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.

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