Here's another of the many, many fine photographs Rob Lieb took in the Grand Canyon between August 27 and September 11. In this one, Kylie Haberman stakes her tent while J.D. Terry inspects the environs of our camping spot.
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My shingles rash has been showing signs of healing all week, though the progress has been very, very slow. What were once a bunch of pus-filled hives have dried up and scabbed over, and now I'm waiting as patiently as I can for them to fade away and be replaced by healthy skin, so that I might happily forget they were ever there.
As for pain, it's been mild compared to what I've heard shingles inflicts on many other people. But I do have one spot, in my lower right ribcage area, that's been bothering me for days. If this pain were just a little more intense, and covered just a little bit more area of my body, I would probably be flat-out miserable. Apparently some cases of shingles have symptoms that linger indefinitely, and I hope this painful spot isn't going to be like that for me.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to allow myself some downtime from athletic pursuits. But my trip to South Africa is just a little over three months away, and that's not that far off in the future. Right now it's hard to imagine myself in the kind of form I want to be in when I'm laying down frequent hard sprints in pursuit of those Miller's Run swells.
This past week I've paddled Tuesday, yesterday, and today. I've kept the intensity fairly low, although I've allowed myself to try some barge wake surfing whenever that opportunity presents itself. But the vessels I've seen haven't been producing very good waves, and I wonder if that's because of the low water. The towboats are pushing fewer barges right now, and they might not be running their engines at full throttle with milder current to fight. Both Tuesday and today there were rigs coming upriver that I went out and tried to surf, shingles and all, but the surfing turned out to be not much good.
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If you didn't know for sure what a case of shingles looks like, now you do.
The doctor I saw Friday morning said it's a pretty classic case. A shingles rash typically affects a specific dermatome, or an area of skin supplied by nerves from the dorsal root of any given spinal nerve. In my case pictured here, it's the thoracic nerves that sprout from my spine and wrap around to the front of my torso. (That's my totally non-expert understanding, anyway.) I took this picture in my bathroom mirror, so that's the right side of my torso even though it looks like my left. According to the Wikipedia page on shingles, a rash usually follows "a stripe or belt-like pattern that is limited to one side of the body and does not cross the midline."
So, how long will I have to deal with this? The prevailing answer is "it just takes time." While I really, really want it to go away, I'm also grateful that as of this writing, at least, it hasn't been as painful as I've heard it can be. So far it's amounted to not much more than an annoyance, and I'm more or less living life.
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By Friday morning it was clear that the hideous rash on the right side of my torso was not running its course, and my throat was still sore, so I went to a doctor. The doctor took one look at it and told me it was shingles.
I know several people who have had shingles, and they report that it was about the most excruciating thing they'd ever had to endure. I wouldn't describe my case as excruciating, but the discomfort level does seem to be ticking upward ever so gradually. The rash didn't really hurt or itch at all when it first appeared; I could walk around barely aware that it was there. But now I can feel it constantly. There's mild itching and sort of a feeling of microscopic needle pricks. My friend Rob, who's a chiropractor and with whom I was just in the Grand Canyon, tells me that the itching is simply my immune system doing its work, and that I should absolutely not scratch.
The doctor gave me a steroid shot that she said would stem the inflammation. She also prescribed an oral steroid, an antiviral medication, and some prescription-strength ibuprofen. So far the rash looks about as bad as ever, but at least the sore throat I was having has gone away (thanks to the ibuprofen, probably).
According to the Wikipedia page on shingles, most shingles rashes heal in two to four weeks. My rash first appeared a week ago, so I hope I get credit for that "time served" and will have to serve only... what? One more week? Two? Three?
Meanwhile, my energy level seems just fine otherwise, and I'm trying to conduct life as normally as I can. On typical Saturday and Sunday mornings I go to the river, and so that's what I've done this weekend.
I woke up yesterday morning after a lousy night of sleep. I was in bed before 9 o'clock Friday evening but didn't manage to doze off until after 2 AM. Maybe the rash was bothering me, or the medications were messing with my sleep cycle, or I was simply feeling anguished by knowing that I had the dreaded shingles... I can't really tell you. But I still woke up between 5 and 6 AM like I always do, and once it was clear I wouldn't be falling back asleep, I went ahead and got up.
My biggest concern as I got in the boat was how my rash would feel with my shirt and PFD rubbing against it. I was prepared to call it quits after just ten minutes if the discomfort was too severe. But it turned out not to be so bad, and I paddled for 40 minutes. I stayed in the harbor and kept the stroke rate low, focusing my attention on stroke mechanics, which I consider the best use of these "easy" training periods like the one I'm supposed to be having right now.
