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.

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