Monday photo feature

Winter is fast approaching here where I live, but the opposite is true in the southern hemisphere.

As the people on the planet's underside savor the warming temperatures of late spring, there are a number of places down there from which I could have drawn today's photo.  One is the province of Western Australia, where the annual WA Race Week is currently underway at Perth.  This event culminates in a race known as The Doctor, one of the most coveted titles for elite-level ocean racers.  ("The Doctor" is the name of the wind that blows off the Indian Ocean onto the west coast of Australia.)

But for this week's photo feature I think I'll pick a photo from another southern hemisphere nation: Chile.  Native Memphian Boyd Ruppelt is down there right now, enjoying all the Andean whitewater he can stand.  He posted the photo above on his Facebook page: it shows Boyd and friends cruising over one waterfall after another on the Rio Claro.

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Working up a plan for winter

It's been the better part of a month since my last post, but I haven't been in hibernation.

The unseasonably warm weather we had in October bled into the first week or so of November.  But the temperature has surely enough been trending downward.  I'm pretty certain we've seen our last day above 80 degrees Fahrenheit for this year.  This month has treated us to a lot of days in the 60s and 70s, but the last several days have stayed below 60 degrees, and the forecast is showing some highs in the 40s in the next couple of weeks.

In the last couple of years I've come to the decision that I've paid my dues when it comes to paddling in cold weather.  And so at this time of year I transition into some dry-land fitness activities.  Because of the above-normal temperatures this fall, I've continued to paddle quite a bit; but with the water temperature dropping on the Mississippi River, I think I've done my last barge-wake surfing until next spring.  I've been staying in the harbor or at least close to it, and working hard on my rotation from the hips.

Meanwhile, I've worked up a couple of dry-land routines for those days when the weather isn't something I want to paddle in.  My main focus in these is to work on my legs and core.  One is an indoor routine, for when it's pouring down rain outside: I do a couple of core exercises on the stability ball, some Hindu squats, and some abdominal crunches while hanging from the pullup bar.

When it's dry outside, but too cold and windy for paddling to be desirable, I go out and do some running and some medicine ball drills.

So, to borrow a phrase I heard Greg Barton use several years ago, I'm "letting the weather be my coach."  This past week has been a perfect example of that.  The early part of the week was warm, and I paddled both Sunday and Tuesday.  By Wednesday morning colder air had moved in and I stayed out of the boat for several days, doing the indoor routine Wednesday and Saturday and the outdoor routine in the Greenbelt Park on the riverfront on Thursday.

The weather warmed up a bit yesterday: by mid-morning the temperature was in the 50s on its way to a high in the mid 60s.  So I returned to the riverfront and got in the boat.  I did a lot more work on rotation, did a couple of surges, and in general tried to maintain a cruising pace a touch above my comfort zone.

I don't normally paddle on Monday, but with the forecast showing another warm day today followed by much cooler weather the rest of the week, I went on back down to the river this morning.  In a 60-minute session I did some stroke-power drills.

That's how it'll be for at least the next few weeks: a mix of in-the-boat and out-of-the-boat stuff, with the weather dictating how much of each I do.  Our winters aren't too terrible in this part of the country, and I hope that once I come out on the other end of the cold-weather season I'll have a strong platform of general fitness to build on.

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Monday photo feature

The father-daughter team of Mike Herbert and Savanna Wright finish up a race on the Tennessee River at Hales Bar Marina near Haletown, Tennessee, on Saturday.  Mike and Savanna, long-time friends of My Training Blog by Elmore, usually look a lot crisper and in-sync than this, but seeing as how they've just paddled almost 32 miles with very little help from any current, they can be forgiven if their form looks a bit frayed here.  They paddled well enough to claim first place in the mixed tandem surfski class.  Photo by Deb Boyles Glover.

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Paddling what little water we've got on a cool weekend

I'd almost forgotten what a cloudy day looked like, but yesterday refreshed my memory.  In addition to overcast skies we had a brisk north wind and a much cooler temperature.  So I wasn't in the mood for any surfing as I embarked on yesterday's paddle, and it turned out there was no barge traffic on the Mississippi anyway.  It was just as well, because I felt tired and achy in the boat and I needed a steady session to work those feelings out.  My quest for better rotation from the hips continues: such mechanics harness more power from the legs and take stress off the arms and shoulders, and I can tell my arms feel a lot better when I'm doing it well.

This morning the temperature was even a few degrees lower, but the sun was out and the wind was calm.  I didn't feel like a world-beater but I did at least feel better than yesterday.  I had a good 60-minute paddle on a river that was again mostly deserted.

About two-thirds of my dock is now on the ground.  I'm having to carry my boat around to another dock that still has access to the water.  The river level continues to hang out just above -10.0 feet on the Memphis gauge, and the forecast says it will more or less stay there.  That's a very, very low level, but not quite as low as the record -12 feet we saw last year.  So far I haven't seen any mention in the local or national news about the situation on the lower Mississippi.  The floodwaters from Hurricane Helene didn't prevent low water here, but they at least bought us some time, and I'm hoping wetter weather will settle into the watershed soon so we can avoid another record-setting year.

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Warm weather fun

This week we've had plentiful sunshine and near-record-high temperatures for late October.  I've had ideas floating around in my head about moving to some dry-land training for a while--lots of leg and core exercises, mainly--but as long as it's as warm as it's been it seems to make sense to stay in the boat a little longer.

I paddled for 60 minutes both Tuesday and yesterday.  Both days I found conveniently-placed barge traffic out on the Mississippi and tried to do some surfing.  The waves weren't especially easy to catch, and I wonder if the low water level has something to do with that--it's currently -9.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  And the towboat pilot I tried to surf behind yesterday was a real grump who apparently doesn't like anybody having fun while he has to work.  He gave me five (5) angry blasts on his horn.  If I could have talked to him, I would have made the same point I made here a couple of months ago: as long as it's okay for him to churn up waves on our river, it's okay for me to go out and try to surf them.

Anyway, I probably won't have many more days of favorable conditions for surfing out there.  This warm weather won't last forever, and the Mississippi's water gets very cold in the winter and I won't have much desire to get wet out there until late next spring.

I also prefer warm weather for bike riding.  I planned to ride Wednesday morning, but I discovered my bike had a flat tire and all the spare tubes I had required patching before they'd be usable.  Yes, I know a lot of riders just throw out punctured tubes and replace them with brand-new ones, but I have a hard time throwing a tube in the garbage when one pin-prick hole is the only thing wrong with it.  Anyway... instead of riding, I spent Wednesday morning patching all my spare tubes.  That pushed the riding back to this morning, when I took advantage of another lovely warm day to take the Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.

It looks like tomorrow and Sunday will be some ten degrees cooler than it's been the last several days.  But it'll still be nice for paddling.

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Monday photo feature

Here we have a before-and-after pair of photos--well, actually it's after-and-before, since the newer picture is on top.  We're looking at the famous Gorilla rapid on the Green River near Saluda, North Carolina.

When I was first learning to paddle at summer camp in nearby Brevard, the Green was one of the staples of the canoeing program--not the part of it that includes Gorilla, but a section a little ways downriver.  Here we had a lovely Class II stream that was ideal for doing lots of ferries and eddy turns, and also for learning the right way to swim in a river.  Green Cove Road ran alongside the entire run.

The putin for this section was the Fishtop access.  To get there we had to ride in the camp bus, canoe trailer pulled behind, down a harrowing set of switchbacks.  Seeing as how we essentially were descending the Blue Ridge Escarpment, it stands to reason that the river must have some steep gradient upstream of Fishtop.  When I was a camper back in the early 1980s we occasionally heard gossip about "unrunnable" waterfalls up there, and an old guidebook said something about rock climbing equipment being required for a paddler to get down that section.  But honestly, we didn't give it a whole lot of thought.  To us, the Green was a place to go and work on the basics.