This morning my rash wasn't itching so much, but it felt exceedingly sensitive. So again I wondered how it would do under my paddling apparel. But once again, it didn't bother me once I was underway. I paddled for 60 minutes and actually felt as much giddy-up in the boat as I have since I got home from out West. I paddled out onto the Mississippi and would have tried some wake-surfing if there had been any barge traffic, but there was none. So I did a loop out there and enjoyed the lovely fall weather. It was sunny with a cool breeze that wasn't strong enough to make an oppressive headwind, but created the sort of smooth chop on the river that I enjoy making the boat glide over. By the time I was walking up the ramp from the marina to the parking lot, I had that pleasant feeling I usually have after a really good paddle and I even forgot about the shingles for a few moments.
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Here's another short film that I put together from the footage I shot in the Grand Canyon. What we have here is Day 13, when we woke up to find the Colorado River running a dark grey color. My best guess is that there was some flash flooding upriver from a tributary that flows from the burn area of the Dragon Bravo fire.
Other than that, we were in a leisurely mood on Day 13. The biggest whitewater was behind us, and we were beginning to sense that the finish line was drawing near. That didn't mean our work was finished, however: hotter weather generated a pesky afternoon headwind that made our downriver progress feel like a slog. But it's easy to forget all that now as I sit here and behold the beautiful landscapes we paddled by. Certainly the music ("West of Samoa" by Speedy West) suggests a leisurely mood.
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Well, if a paddling trip through the Grand Canyon didn't finish me off physically, the crafts fair last weekend sure did. My entire body was achy and sore by the time I brought all my tools and equipment home from the event on Sunday evening.
In the days since then I have felt like doing little besides lying around. The aches and pains have been quite a variety: a sore right biceps muscle, which I strained somehow while swinging an axe last Friday; soreness in my lower back; a stabbing pain in the vicinity of my left hip flexor whenever I move a certain way; and a very general exhaustion of all my trunk muscles and even my internal organs.
Maybe the weirdest thing is an ugly rash of hives across the right side of my torso. It sort of looks like poison ivy, but I can't recall coming into contact with any of those three-leaved plants recently. I also haven't taken any new medications, and I can't think of any foods I've eaten that I might have an allergic reaction to. Very strange. I first noticed it last Saturday evening, and in the last couple of days I think it's gotten worse, not better. And the skin in my torso area seems more sensitive than usual, even where the rash isn't... kind of a tingling sensation.
Meanwhile, my weight has been down below where I think it should be. At least anecdotally, I seem to feel at my strongest and most energetic when I weigh close to 160 pounds; but for most of the last year I've been in the low 150s, and just before I left for the Grand Canyon I dipped below 150. Since getting back home, I have continued to weigh in below 150, with my low point being 146.
The explanation for my weight loss, and what it might mean, is something I don't really know. I've tried changing my eating habits a little--incorporating more protein, for instance--but I never could tell if that was making any lasting difference. In recent years I've been lifting weights less, largely because of the nerve-impingement issues in my upper spine, so maybe decreased muscle mass has something to do with it.
In any case, these days I'm feeling about as "down" physically as a person can feel. I feel borderline sick, actually--my throat has been sore for a couple of days. But I don't seem to be running a fever, and once I get up and around each morning my energy level seems okay.
The good thing is that a thorough rest is already what I have planned for the next several weeks. I'll be here at home for the next four months; my next big event is a return to the western cape of South Africa for some downwind paddling in late January. Certainly, I'll need to be trained up for that, but I've got time. I hope to have a new fitness program underway by late October or early November.
Right now I'm just trying to keep myself moving to some minimum degree. I went down to the river and paddled both Tuesday and today. I've actually felt surprisingly good in the boat once I've warmed up, though today I limited myself to just an easy 40 minutes because I'm getting more and more concerned about this rash and whatever maladies I've got in me.
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I'm pleased to announce that a member of my Grand Canyon party is part of a story that aired nationwide on National Public Radio today. Amelia Taylor of Sevierville, Tennessee, is featured for her river cleanup work in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. You can listen to the story and view photographs here.
Another member of my party, Nick Wirick of Del Rio, Tennessee, appears in one of the photos.
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On Monday I did a bike ride, and on Tuesday I went down to the riverfront and paddled for an hour. Other than that, my time this week has been occupied by the annual Pink Palace Crafts Fair, which begins today and runs through the weekend. I'll be out there demonstrating the craft of chairmaking, a big part of my non-athletic life.
I mentioned earlier that I was waiting to see the photographs that my friend Rob Lieb took on our river trip through the Grand Canyon. Yesterday he sent me some ninety images, and many of them are quite stunning. I expect I'll share many of them here as time goes on, but right now I'll focus on the ones that feature ME!!!!
