Winter camp!

After a couple of weeks out of the boat due to holiday travel and various preoccupations, I'm shocking my body back into a more serious training mode at a camp in sunny Florida.

I left home Friday morning and arrived yesterday afternoon at the Rainbow River, a lovely spring-fed stream that flows through the town of Dunellon just above its confluence with the Withlacoochee River.  A few friends--Steph Schell, Royal McDonnell, Chris Norbury, Chris Hipgrave--had been here several days already and were doing a time trial from KP Hole to the Route 484 bridge.  Not ready for that kind of stress, I put in at the bridge and paddled upstream until I saw these athletes coming down, and I followed them back to the finish.

Yesterday was more substantial.  In the morning was a long (100-120 min.) session at a "conversational" pace, which is to say that it was supposed to be a good solid training paddle, but not at such high intensity that you couldn't chat with your companions.  I spent most of it alongside Chris H. and Royal, and I had to work pretty hard to keep pace with them.  I tried to take good strokes and keep the stroke rate in a reasonable range, and not exceed that "conversational" pace.  We paddled from the Route 484 bridge up to Rainbow Springs and back; in the last mile back to the bridge my form was sort of falling apart and I fell off the pace, so I concluded my paddle at an even 100 minutes.

Yesterday afternoon we did a power-building workout: six times (2 min. on/1 min. off at 50 strokes per minute and 3 min. on/1 min. off at 60 spm).  Both cadences are quite low, but 60 spm felt really fast after doing 50 spm.

After the two-week break from paddling my arms had felt as good as they'd felt in a long time.  But now they're sore again, especially my forearms.  I've got a couple of blisters on my left middle finger, too.  Tomorrow is a scheduled day off, and I'm as grateful for it as anybody even though I just got here.  There are some tough days coming up this week and I hope a day will be enough for me to regroup.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

As I was leaving the riverfront yesterday I saw this barge rig carrying a load of wind turbine blades up the Mississippi.  It was the first time I'd seen this particular cargo out there.

I think most of the barges I see on the river are carrying agricultural products--grains, primarily.  That's the biggest economic impact of extreme low-water periods like the one we're having this fall: it's more difficult for farmers to get their harvests to market.

Products of the sand and gravel industry--piles of rock, Portland cement, stuff like that--are a common sight on barges.  I also see a lot of coal being shipped by barge, though maybe not as much as I once did now that TVA's Allen Fossil Plant downstream of downtown Memphis has been converted to natural gas.  Sometimes I see barges that appear to contain some variety of fuel in liquid or gas form.

But that's about it for what I routinely see being shipped out on the river.  So it was interesting to see something new yesterday.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Staying in motion, if only just barely

I suppose my life wouldn't be complete without some aches and pains, and not to worry: I've got some.  That discomfort in my right collarbone that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is still present; it just so happened that I had my annual physical scheduled for this past Wednesday, so I mentioned it to my doctor and she ordered an X-ray.  Fortunately the bone came out looking just fine.  The doctor said it could be just a bruise, or even a weird virus that she's heard is going around that causes such pains.  Or maybe it's just the latest manifestation of my impinged nerves.

Meanwhile, my left hip flexor has been bothering me as well.  I started noticing it during one of my runs the week before last, and after I ran last Wednesday it seemed to feel worse.  My original plan was to run again on Friday, but I decided to skip it and see if the extra rest made any difference.  As of this writing it's still hurting about the same.  It sure seems that whoever controls the universe simply doesn't want me to run.

So I'm feeling pretty beat up these days.  I guess the bright side is that right now I'm still just maintaining some general fitness and don't have anything on the horizon that I need to be in top competitive shape for.  And at least I can still paddle without any severe discomfort.  That's what I did yesterday and today.  Yesterday it was overcast with a chilly breeze, and I felt sort of sluggish in the boat.  I basically just got in my hour... punched the clock, as it were.  I felt better today, and I expect having some sunshine had something to do with that, though it was still breezy and chilly.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

If you want it, attain it!

"Attainment" is a paddling term for moving one's boat upriver, against the current.  On a slow-moving Class I river, attaining is as simple as paddling upstream faster than the current is carrying you downstream.  As the degree of whitewater complexity rises, you might have to seek help from features in the river to get your boat upstream: hopping from one eddy to another, for instance, or surfing a wave that slants upstream.

I come from a whitewater background, and I've always enjoyed looking for clever ways to move upstream in a rapid.  Attainment is also a great exercise for developing fitness, technical efficiency, balance and control, and a deeper understanding of whitewater features and how they can help you get your boat from one spot in the river to another.

As I moved more into boats designed for flatwater and open-water paddling, I found that my attaining skills often came in handy when paddling those boats out on the Mississippi River.  Again, it's typically a matter of paddling upstream faster than the current is flowing downstream, but sometimes little things like stroke timing and angle of approach matter, too.

One old slalom racing friend of mine recently created a group on Face Book dedicated to attainment, and he invited group members to share their thoughts and their videos on the topic.  I knew right then I had to make a short film about attainment out on my home river.  You can now view it below.  I threw in a few cinematic tropes just for fun, but I hope the viewer ultimately will appreciate the important role attainment plays in the life of a paddler.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

A few thoughts about running

As some readers might know, I was a runner when I was younger.  I ran track and cross country for my high school and college teams.  I was a decent runner, if not a great one.  In high school my times were around 2:02 for 800 meters, 4:34 for 1600 meters, 10:12 for 3200 meters--good enough to win a few races in my area, but nowhere near good enough to attract the attention of college coaches.  I went to college with academics in mind but decided I might as well participate in the crummy no-scholarships running program the school had.  There I managed to raise my performance a level or two--still far from stardom but good enough to hold my head high as a respectable collegiate runner.  I broke 27 minutes a couple of times on 8-kilometer cross country courses, and my greatest achievement was probably clocking 8:52 in an indoor 3000-meter race in Louisville's Broadbent Arena.  Not long after that, I went down with a severe iliotibial band injury and was never able to return to that kind of form.