By the late 1980s, techniques and materials had advanced enough that a few pioneering paddlers began to believe that this section of the Green above Fishtop, known as The Narrows, might not be unrunnable after all.  Then they went in there and proved it, running every last one of the rapids, including the raucous Gorilla and the frightening Sunshine.  Before long a couple of videos, Green Summer and Gorilla, were commercially available on VHS cassette.  Steep creeking had truly arrived.  With Lake Summit Dam providing frequent flows, more and more paddlers sought to get in on the action.

I have never run The Narrows of the Green myself.  I can cite a short list of reasons, and yes, fear of the place is one of them.  I simply couldn't imagine myself running something as bodacious as Gorilla.  But since the late 80s many people piled up dozens and even hundreds of runs on The Narrows and could do it in their sleep.  Since the early 2000s there even has been an annual race on the Green Narrows.

The Green is one of the rivers that got positively hammered by Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago.  Green Cove Road, including the switchbacks, sustained tremendous damage, and many houses along the road were swept away.  I've seen some photos and video footage of this section of river that was such a part of my early paddling education, and it looks completely scoured out.  It remains to be seen whether it will ever again be the ideal whitewater training ground that it was before.

Upstream in The Narrows, the rapids have changed radically.  The word on the street is that nothing is the same as before.  Pictured above is the "new" Gorilla rapid on top and the "old" Gorilla (during the 2017 edition of the annual race) on the bottom.  The camera angles aren't quite the same, and the upper photo is closer in to the rapid than the lower photo, but it's pretty clear that an impressive amount of rock got washed away from the river-left bank.  The early assessment of the few paddlers who have ventured into the gorge since the storm seems to be that Gorilla is no longer runnable.  I won't be surprised if somebody puts that to the test before long, however.

Both the photos above are screen-grabs from videos on You Tube.  The top one is from a drone video posted by a Wesley Shelmire, and the bottom one is from a video on the Kayak Session TV channel.

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Healing and getting back in motion

The last time I posted here I mentioned I was trying to get a response from my doctor's office about an X-ray I'd had taken.  They finally got back to me, a full seven days after the X-ray was shot, to tell me there was no sign of a fracture.  That was nice to know, though I sure would have appreciated getting the information in a more timely fashion.  I asked them if the image shed any light on my continued coughing, and they said no.  It's now been more than a month since I first got sick, and while I think the coughing is getting ever-so-gradually less frequent, I'm still having some occasional fits of it.  It's at its worst when I get up in the morning, when I'm expelling all the gunk that had collected overnight.  My friend Rob who rents the little studio apartment in the rear of my building told me that he's been praying for me because he's heard me coughing so much.  I genuinely found that touching.

Since learning that I had no broken bones in my chest area I've been easing myself back into some physical exercise.  I did a couple of 50-minute paddles toward the end of the week before last, week and paddled for 60 minutes on Tuesday and Friday of this past week.  My stamina was probably down a tad, but in all I felt reasonably good in the boat.

I woke up this morning with an inexplicable sharp pain in my left wrist--I don't recall doing anything yesterday that might have caused such an ailment.  I went on down to the river hoping for the best, and was relieved to find that I could paddle with no real pain.  I did another 60 minutes, and even got to do some barge-wake surfing.  The waves had a long wavelength and a small amplitude and seemed to require a bit more speed than I could generate, but I did get a couple of okay rides.  The best thing was that I felt good after doing some hard sprints--a sign that maybe I'm getting some stamina back.  By the time I finished paddling my wrist seemed to feel somewhat better, so maybe it just needed some exercise to loosen it up.

Wednesday morning I did a 75-minute bike ride.  I went out the Greater Memphis Greenline to its junction with the Wolf River Greenway, and then rode down the Greenway to where it makes a loop just south of where it passes under Walnut Grove Road.  I traversed the loop and retraced my path back home.  I felt like I'd lost a bit of fitness on the bike too, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so when I had almost nothing left in my legs.  At least there's plenty of time to get that back.

How is the Mississippi River doing these days?  Well, in a post several weeks ago I said that the catastrophic floodwaters in the North Carolina mountains "might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row."  And might is the key word here.  The lowest Memphis gauge reading ever recorded is -12.04 feet on October 17 of last year.  This fall the level had been below -10 feet before the floodwaters brought it up to about 6.5 feet a little over two weeks ago.  That's almost a 17-foot rise, coming mostly from a small area in North Carolina.  Now that surge of water has moved through, and the level is back down below -8 feet.  By the time I got down to the river on Friday my dock was starting to run aground:

The current forecast has the level holding steady for the next couple of weeks, and the hope is that it will stay above super-low levels until the wetter season settles into the Midwest.  "Super-low" water makes things tough for the barge-shipping industry, and its struggles can eventually ripple through the greater economy; it also causes damage to our marinas and other infrastructure that local river users depend on.

The weather has been just plain gorgeous lately, with plenty of sunshine.  We had our first cool spell of the season in the middle of last week, with the temperature just barely reaching 60 degrees Fahrenheit during the day.  But it's warming back up now and we're expected to have highs in the 80s for the next week.

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Monday photos feature

Yes, it's "photos" plural this week because I've got a number of them to share.

The photo above, a screen-grab from WVLT-Knoxville footage, shows Interstate 40 where the eastbound lanes collapsed into the Pigeon River.  The North Carolina Department of Transportation is currently saying that this part of I-40 will be closed until September 2025.  I won't be surprised if that date gets pushed back as time goes on.

I understand that this destruction is located at about Mile 4 in North Carolina.  The putin for the main dam-controlled section of the Pigeon is right at the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.  So that means this damage is about four miles upstream of that putin.

Back in the mid-1990s several slalom races were held on the Pigeon right at the state line, including an installment of the old Champion International Whitewater Series in 1996.  I shot this photo of the C2 team of David Hepp and Barry Kennon in that race.  That's David in the stern and Barry in the bow:

I competed in that race too, and I've also run the section of the Pigeon from the state line to Hartford, Tennessee, a number of times.  In this photo, taken by Mike Davis in 1993, I'm on a camp trip paddling with a camper named Billy Treadway:

On another Pigeon run, I'm in my old Gyramax C1 practicing my roll:

Another river that flooded last week was the French Broad.  The French Broad has its headwaters in the vicinity of Rosman, North Carolina, and flows north through Asheville; it crosses the state line into Tennessee north of where the Pigeon does.  Communities along the French Broad that received significant damage include the towns of Hot Springs, Marshall, and Asheville, and the Biltmore Estate just outside Asheville.  Rion Smith took this photo of me during a 1992 trip on the French Broad where it flows by the Biltmore Estate.  I'm putting on the sort of stern expression that befits such an important man as the head of a summer camp canoeing program:

In the summer of 1994, Clay Barbee shot this photo of me as I tried to get enders in Frank Bell's Rapid.  This rapid is on the French Broad a couple of miles upstream of Hot Springs:

A couple of miles above Frank Bell's Rapid, Big Laurel Creek flows into the French Broad.  My friend Amelia drove by the putin for Big Laurel last week, and she told me it didn't look like it got quite the amount of flooding that the French Broad did.  Here's a shot of me running Stairsteps rapid on Big Laurel in the spring of 1994.  Alfred Thompson took the photo:

These photos represent just a small sample of all the paddling I've done in the mountains of western North Carolina in times when a hurricane seemed the least of the region's worries.  From what I hear, some of the rapids in these rivers have now been completely rearranged.  Whatever the case, I hope that in good time, once the rivers have settled into their altered courses and the region has had a chance to recover from this meteorological disaster, paddlers will once again enjoy carefree days on these playful streams.

