any readers who have bigger plans for training and competing this fall, I hope they perform well and have lots of fun.  I wish I could share in it a bit more, but there's no reason for alarm.  I've always come back around in the past, and I reckon I eventually will once more.

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