I graduated from college in 1990, and in the ensuing years I ran sporadically as my involvement in canoe and kayak racing increased.  I did an occasional road race, and while working as a high school teacher I assisted with the school's cross country program and ran with the kids a good bit.  I stayed in pretty good shape, albeit nowhere close to the peak form of my college career.

But by the early 2000s my efforts to run sort of petered out.  I was spending a lot of time training in the boat, and seeing as how I enjoyed paddling more than running, I just didn't see much reason to keep doing the latter ("Runners don't paddle, so why should paddlers run?").

I'd hardly run a step for some 20 years when, at about this time last year, I decided to buy a new pair of running shoes and give it another try.  Why did I decide to do that?  Nostalgia, mostly.  I'd been watching some You Tube footage of Olympic and world championships races of the last decade, and decided that I sort of missed being able to go out and run a mile or more and have it feel good and smooth.  I also wanted another cross-training activity in the mix as my tolerance for cold-weather paddling diminishes.

For my first time out a year ago, I figured 20 minutes was a reasonable length of time to run.  Anybody can run for 20 minutes... right?  But it was no more than a couple of minutes in that I realized just how out of running shape I was.  All the cardiovascular infrastructure that I'd built up from high school into early adulthood was gone.  I tried to settle in for 20 tough minutes, but I ended up stopping well short of that because of pain in my Achilles tendons.

I attempted two or three more runs last December, with similar results.  Finally, after injuring one of those Achilles a bit more severely, I decided to give it up until the arrival of warmer weather.

At the end of April I gave it another try, and this time I radically lowered my expectations of the distance I could handle.  I did just a short lap around the block here in my neighborhood--a distance of maybe 800 meters or so.  For the next couple of months I used this around-the-block run as my warmup for gym sessions.  The main thing I remember about those runs is that they never seemed to get any easier; each one felt like just as much of a chore as the first one had felt.

In July I took my trip up to New England, and once I was back home in early August I didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond some unstructured weekend paddling.  By November I was starting to feel like a slug and decided it was time to get back in motion.  If you've been reading this blog lately, then you know that my current routine includes some paddling, some bike riding, several exercises with a medicine ball, and some running.

Twice a week, I've been going over to the park just west of my home and running the perimeter of a big grassy field (we call it the "Greensward").  A lap around the Greensward is probably somewhere around 1000 meters, and over time I've been nudging that distance up by cutting fewer and fewer corners.  Each time out I've run a lap, done a couple of sets of medicine ball exercises, done a couple of sets of runs up the front stairs of a nearby building, and finished with a run of maybe 500 meters.  While I haven't been setting any speed records, it finally seems like running is getting a bit easier for me--a tiny bit, at least.  For a while I was having doubts about whether I would finish each run, even with less than 50 meters to go; but in the last week or so I've noticed that I'm feeling less that way.

I have no lofty plans to resurrect my running career; as I noted above, I enjoy paddling more than running and I think I will continue to satisfy my competitive urges that way.  But maybe... just maybe... I can get back to thinking of running as "something that I do."

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

Can you see them?  CAN YOU???  They're right there in front of that pile of rocks on the far bank: a pair of big canoes taking some customers on a tour of the Mississippi River at Memphis on a blustery, overcast morning a couple of weeks ago.

I was in the Greenbelt Park at the time, doing my running and medicine ball routine.  When I noticed the canoes out there I zoomed in as close as my cellular telephonic device's camera would allow, and snapped the picture.

The canoes operate under the auspices of Mississippi River Expeditions, and I expect Mr. Matthew Burdine was out there leading the tour.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Not moving freely, but moving just the same

As I said a few weeks ago, for now I'm just living with the discomfort brought on by the vertebrae that are impinging the nerves running through my shoulders into my arms.  The pain seems to wander around.  For the last month or so it's been mostly in both forearms, and at times I've lain in bed at night and felt them throbbing.  Now, just in the last couple of days, I've been feeling a rather sharp pain in the area of my right collarbone; it's almost as if I've fractured the bone somehow, though I can't think of anything that's happened that would have caused such a thing.

Since my last post I've continued with my variety of training activities.  I'm riding my bike a couple of times a week and doing my little running/medicine ball routine twice a week.  I've saved paddling for the weekends, usually paddling for 60 minutes each time out.  I'm just doing whatever I feel like as opposed to any specific workouts.  If I'm feeling good I'll throw in some long surges.

This weekend I paddled on Friday, and it was yesterday that I woke up feeling that pain in my collarbone area along with a lot of stiffness and soreness.  I went out and did a pretty leisurely bike ride: the annual Memphis marathon was in progress, and I spent as much time coasting or standing along the course and watching the runners as pedaling in any sort of deliberate way.

When I returned to the river this morning I was worried that the collarbone pain would bother me in the boat, but it turned out not to be so bad.  It was all the more reason to paddle with my leg and lower abdominal muscles as much as possible.

Enquiring minds want to know: what has the Mississippi River been doing lately?  Well, it continues to be various degrees of low.  Last weekend, when the river was flowing around seven and a half feet below zero on the Memphis gauge, I was unable to paddle southward from my dock, as I usually do:

But there was just barely enough water for me to paddle out to the north.  I had to thread my way through those water and electrical lines beneath the ramp:

During the last week the river crested at about -4.5 feet.  By this morning it had dropped back down to -6.3 feet, but I still had a sliver of water allowing me to depart to the south:

My river is never the same thing two days in a row, and I'd say that's a good thing.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.