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Mountain devastation makes my troubles seem small

I decided to go back to the doctor on Wednesday because of both the injury to my chest area and my continued coughing and chest congestion.  My regular doctor is out of the office on leave right now, so I've been seeing other doctors in the practice.  The one I saw Wednesday was upbeat about my coughing situation, saying he thought it should run its course in a few more days.  He ordered a chest X-ray to determine whether something's broken in my ribcage/sternum area.  My doctor's office has its own X-ray lab, so getting an X-ray is usually a quick and simple process there.  Unfortunately, the office's in-house X-ray technician had left for the day (even though it wasn't even noon yet), so the doctor had to send me up the street to the minor emergency diagnostic center that's owned by the same corporation that owns his practice.  When I got there I found myself in line behind a couple of people, so I ended up sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour.  Finally they got me in and out of the lab, and so all that was left was for them to send the image back to the doctor I had seen, and for him to call me to discuss the results.

Thursday came and went with no call from the doctor.  So Friday morning I called his office, and when I got their voice mail I left a message asking them to remind him that he owed me a call.  By mid afternoon Friday I hadn't heard a word, so I called again and got a person on the phone this time.  The person told me that because it was after 3 PM, the doctor would most likely not call me until Monday.

And so I'm pretty angry with my doctor's office right now.  The nicest thing I can say about this doctor is that he's not the first I've met for whom customer service is not a high priority.  The upshot is that I'm refraining from paddling this weekend because I still don't know if something is broken in my chest area.  It's frustrating, but maybe it's not the worst thing for me at this moment.  Seeing as how I'm still not entirely recovered from that illness I had, maybe I just need to chill out for a few more days and give my body a chance to get right again.

My friend Amelia, with whom I paddled up at the Gauley last month, paid me a visit Thursday because she was in this area as part of a job.  The main reason I bring this up is that she lives in east Tennessee and works for one of the rafting companies on the Pigeon River, one of the rivers that flooded catastrophically a week ago, and she shared some first-hand information on what's happening over there.  Her raft company is located on the bank of the Pigeon in the town of Hartford, pretty much all of which was badly flooded.  Flood-driven debris knocked a hole in a wall of her company's building, and a lot of the gear was washed away.  The whole place was filled with mud, and the building was destabilized and will need structural repair.  The good news, said Amelia, is that the entire community--neighbors, church groups, raft guides, everybody--came out and started helping one another as soon as the floodwaters had receded.  She said it took just a few hours to get all the mud scraped out of the building, and the company even recovered some of its rafts from a little ways downstream.

Hartford is just one of the towns that experienced major flooding.  A few towns were all but washed off the map.  If I'm interpreting what I've seen in photos correctly, the entire business district of Chimney Rock collapsed into the Rocky Broad River, and many buildings in the town of Marshall were completely destroyed by the flooding French Broad.  The common thread in every town that got flooded appears to be mud: a thick layer of mud contaminated with a whole cocktail of pollutants including petroleum products and raw sewage.  Every street must be scraped of that stuff to be passable for cars like my little Toyota Corolla.

Water and electricity are out all over the region, and it's going to take a long time to get them up and running again because the roads must be rebuilt/repaired before the utility trucks can get in to replace damaged lines.

So it's a mess over there.  I'm grateful for all the organizations, from FEMA to local governments to nonprofits to individuals with skills and equipment, who are over there helping with the cleanup.  If you can't offer help in person, I hope you'll consider donating some money as long as you're smart about it.  So far I've donated to several people or entities who are known to me first- or second-hand.

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Catastrophe in the mountains to the east, and not much paddling here at home

Times are tough for a part of the world that's near and dear to me.  The mountains of western North Carolina are where I fell in love with paddlesports at summer camp some 43 years ago, and were also home to a crafts school (no longer in operation since the retirement of its director) that was the foundation of my development as a woodworker.  That region was positively walloped late last week by Hurricane Helene, which had already perpetrated significant damage as it moved north through Florida and Georgia.

Central characters in the story were rivers I have spent untold hours paddling and exploring: the French Broad, the Green, the Pigeon, the Tuckasegee, the Chattooga, and the Nolichucky, along with various tributary creeks.  Floodwaters did horrific damage to familiar towns like Asheville, Marshall, Hot Springs, Erwin, Chimney Rock, Bryson City, Hartford, Boone, and Greeneville.

The storm exposed just how tenuous the access to many of those communities can be.  If a street is closed here in my grid-patterned city, all you have to do is go around the block to get to a house on that street.  That's not how it works in the narrow valleys and hollers of the Appalachians, where there's typically just one road in.  In some cases bridges or culverts were washed out, leaving entire communities utterly isolated.  Right now even the big city of Asheville is all but impossible to drive to because all of the major interstates and U.S. highways suffered damage.  I learned just this morning that a friend of mine managed to drive from Asheville to her home near Gatlinburg via a convoluted network of state roads in Madison County (NC) and Greene County (TN), probably taking hours longer than normal.

I expect my camp will have limited choices on where it can take canoe trips next summer.  As of now I know that at least two of its bread-and-butter rivers, the Green and the Pigeon, have suffered major damage to their access roads that will probably take many months to repair.  I'm just glad this catastrophe took place early in the camp's offseason; if it had happened in, say, April or May, the camp might have had to cancel its summer sessions because the region's infrastructure, on which it relies for everything from transporting campers to bringing in food and other goods and services, was in ruins.

If there's a bright side to this whole episode, it's that it might have saved the lower Mississippi River from dropping to record-low levels for a third year in a row.  Just a week ago the river was more than ten feet below zero on the Memphis gauge; the record low of -12.04 feet was set just a year ago.  Since then the water has come up to three and a half feet above zero, and is predicted to keep rising to a little over six feet by late this week.  That's not really a high level at all, but it's high enough that the commercial shipping companies can operate comfortably, and that's the main reason those record-low levels have made the national news for the last couple of years.

And yes, much of that water is coming from western North Carolina.  The French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers all flow into east Tennessee and eventually form the Tennessee River.  The Tuckasegee, meanwhile, is a tributary of the Little Tennessee, which also flows across the state line and feeds into the Tennessee.  The Tennessee, of course, flows past Knoxville and Chattanooga, dips down into northern Alabama and Mississippi, re-enters Tennessee and flows northward into Kentucky, and finally confluences with the Ohio, which joins the Mississippi a short while later at Cairo, Illinois.  So my river right here at Memphis includes water from some of those rivers I grew to love as a camper in North Carolina.

Speaking of that river here at Memphis... this morning I went down to the riverfront to paddle my surfski for the first time in almost a month.  If you've been following this blog lately, then you know that during that month I made a trip to the Gauley River, then came home and got sick for a while, then did my annual demonstration at the crafts fair here.  I definitely wasn't planning a serious training session today: as much as anything, I just wanted to check on my boat and make sure all was well down at the dock.  The truth is that my physical health is not entirely back to normal.  I don't really feel sick anymore, but I've got a lot of chest congestion and I'm having some fairly frequent coughing fits.  And there's still some swelling in that injured area of my chest (courtesy of my tablesaw).

Once I was in the boat this morning, I started out gingerly, and the session ended up being even briefer than I'd planned.  There was discomfort and stuff moving around in my chest--whether there are actual broken bones in there, or just soft tissue moving weirdly, I'm not sure.  I might have to make another trip to my doctor, especially if this coughing still hasn't run its course in another day or two.  I expect she'll want to take an X-ray, both to look for broken ribs/sternum and to gain some insight into what the deal is with all this coughing.

So I was in the boat for just 20 minutes today.  I ended up doing a litter pick-up, by way of keeping the paddling intensity low.  And there was plenty of litter out there in the harbor, both because of the rising water level and because Hurricane Helene sent a good bit of rain to this region, too.  There was much more trash than I could ever fit into my surfski's footwell, so I focused on aluminum cans, which seem to be the most viably recyclable items these days.  I collected a bucketful, and that didn't make even the slightest noticeable dent in the floating trash, but at least I can say I'm a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.