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But we did in fact have a real photographer in our group. My friend Rob Lieb of Holmes, New York, has been a very good amateur photographer for some thirty years. Like me, he's been recovering at home since our trip concluded, and is only just starting to look through the images on his memory cards. The photo above is one of just a couple of photos he's shared with me so far. I look forward to seeing more.
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I spent this week mostly taking it easy, not doing very much. I did some house cleaning, and cleaned up my paddling and camping gear and put it all away, but otherwise I lay around here at home. Sixteen days of paddling and camping in the wilderness, followed by some twenty hours of driving to get home, will do that to a guy.
I've been thinking a lot about how it all went in the venerable Grand Canyon. My agenda was simple: I just wanted to paddle the river and experience the canyon to the fullest extent possible in sixteen days over 226 miles. And I'd say I accomplished that. There's no particular thing I'd really wanted to do that I didn't get to do.
There's no question that my whitewater skills felt rusty. While I've been paddling as much as ever in the last decade, little of that has been on whitewater, and I shouldn't have expected to be in peak form for that particular discipline. But a river-running expedition in the Grand Canyon is really about a lot more than the whitewater. The climate is fickle in the desert Southwest, and paddling some fifteen miles of whitewater each day did a number on me. Even back in my peak whitewater days, I rarely was on a river for more than three or four days in a row. In the Grand, I had to pace myself like I'd never done before in a whitewater boat. That Day 7 layover we took was a welcome break, and I also spent a couple of days just riding a raft. By the time we stopped to make camp each afternoon, I was thoroughly whipped. Most nights I bedded down by eight o'clock.
The trip was my latest reminder that my best whitewater paddling is a thing of the past, and I won't lie: it's hard to accept that. But I try my best to keep that in perspective. If Dane Jackson (arguably the best whitewater paddler in the world these days) had been there with us, he probably would have styled the whitewater just like he does in the Green Narrows and on the Gauley and other well-known "day trip" runs. But even he would have had to pace himself and be mindful of rest and hydration and nutrition to withstand sixteen or more days of continuous exposure to that environment.
Our party enjoyed quite a bit of good luck. Flipping a raft was always a worry, but we managed to avoid such an emergency. Several times a rower piloted his craft through a rapid by the skin of his teeth, but more often our raft captains navigated the whitewater with skill and aplomb.
We could have encountered a canyon filled with smoke from the Dragon Bravo fire, but firefighters had it well under control by the time we launched on August 27, and smoke was not a problem at all.
We could have had miserable weather, but I wouldn't say that we did. Certainly, it was sunny and hot much of the time, and we guzzled down large quantities of water (which we'd had to filter ourselves out there in the wilderness) to cope with it. We also had some rain, but not enough to make the whole journey feel like an ordeal. Our worst single day of rain was probably Day 1, when a fierce monsoon blew upriver with ferocious winds for a while, and left us shivering until the sun came out again.
Flash floods are always a worry when camping or hiking in a side canyon, especially during the late-summer monsoon season. But we avoided any scary incidents. We tried to use common sense when pitching our tents, sticking to higher ground, and we always had an eye to the sky whenever we stopped to hike. We did see signs of significant flash flooding in the form of heavy sediment flowing down the Colorado River from points upstream, but that was as close to any kind of catastrophic flooding that we got.
I've heard horror stories about entire groups of river runners falling victim to food poisoning or nasty viruses or bacterial infections, but our party eluded all that. Late in the trip one person was feeling a mild version of the dreaded "tolio" foot infection, but that's the only affliction I was aware of in our group. I think we did a good job of washing our hands and doing all the other little things that prevent the spread of germs.
I could go on and on with observations about my Grand Canyon experience, but honestly, there's nothing I can write here that's an adequate substitute for seeing the place yourself. Even the most artfully-crafted photographs and video footage don't measure up to immersing yourself in the actual place, and I'm just grateful I've had an opportunity to do that.
Yesterday I finally summoned the gumption to get back in a boat. I'd brought my surfski home from the marina and stored it in the garage while I was away, and I loaded it up and took it back to the riverfront to capture what's left of warm weather for this year. I paddled for an hour and felt tired and sluggish, but it was nice to feel like I was back among the living, at least.
The Mississippi River has dropped to the low levels that are common in late summer and fall. Right now it's not quite as low as it was the last several years--it dropped to record low levels in both 2022 and 2023, and only the water that Hurricane Helene had dumped on western North Carolina and east Tennessee kept it from doing so again last year--but it's good and low just the same. Yesterday the level was about 6.6 below zero on the Memphis gauge, and this morning it was down to about -6.9 feet.
I felt a bit more energetic as I paddled today. I'd hoped that some towboat wake surfing might jumpstart my enthusiasm even more, but just like yesterday, there was no commercial traffic in sight out on the river. I'm just glad to have gotten my body moving again.
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