Whether I get back in the boat anytime soon remains to be seen.  If in fact something is broken, I'll have to take some more weeks off to let it heal.  I hope to do some bike riding and other general-fitness activity to tide myself over in the meantime.

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Monday photo feature

In this photo I'm using an axe to shape a chair part during the class I took at the Maine Coast Craft School near Bristol, Maine, in 2023.

I'll be doing more of this kind of work this week here in Memphis.  The Pink Palace Crafts Fair is scheduled to take place this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and I'll be doing a chairmaking demonstration.

I continue to have some pain in my chest area from Friday's tablesaw mishap.  And I still don't feel completely over that illness I had.  I'm feeling weak and lightheaded and not very energetic.  Whatever that illness was, it's really knocked me flat for a long while.  All I can do right now is keep trying to rest and hope I'll be ready to go by Friday.

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From one ailment to the next

My illness continued well into this past week.  By Sunday evening I was developing a bad cough, and by Tuesday I knew it was time to see a doctor about it.  The doctor who examined me thought I probably had a respiratory infection, and he prescribed a short course of antibiotics.

After a couple of days of medication I was feeling somewhat less sick, but still very weak and low on energy.  On Friday morning I knew I wasn't ready for any hard physical exertion, but with my annual crafts fair coming up a week later, I decided I could at least go down into the shop and start gathering some tools together for the chairmaking demonstration I'll be doing.

The presentation I was planning included some small signs, and to make these signs I set up my tablesaw to cuts some small rectangles from some plywood scraps I had lying around.  A tablesaw is a machine that presents some dangers, and I do not take them lightly.  I think for the most part I have developed sound safety habits in terms of how and where I stand, keeping my center of gravity over my feet, and using accessory sticks to push the workpiece through the blade while keeping my hands and fingers out of danger.

But mistakes happen in the blink of an eye.  I think in this case I got a little distracted at the wrong instant.  I took the pressure off the push-stick before one of the plywood rectangles was entirely clear of the spinning blade, and the blade snagged it and sent it hurtling through the air like a frisbee, right into my chest.  It knocked the wind out of me and left a mark on my right pectoral muscle:

There may well be a cracked rib or two in there.  At the very least, I've got a deep bruise.  And the worst thing about it is that it's now very painful to cough, and I'm still coughing a lot.

If I do in fact have a fracture, then I'm done paddling for a good while.  I'll have a better idea in a week or so what the situation is.  But I didn't have much paddling planned for this week anyway because of the crafts fair.  I just hope my injury won't interfere too badly with my crafts fair duties.

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Monday photo feature

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the Gauley River in West Virginia is an annual destination for paddlers.  That's because every September the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers releases water into the Gauley to draw down the level of Summersville Reservoir.  Paddlers travel from all over to partake in the whitewater fun.

Not surprisingly, it's big business for the local tourism and hospitality industry, and especially raft companies.  And photographers have found their niche, too.  A company called West Virginia Sports Photography places people with cameras at notable rapids along the river to shoot everybody who comes by, hoping that some of those people will want to purchase mementos of their heroic moments.

They found a customer in me!  I shelled out some money for three of their photos.  That photo in last Thursday's post of me running Pillow Rock Rapid is one of them.  And the one above is another.  That's me running Koontz Flume on the lower Gauley back on Friday, September 6.  I was doing a lot of deep braces that day, trying my darnedest to keep the boat upright.

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🤢

I mentioned at the end of my last post that I was taking a few days off, and probably wouldn't paddle again until this weekend.  Well, my body has announced that it needs even more recovery than that.  I've come down with something--I felt it starting to come on Friday evening.  I don't really know what it is; so far there haven't been any cold or flu symptoms, just chills, body aches, and probably a mild fever.  My bladder has been very active, too: each of the last two nights I had to get up and use the bathroom four or five times.  And since last night I've been having trouble keeping food down.  All I felt like having for supper was some soup from a can, and I vomited some of that back up.  This morning I had some cereal and fruit for breakfast, and for a while I was unsure if I could keep that down, but ultimately I did.

I really don't get sick very often, and believe me, I'm grateful for that.  I certainly get plenty of exercise, I get a good sleep almost every night, and I think I do a reasonably good job of eating right.  It also doesn't hurt that I live and work alone, not breathing in other people's germs all the time.

I think this is just my body telling me to slow down.  I spent two of the last three weekends in the Appalachian Mountains re-starting my whitewater paddling career, and I've also had a lot going on in my non-athletic life.  I've had some things to deal with over at my rental property, I've had a lawyer helping me do some estate planning, I've got a woodworking project whose deadline is no time soon but I've been trying to knock it out anyway, and my annual crafts fair is coming up two weeks from now.  So I've had that feeling of being constantly on the go.

It's not the worst time to just hole up inside for a few days, as the weather has continued to be pretty gloomy.  By Friday morning the strong winds had abated, but it still rained for quite a bit of the day.  Rain has continued off and on yesterday and today, and we've seen no sunshine at all.  It sort of feels like what we sometimes have in December here in Memphis--not all that cold, really, but just wet and depressing.  It's sure not making these chills I'm having feel any better.

Anyway, I'm just trying to get a lot of rest and drink a lot of fluids, and I hope this will run its course soon.

EDITED TO ADD: I do not have covid.  I didn't think I did because I was able to taste my food without any trouble, but my mom thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to test for it, and she brought me a test kit this afternoon.  The test came back negative.  So that continues to be something I've avoided since the world was beset by a pandemic four years ago.

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Gaw-lee! I'd forgotten how big that water is

For those who haven't been paying close attention: I grew up paddling whitewater, but did very little of it in the last eight years or so while focusing more on flatwater racing and ocean-style surfski paddling.  In other words, while I haven't just been lying around in the last few years, I have been allowing those skills I'd always used to navigate whitewater to atrophy.  Now, with a trip through the Grand Canyon scheduled for a year from now, I'm venturing back onto some swift-flowing mountain streams.

Last week my quest to grind my whitewater-paddling gears back into motion led me to the state of West Virginia and the Gauley River.  This river was pioneered by adventurous paddlers in the 1960s and 70s, and back then it was considered the outer limit of navigability.  But with the improvement of paddling techniques and equipment, it's become an annual destination for capable paddlers all over the country and even the world.  Water is released into the river from Summersville Reservoir every Friday through Monday in the month of September.

It was my first visit to this river since 2014.  By Thursday evening I was camping with my friend Amelia, a paddler and raft guide who lives in Sevier County in east Tennessee, at the Summersville Dam campground.  Our plan was to meet Amelia's friends Nate and Dave Friday morning to run the Gauley's lower section from Woods Ferry to Swiss.

The lower Gauley is quite a bit tamer than the upper section, and I was happy to be easing into my weekend of paddling.  I mentioned here that I was feeling rusty when I ran the Nantahala and Ocoee Rivers a couple of weeks ago, and that rust was still present as we paddled down the lower Gauley on Friday.  I'd forgotten just how edgy my Atom C1 is, and I was flipping often and constantly having one edge or the other grabbed by swirly cross currents.  But in all I managed to enjoy myself: I think it was only the second time I'd run the lower Gauley, the first time being way back in 1994, and I'd forgotten what a pretty place it is.  It was a lovely sunny day, too, with an afternoon temperature in the mid 80s Fahrenheit.

That evening two more friends of Amelia's, Anna and Brent, joined us at our campsite.  I'd paddled with Anna on the Pigeon River in July of 2023.  While I'd never met Brent before, he would turn out to be an excellent paddling companion: this visit to the Gauley marked his 35th consecutive year of paddling there, so he was intimately familiar with the river, and even more important was that he was a wellspring of positive energy and an utterly pleasant guy to be around.  As the weekend went on I found that there was no more popular person on the river: every couple of minutes, it seemed, somebody was paddling by us shouting "Brent!  How you doin'?"

The size of the whitewater on the lower Gauley had been a step up from the Ocoee, and I knew that the water on the upper Gauley would be a step higher than that.  So I definitely had some jangling nerves as I got ready to put on the upper section on Saturday.  We'd had some light rain overnight and the temperature was almost 20 degrees cooler than it had been Friday, and that added to the tension.  The first couple of miles of river offered similar stuff to what I'd paddled on Friday, and that gave me a nice warmup.  Then came the first significant rapid, called, ironically enough, Insignificant.  Since Anna had never been to the Gauley before, Brent was leading her through the cleanest, most reliable lines, and I followed along after them.  I had no trouble with Insignificant, but since I hadn't run any whitewater that big since my last trip to the Gauley ten years ago, it got my attention.

We paddled through a few of the lesser rapids (many of which are as big as anything on the lower Gauley), and arrived at Pillow Rock Rapid, one of the truly memorable whitewater landmarks in this country.  The riverbed constricts down to maybe a third of its normal width, and the entire flow slams into an enormous rock that juts out from the river-left bank.  The water comes back on itself to form the eponymous "pillow," and flows off to the right onto a boulder known as "Volkswagen Rock" because it's shaped like one of those classic Beetle cars.  The good news about Pillow Rock Rapid is that it's pretty forgiving: it doesn't have the sort of nasty undercut rocks or boulder sieves that are common elsewhere on the Gauley, and if you come out of your boat, you're most likely to wash into the calmer water below Volkswagen Rock.  Still, Pillow Rock is one of the more impressive pieces of whitewater that people willingly paddle into, and I don't think it's possible to sit in your boat at the top of it without feeling at least a little bit nervous.

I was in fact very nervous as I watched Brent and Anna paddle their entrance route into the rapid.  But they were wasting no time, so I didn't have to stew over it for long.  I followed Brent's line, and once I was past the monster hole on the river-right bank, I felt like I'd cleared the most formidable hurdle.  I started to work my way right so I would miss the pillow, but I was swept into it anyway, and flipped.

It was not the first time I'd flipped in this rapid, and past experience had taught me to hang out upside down for a bit until my boat gets washed down below Volkswagen Rock where a roll will be easier.  This time, however, I'd managed to inhale a mouthful of water while going over, and I couldn't hold out underwater for long.  My paddle blade had been sucked deep, and I struggled to move it into position for a roll.  Once I'd done so I was thinking (hoping) that I was in smooth enough water, but right as I attempted to roll I got slammed into the froth on the left side of VW.  By this time I didn't think I could wait any longer, and I popped my skirt and swam out.  Amelia was nearby and she helped me swim my boat into an eddy on the left bank.  I'd thrown my paddle toward that bank, and another guy kindly grabbed it and delivered it to me.

No paddler wants to swim, but it happens to pretty much everybody sooner or later.  Regaining your composure after a swim is always a challenge.  For starters, there's the physical impact: even if you don't get banged up (and I did not, fortunately), being submerged in cold water for at least a couple of minutes lowers your core temperature into the shivering zone.  And unless you have the unflappability of a world-class athlete, some self-doubt will start to creep in as you face the whitewater that's still to come.

That's the state I was in as I dumped the water from my boat, gathered up my gear, and tried to get warm as our group took a break on a rock in the middle of the river.  I was suddenly dreading the rest of the day, and that was totally an overreaction, I know, as my swim was nowhere near the worst I'd ever experienced.  But my confidence was already fragile.

Of course, I had no choice but to get back in the boat and continue.  I paddled along timidly and was getting flipped by the silliest little wave-holes.  Soon enough the Meadow River came in from the left, signaling the next major rapid, Lost Paddle.  I took out on a sandy beach at the mouth of the Meadow to drain some water from my boat and get myself focused for the long, constricted rapid that features three or four drops of big, fast water.

I ran the first couple of drops without incident.  But sitting in an eddy about halfway through, I sensed that there was a lot of water in my boat, and that made no sense because I'd just dumped it out.  It had to be my imagination, I thought, unless... could I have broken my boat somewhere?  That didn't make sense, either.

My companions were moving swiftly through the rapid, so I put those thoughts aside and kept going.  But in the final set of waves and holes, I had no control over my boat.  I got spun backward, and my corrective strokes were ineffective because the boat was basically a submarine.  The only thought in my head at that moment was "What in the Wide World of Sports is going on here!?" or some variation of that.

I managed to stay upright as I washed through the final meters of Lost Paddle and into the pool below.  But I was completely demoralized by my inability to control my craft.  "What on Earth is wrong with me?" I wondered.  "Do I even still belong out here?"

I knew I had to get out of the boat and dump it, and as I paddled toward the bank, I got a peek back at my stern.  Only then did I discover the actual problem: when I'd drained out water up at the mouth of the Meadow, I'd forgotten to put my boat's drain plug back in.

It's about the dumbest mistake a person can make, but at that moment I was relieved simply to have an explanation for all my struggles in Lost Paddle.  Suddenly, I felt a renewal of confidence with just two big rapids left to go.

The first of these was Iron Ring, and I had about the cleanest, driest line through that rapid I'd ever had.  Brent and Anna were at the bottom watching me come down, and they were very complimentary of how I looked in the big drop.  A little while later we reached Sweet's Falls, and I had a similarly good run there.  We paddled a mile or so farther to the takeout at Mason's Branch, and I felt I'd achieved a positive ending to a sort-of-tough return to the upper Gauley.  Lest you think I was all gloom and doom on Saturday, here’s a photo in which I managed a smile:

From left to right, that's Anna, Brent, yours truly, and Amelia.

Still, I hadn't completely moved past the day's difficulties.  Besides my swim, I had flipped many times and struggled a bit in the big-water conditions, and I spent Saturday evening wondering if I would have better control when we ran the upper Gauley again on Sunday.

There was also the philosophical question of just how badly I want to revisit the whitewater experiences of my past.  Even when I was running stuff that's quite a bit steeper and more challenging than the upper Gauley, the sport was never really about adrenaline for me.  Most of my satisfaction came from a sense of accomplishment of attaining the skill level that was necessary to run a given river or a given rapid.  In the last decade or so I've been finding that sense of accomplishment on open water, riding downwind swells and stuff like that.  It's every bit as challenging as navigating big rapids, but I'm not getting slammed into rocks.

Now here I was back at the Gauley, and I was wondering if, at age 57, I still had it in me to run this caliber of whitewater.  I'd already decided I don't need to go and do steep creeks and Class V water anymore, but was the Gauley now beyond my reach too?

Sunday morning I shared my misgivings with Brent.  He reminded me that everybody swims once in a while, and he said "Man, the whole rest of the run you looked solid!  I wasn't worried about you at all.  And then you went and styled Iron Ring!  You're fine, man... just go out and enjoy yourself."

It was what I needed to hear.  Once I was in my boat just a while later, I felt quite a bit more sure of myself.  I wasn't flipping a lot like I'd done the previous two days.  I was still following Brent's lines through early rapids like Insignificant, but I was paddling more aggressively and reading the whitewater more confidently on my own.

Of course, I wouldn't truly feel better until I'd redeemed myself at Pillow Rock.  I entered the rapid in the same spot Brent did, just to make sure I was on the right line to miss the nasty river-right hole, and once I was past that I took a couple of strong strokes to propel myself to the right, away from the worst of the pillow.  I hit the bottom-most bit of the pillow, but I was able to surf it to continue my rightward momentum all the way to the right side of Volkswagen Rock.  A photographer from West Virginia Sports Photography got several shots of my descent, including this one:

I'm thoroughly buried in white froth, but I'm still upright!

With a certain monkey off my back, I was able to savor the rest of the river for real.  I remembered to keep my drain plug in and had a delightful run of Lost Paddle.  I think this rapid might be the most beautiful spot on the river: the riverbed constricts between two steep slopes, and boulders are strewn everywhere, and the whitewater is big and interesting and pretty.  Lost Paddle is not too gnarly, but it's challenging enough to get your attention as you avoid several deadly undercut spots.

I got to the bottom of Lost Paddle with a smile on my face.  I tried to repeat my perfect run of Iron Ring, and though I didn't succeed entirely, my run was plenty good enough.  I flipped at the bottom of Sweet's Falls, but I hit my roll, so hey... it was a serviceable effort.  I got to the takeout feeling happy about my run--not just because I didn't swim and didn't flip much and stuff like that, but because I felt like I was starting to hit my stride, to rediscover a comfort zone on this classic river.

I should note that on Sunday I had the pleasure of paddling with a couple of the people who will be part of my Grand Canyon trip next year: Jessica ("Sparkles") and Brian.  Amelia went out and recruited them for me.

The obvious next step would have been for me to get one more run in on Monday to solidify my feelings of confidence.  Alas, I was planning to visit a cousin in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Monday evening, and I really wanted to get a good visit with him and his family.  I wouldn't be able to do that if I arrived late in the evening.  Everybody I knew with whom I was comfortable paddling was planning a late-morning putin, too late for me to paddle the river and get to Oak Ridge at a reasonable hour.  So I skipped paddling on Monday and hit the road.

I enjoyed seeing my relatives Monday evening, and I got back to Memphis in the late afternoon on Tuesday.  Since then I've just been recovering physically.  Three long days of whitewater definitely left me with some aches and pains.  The weather here at home has turned foul, too: the remnants of Hurricane Francine have been hammering us all day today.  In the last couple of years we've had several bouts of hurricane remnants passing through here, and this storm is by far the worst of them.  I'm definitely not eager to be in a boat on the Mississippi River in this weather.  Maybe by the weekend I'll venture down there.

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I'm off to the mountains again

Yesterday afternoon I went downtown and did a short paddle in the surfski.  Then I carried the whitewater boat up the ramp and put it on my car.  At least one river awaits in the mountains of West Virginia.

Today I plan to leave home in the mid afternoon and spend tonight in Nashville.  From there I'll set my course for the putin of the Gauley River near Summersville, West Virginia, tomorrow.

If you're a regular reader, (a) I'm grateful, and (b) I wouldn't expect any new blogging here until the middle of next week.  I kind of liked being entirely offline when I went to North Carolina two weekends ago, and I'm looking forward to doing that again.  With any luck, I'll see you on the other side.

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Monday photo feature

One of the things I did when I visited camp the weekend before last was go by the site of the photo I posted here two weeks ago.

Back when that first photo was taken, around 1989 or '90, this dock was the home base for the canoeing program.  That's not the case anymore, since a new area for the activity has been established off to the left of this photo.

The house in the right-hand portion of the photo has been added onto a bit in the last 35 years, and the infirmary is no longer located there.  I think one branch of the family of owners currently lives there.

The biggest difference is a greater abundance of flora.  You can't see the dining hall up on the hill anymore because several pine trees have grown tall to block the view.  Also not visible from here anymore is the barn: that cluster of trees on the bank in the left half of the photo had just been planted when the first photo was taken.

Also new in this photo are those silly inflatable lake toys that I used to sneer at other camps for having.  Now my camp has them too.  Oy.

At least the central face of the two photos hasn't changed.  The guy in this new photo is the same guy as that guy wearing the green shirt and red shorts in the old photo, and he hasn't changed one bit.

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Sort of a ho-hum weekend

This weekend we've had some thundershowers in the area that have kept the temperature down a bit, but not the humidity.  It was as muggy as could be when I got to the river yesterday morning.

The Mississippi River is dropping to its low levels of late summer.  It was at 5.7 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge yesterday.  I have a feeling that by mid October the lower Mississippi will be making the national news for its low water for the third year in a row.

My sluggish feelings have continued this weekend, and yesterday I was hoping to find some surfing opportunities out on the river to help me snap out of them.  The reason I think such activity would help is something I've heard Dawid Mocke talk about during my two trips to South Africa.  Riding big swells on a downwind run, says Dawid, prompts the body to produce both endorphins and adrenaline.  The endorphins are produced because of all the hard sprinting one must do to catch runs, while adrenaline production is the body's instinctive reaction when the brain perceives a physical threat to one's person (i.e., a spectacular wipeout).

So that's what I was hoping for yesterday.  But when I reached the mouth of the harbor, I found the river utterly devoid of barge traffic that would produce some fun surfing waves.  So I just paddled a big loop, going down to the old bridges downstream of downtown and back up along the Arkansas bank before ferrying back over to the harbor entrance.  I pushed the pace hard on this ferry, and while it was good to burn some energy, it had the opposite effect of endorphins an adrenaline.  I got back to the dock feeling worn down, and continued feeling that way the rest of the day.

This morning I wandered out into another muggy, overcast day.  The river had dropped to -6.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  I got back in the surfski and paddled to the harbor's mouth once again, and this time I did find a barge rig out on the river, but it was a small one--just a couple of barges wide and a couple of barges deep.  So it wasn't churning up big waves.  I ferried out and did what tiny bit of surfing I could, and returned to the harbor and paddled back to the dock.  I got in the whitewater boat and did some drills, but no rolls, because the recent thunderstorms in this area had made the water look nasty.  I'd just heard on the radio about the postponement of the Paralympic triathlon at Paris because thunderstorms had elevated the bacteria levels in the Seine River, so I decided there was no reason to try my luck here on the Memphis riverfront.

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Traveling to the mountains where the water runs white

I'm back home from my short trip to east Tennessee and western North Carolina.  Last weekend I attended the centennial celebration at the camp I went to as a kid.  It was the first time I'd been by there in some five or six years, and it was fun to be back for a short while.  I enjoyed seeing old friends and acquaintances, and just as important is that none of the people I didn't like (i.e., bullies) showed up.

For the first time in nearly 40 years, I shot targets at both the archery range and the rifle range--those were among my favorite activities way back when.  My targets weren't very good: it was a reminder of how truly athletic these pursuits are.  While different from, say, gymnastics or basketball, shooting sports require a similar degree of calm control.

I also spent some time on the lake paddling my whitewater boat, doing the same kind of drills I'd been doing in the harbor here at home.  Then, once the festivities concluded Sunday morning, it was time to go run a whitewater river.  A couple of hours west of the camp property is the Nantahala River, a clear dam-controlled stream that played a big role in my paddling education in the 1980s.  It was an advanced run for campers because of its cold water that flowed more swiftly than the entry-level streams we ran, and back then I couldn't imagine a more formidable gauntlet of whitewater rapids.  Of course there are many rivers that are much more difficult than the Class II-III Nantahala, and in due course I moved on to some of them.  Now, for me, the Nantahala is just a pleasant, relaxing place to work on some skills.  And that's what I did Sunday afternoon.

One not-so-pleasant part of Sunday was navigating the chaos around the Nantahala Outdoor Center.  When I took my first canoe trips to the Nantahala in the early 1980s, the N.O.C. was still in its salad days. Pretty much everybody who worked there, from the raft guides and canoe & kayak instructors to the person ringing the cash register in the store, was a paddler.  A number of the employees were slalom racers earning some money while they pursued their dreams of making the U.S. whitewater team.  The store carried a little bit of non-paddling-related stuff; the Appalachian Trail passes right through the area, so it always made sense to have some hiking and camping gear, for instance.  But the main focus of the place was excellence in paddling, and those early visits to the N.O.C. were a big part of my catching the paddling bug.  Sadly, the place now more closely resembles the maw of a tourist vortex, especially on summer weekend days.  The traffic congestion is horrendous at times and finding a place to park is no small feat.  The crowds of people milling about the N.O.C. campus are much more interested in buying a tee shirt in the store or having a drink at the outdoor bar than giving the slightest thought to running a whitewater rapid skillfully and gracefully.  The company now offers many activities that have nothing to do with paddling.  I think they host a lot of corporate-team-building events with their ropes courses and zip lines and stuff.  Once upon a time the cashier in the store would have been a seasoned river rat or even a world-ranked racer, but nowadays that person is more likely to be just some college kid working a summer job, and if you ask about his or her paddling experience, you'll probably get an answer like "Well, I haven't been kayaking yet, but I'm hoping I'll get to go before the end of the summer."

Look, I get it that it's a business, and it has to evolve and grow and compete for a slice of that ever-fickle consumer market.  I'm just looking back wistfully on simpler times, that's all.  The N.O.C. property is the takeout for paddlers on the Nantahala, and by the end of the day, after I'd sat in the traffic on the two-lane highway and searched for a place to park my car and weaved through the throngs of tourists and all, I was more than ready to move on.

Move on I did.  I continued west, back into Tennessee, and made camp at a Forest Service campground on the bank of the Ocoee River.  I got up Monday morning and put my boat on the Ocoee for the first time in maybe a decade.  The Ocoee is a step up from the Nantahala: more of a Class III-IV run.  It's kind of the summertime staple for whitewater paddlers in the Southeast because of its reliable dam-released flows.  And it was here on Monday that I realized just how rusty my whitewater skills are.  If you're familiar with the Ocoee, then you know all the fun little moves you can do: the elevator move above Broken Nose; the ferry-into-an-ender move at Slice & Dice; flat spins at Moon Chute; the various eddies at Tablesaw.  Once upon a time I had those moves dialed, but on Monday I couldn't do any of that stuff.  Whitewater play is pretty much a matter of leaning the right way and taking the right stroke at the right instant, and right now my timing and my confidence in my balance are gone.  So I had some frustrating moments while running the Ocoee.

What else should I have expected?  To be good on whitewater you have to do whitewater, and I'd barely paddled whitewater at all in the last eight years.  Even if I were twenty years younger I couldn't reasonably expect to pick right up where I'd left off after so much time away.  Here in late middle age I might have to lower my expectations to simply being competent on the river.  And that's the problem: I don't want to be just competent.  I wanna be stylin' it out there!

In about a week I'm planning to join a friend on the Gauley River up in West Virginia, and the Gauley is quite a bit more challenging than the Ocoee.  At the very least I need to get down it in one piece, and I'm not too worried about that, seeing as how I've watched a lot of people far less skilled than I presently am run that river.  I just hope I can re-adjust to a serious whitewater environment and recover at least a little bit of my old mojo.  That's the minimum of what I hope to accomplish as I work to get ready for two weeks in the Grand Canyon a year from now.

When I finished my Ocoee run I loaded up the car and headed back home.  The weather had been delightful over there in the southern Appalachians: sunny, a high temperature not much above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, overnight lows in the 50s.  I was sorry to leave that behind.  By the time I was in middle Tennessee the dashboard temperature display in my car had risen into three digits.  The temperature here in Memphis has been around 100 degrees for the last couple of days.  I've spent that time just recovering.  I've been sore in my shoulders, lats, traps, lower back, quads... all over.  All those flatwater drills I'd done in my whitewater boat were fairly intense, but there's just no way to prepare for all the stresses of whitewater without paddling some whitewater.

I woke up this morning feeling not so sore anymore, but still tired and sluggish.  I got myself down to the river to see what I could do.  I paddled the surfski to the mouth of the harbor hoping to find some wake-surfing opportunities out on the Mississippi, but there was no barge traffic in sight.  So I headed back to the dock.  Another sizzling hot day was taking shape, and while a south breeze kept me cool when I headed south, coming back north toward the dock I was as hot as could be.  I practiced a couple of remounts by way of cooling off.

Back at the dock I hopped in the whitewater boat.  I'd just received a brand-new sprayskirt I'd ordered from the River Elf company of Florence, Alabama, and I set about the process of breaking it in before my Gauley trip.  My old skirt had been leaking like a sieve, and I could tell already how much drier my boat was as I did a number of rolls.  One of the things my recent river runs reminded me of is how rarefied a flatwater environment is: making the boat glide and spin is so much easier when you don't have all the various opposing currents that rivers like the Nantahala and Ocoee and Gauley have.

Getting good and wet in the whitewater boat, and then taking a hose bath on the dock, felt good on a very hot summer day.  I hope for cooler weather in West Virginia next week.

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Leaving town a bit later than planned

My travel plans have changed.  My uncle died sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning, and the funeral is tomorrow afternoon up near Jackson, Tennessee.  So now my plan is to attend the funeral and then drive the seven hours or so from there to camp.

I'll miss supper and the Friday evening festivities at camp, but at least I'll be there for the heart of the weekend.  The main thing I'm giving up is a couple of days of whitewater paddling, and I'm disappointed about that, but there will be other days to paddle.

On Tuesday I went down to the riverfront and did some pushups and situps on the dock before paddling for 60 minutes.  I got to the mouth of the harbor to find a big barge rig out on the Mississippi, but it was heading upstream beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, too far away for me to chase down in a 60-70 minute paddling session.  But I did find some decent residual waves within my reach.  There were some small linkable runs, and I got a nice little workout working them.

By yesterday morning it was clear I would not yet be hitting the road, so I got on the bike and rode out to Shelby Farms and back.  I'd ridden pretty hard the previous couple of weeks, but yesterday I mostly stayed at a relaxed cruising pace.

This morning I went back downtown and again did some pushups and situps before getting in the boat.  There was no barge traffic in sight out on the river, so I just paddled around for an hour.

I'm still feeling stuck in the doldrums these days.  It's funny how the mood of an athlete constantly ebbs and flows.  On a typical hot summer day several weeks ago I would do a gym session at home and then down at the river I would do some hard surfing or some whitewater drills or both, and then take a hose bath, and leave the dock feeling tired, but at the same time... exhilarated.  But in the last ten days I've been leaving the dock feeling just plain beat down.  Like I said before, I hope this trip to the mountains of east Tennessee and western North Carolina will be just the thing to help me snap out of it.  I'll still get in some easy whitewater paddling on my way back west--probably on the Nantahala and Ocoee Rivers

A heads up for readers: the next post here might not go up until the middle of next week.  I'm not counting on having wifi access in most of the places I plan to go on this trip.  And if a break from the normal grind at home is going to do me good, then maybe a break from blogging will, too.

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Monday photo feature

Mike Davis shot this photo on the canoe dock at Camp Carolina for Boys just outside Brevard, North Carolina, around 1990.  I attended this camp from age ten in 1978 to age 24 in 1992.

This lake, along with some of the rivers in the surrounding region, was where it all started for me.  Each day I would spend some time in boats on the water, and take my meals in the dining hall up on that hill above my head.  If I got sick or needed first aid, I would visit the infirmary in the house on the right.  In the O.D. House, that little shed you can see above and to the right of my head, there was a pay telephone that people could use in the rare event that communication with the outside world was necessary.  The barn to the left was a lodge for small gatherings.

There were, of course, many other camp activities, but canoeing was my favorite, and those other activities took place outside the scope of this photo.

In the late 1980s I served as the head of the canoeing program, and this little dock was my fiefdom.  I was determined to convince campers to become paddlers just like I had done.  Not every one of them complied, but it was an important exercise in my own paddling education to explain to others what I had learned in previous summers.

The camp has been in operation since 1924.  Do the arithmetic!  It's time for a centennial celebration.  And that's just what will be happening this coming weekend: I'll be attending an event at the camp along with other camp alumni.  I don't know who will show up, or how many people, but I hope it will be well-attended by folks who value their camp experience as much as I do.

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Post-Olympic letdown

Since the Olympics ended a week ago I hardly know what to write about here.

Basically it was another week of the same stuff I've been doing all summer.  I did gym sessions on Tuesday an Friday; I did a bike ride Friday; and I paddled my surfski and/or my whitewater boat Tuesday, Thursday, yesterday, and today.

It's gotten hot again after that nice break we had last weekend.  And I've also felt really tired all week.  Maybe those two phenomena are related, and maybe they're not.  Either way, it's had a negative impact on my motivation.  I'd planned to do another gym session before going to the river this morning, but I just couldn't find the gumption.  Down at the river all I did today was paddle the whitewater boat for 40 minutes, and I went much lighter than usual on the drills, instead just paddling around semi-aimlessly.  I did do lots of rolls.

In several days I'll be heading east.  I'll be visiting my old summer camp at Brevard, North Carolina, and I also plan to paddle some whitewater in western North Carolina and east Tennessee.  I hope this change of scenery will have a re-energizing effect.

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Monday photo feature

Yuliya Trushkina, a member of the Individual Neutral Athletes delegation at the Paris Olympics, awaits the start of the women's 200-meter C1 "Final A" on Saturday.

That canoe she's in has all the stability of a floating telephone pole.  Some 20 years ago I got the chance to paddle a boat like that.  Even though I had paddled whitewater canoes for many years, and was also able to handle a fairly tippy surfski, I was unable to paddle that boat more than six or eight strokes before I went for a swim.

Athletes who are able to race canoes like this one at a world-class level, bringing to bear all the power in their arms, shoulders, torsos, and legs, have the same kind of balance that elite-level gymnasts have.  Once in a while somebody wants to tell me that paddling a canoe doesn't require the same degree of skill as "real" sports like basketball and football and so on, and I want to tell that person to get in a boat like the one pictured above and just stay upright for five seconds; forget propelling the thing forward at 4+ meters per second for up to a kilometer.

We saw elite-level balance among the whitewater paddlers in Paris, too.  Check out the move at 0:47 of this video.  Keep watching and see other athletes do the same move.  Most of them make it look easy, but that move is hard.  I know because I've tried, and usually failed, to do moves just like that one.

The fact is, top canoe and kayak racers are elite-level athletes.  Just as elite-level as LeBron James.  Just as elite-level as Simone Biles.  Just as elite-level as Novak Djokovic.  Just as elite-level as Scottie Sheffler.

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Loving the Olympics and hating them, too

Yesterday was the final day of the Olympic flatwater sprint regatta at Vaires-sur-Marne on the east side of Paris.  Men won medals in the 1000-meter single kayak event, and women raced finals in 500-meter single kayak and 200-meter single canoe.

Lisa Carrington of New Zealand cemented her status as one of the greatest sprint kayakers ever with her win in 500-meter K1.  It was her third gold medal of these Games, and with eight Olympic golds in her career, she is now tied for the record with Birgit Fischer of Germany.

The women's 200-meter C1 final was the last of the regatta, and it could not have been more dramatic.  Nevin Harrison of Seattle, Washington, came in as the defending Olympic champion, but it was clear that she had her work cut out for her when she finished second in her semifinal to Canadian paddler Katie Vincent.  Seven of the eight finalists broke 46 seconds in the semifinal round, including reigning world champion Yarisleidis Cirilo Duboys of Cuba.

Harrison got a good start in the final and led by maybe half a meter at the halfway point, and in a race so short I thought that might be enough for her to take it.  But Vincent put on a tremendous second-half surge, and the two women broke the finish line like this:

You can see who the three medalists are--from top to bottom, they're Vincent, Cirilo Duboys, and Harrison.  But did Vincent break the line first, or did Harrison?  Honestly, I don't know how you determine a winner in such a situation.  Apparently the officials had the necessary technology, and in the end Vincent was declared the winner.  Her official margin of victory was one one-hundredth of a second, 44.12 to 44.13, but in reality I think the margin was just a few thousandths.  44.12 is also the fastest time ever recorded in this event, a "world best" (the sport does not recognize "world records," because no two venues are alike and there are too many variables that impact a boat's hull speed).

Yesterday's 200-meter C1 semifinal results are posted here, and the final results are here.  You can watch NBC's coverage of the race here.

All told, I’d say my nation’s team had its most successful regatta in quite a few years.  Certainly, having an athlete the caliber of Nevin Harrison helps, but I'm encouraged by how the other two U.S. athletes, Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker, did as well.

What I really hope is that in the future the U.S. will be able to take something closer to a full team to the Olympics--C2s, K4s, everything.  I think the meager U.S. contingents we've seen in recent Games is partly the result of the national governing body not having its act together, but most of the blame should be directed straight at the I.O.C., which has stubbornly limited the number of Olympic paddlers (slalom and flatwater combined) to a very modest figure.  Women's canoe classes made their debut at Tokyo three years ago, and I think that's absolutely a good thing, but rather than add them to the mix to make a great sport even better, the I.O.C. insisted on making cuts elsewhere, eliminating men's slalom C2, to preserve their precious athlete quota.  The cuts got even more draconian with the addition this summer of something called "kayak cross."  In the flatwater sprint regatta at Paris there was just one distance available to each boat class.  Men's K1 paddlers raced only 1000 meters; no more 200 or 500.  The women's C1s raced only the 200-meter distance.  The men's K2s raced only the 500-meter distance.  And so on.  In track and field there are distances for the full range of athletic abilities, from sprinting to middle-distance running to long-distance running.  But if you're a female K1 racer and 500 meters is not the distance to which you're best suited... too bad.

I get it that there needs to be some kind of cap on the number of athletes in each sport.  Just housing and feeding those people requires tremendous resources.  But what gets under my skin is that while the I.O.C. won't budge on athlete quotas for sports like ours, they go and let in sports that I think are a joke (I'm looking at you, break dancing).  What's more, the Olympic programme includes sports for which an Olympic gold medal is not the ultimate achievement.  The level of play in the Olympic men's basketball tournament is not as high as it is in the N.B.A. playoffs, and I doubt it ever will be.  And so in my view, basketball does not belong in the Olympics.

Yes, these are the issues I get all worked up about every four years.  But, well... big world-class events like the Olympic Games are important an all, but to me, going out and paddling my own boat here at home is every bit as important.  And that's what I did yesterday morning once I'd digested the results from Paris.  It was another two-boat session--about 40 minutes in the surfski an 20 minutes in the whitewater boat.  The weather was just plain delightful: the high temperature yesterday was around 84 degrees Fahrenheit with a pleasant north breeze.  We complain about our hot summers around here, but we do get some breaks between heat waves, and the break we're having now is about as nice a one as I can ever remember in August.

Today is Sunday, and Sunday is Funday!  I started it off with a gym session, and that's not what I consider the most fun thing to do, but then I went down to the river in search of fun, and it looked like I would get it when I reached the mouth of the harbor: heading upstream from below the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges was a big old barge rig with a nice-looking wake behind it.  I paddled out to do about the most fun thing you can do in a kayak or canoe--surf some big waves.  The ones in the main wave train behind the towboat were very large and very steep and moving very fast, and I could never quite get the boat up to speed to catch them.  As I fell farther back the waves quickly flattened out, and I feared I had missed out on my Sunday Funday fun.  But as I kept paddling against the river's current I started finding all kinds of residual waves that had linkable patterns.  Each time I caught a wave and gained some speed, I worked to take that speed onto another wave.  It wasn't exactly epic surfing--I had to sprint so hard and so often that before long my arms, already tired from the gym session, were screaming. But it was fun to get out and challenge myself and work on some skills, not to mention my lactic acid system.

The Olympics are wrapping up today, but you can bet I'll keep doing my thing, and sharing it here.

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