My mood is something short of electric as I prepare to depart

I've spent my last few days at home following my usual canyon conditioning program, with some paddling and some bike riding.  I've been doing it in some pretty hot weather, too.  It gets quite hot on the floor of the Grand Canyon, but I hope the lower humidity will make it seem like a relief after the sweltering heat we've had here in the Mid South this summer.

I rode my bike Monday morning.  I did the ride I often do, out the Greater Memphis Greenline to Shelby Farms, around the lake, and back.  It takes me around 95 minutes, usually.

On Tuesday I spent 40 minutes in the whitewater boat in the harbor.  There's no better remedy for summer heat than some Eskimo rolls.

A front moved through the area Tuesday evening, bringing some strong gusty winds.  They didn't last more than 15 or 20 minutes, but they blew some tree branches that were encroaching on the power lines that serve my house, and some lines got squeezed together and blew out the transformer.  So I spent Tuesday night and yesterday morning with no electricity.  I'm sure I've had worse nights of sleep, but I lay awake for extended periods feeling sweaty and uncomfortable, not to mention frustrated at how long it was taking the power company to show up and make repairs.  I got maybe five hours of sleep, all told.

There were some 160 outages citywide, affecting several thousand customers.  The utility company finally got to my property by mid-morning yesterday, and had the electricity back on by lunchtime.  I felt a little groggy from the lackluster sleep, but I got out for an afternoon bike ride, happy that I had an air-conditioned home waiting for me when I was finished.

This morning I had my last paddling session before I hit the road.  I got in the surfski and would have been happy just paddling to the mouth of the harbor and back.  But when I reached the mouth I saw an upstream-moving barge rig well positioned for me to get to it quickly, so I went out for some surfing.  The waves were good, but not great; definitely nothing like the awesome conditions of last Saturday.  But I was able to do some interesting stuff for a short while.  Then I returned to the harbor, paddled back to the dock, and took both the ski and the whitewater boat up to the truck to bring home.  It could be a good month before I get back to the dock on the Memphis riverfront.

There's lots of packing to do, and I hope I can remember to include everything I'll need during sixteen days in the wilderness.

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Monday photo feature

Saturday before last, after I raced down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois, I rode my bike from Alton back up to Grafton to retrieve my vehicle.  During my ride I stopped to take this picture, which illustrates a big difference between the "upper" Mississippi (above the confluence with the Ohio River) and the "lower" river down where I live.

The flow of the upper Mississippi is controlled by a series of dams, just like the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Columbia, and other sizable rivers in North America.  Because of that, it's feasible to build a road right alongside the river, like Illinois highway 100 pictured here.

The lower Mississippi has no dams.  It's entirely free-flowing, and as it approaches its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, it meanders wildly across a broad flood plain, occasionally adopting a new course and leaving behind an abandoned meander (an "oxbow lake").  Because of that, there aren't many roads running right alongside the lower Mississippi.  Much of the lower river is simply a remote bottomland wilderness.

That's the bike path in the foreground of the photo.  It's just a strip of asphalt, similar to the Greater Memphis Greenline here where I live.  Much of it was bumpier and weedier than my trail here, however.  The section I rode is in two counties: Madison County (where Alton is) and Jersey County (where Grafton is).  The condition of the trail improved dramatically as soon as I crossed into Jersey County.  Maybe Madison County is experiencing more fiscal stress than Jersey.  Or maybe they just don't think it's that important to maintain a bicycle trail.

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Finding ways to get wet like the ducks do

I went to the riverfront yesterday morning and paddled the surfski out on the Mississippi.  There was no barge traffic nearby, so it was just some steady paddling.  Maybe the most interesting thing was back at the dock, where some ducks I'd never seen before were hanging out.  I was surprised at how close they let me get with my camera:

Today I paddled the surfski on the river again, and it was, quite simply, awesome.  When I got to the mouth of the harbor there was a barge rig down below the old bridges, coming upstream.  I paddled around a while until it reached the downtown Memphis area, and then headed for its wake.  What followed was as good a surfing session as I've ever had on the Memphis riverfront.  It was at least as good as this session in May of 2020, and maybe even better because while the conditions five years ago gave me nice extended rides, the conditions today challenged me to work each wave either to stay on it or to link onto another wave.  I was in my relatively stable V10 Sport ski, and I was pushing that stability to its limit.  A couple of times I thought for sure I was going over, but each time I executed a timely lean to stay upright.

Eventually the towboat left me behind and the waves petered out.  It was shaping up into a very hot day, but at least I'd found a wet, fun way to spend part of it.  I returned to the harbor for the two-kilometer paddle back to the dock under a blazing sun.  I cooled off by practicing some remounts, and then back at the dock I took a cool hose bath and savored the endorphin rush from all the hard paddling I'd done.

It looks like we're in for some more oppressive heat between now and my departure for Arizona.  Arizona will be hot too, of course, but at least out there it's a dry heat.

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It's the home stretch toward this year's BIG trip

Now that I've done perhaps my one race for the year, I've settled back in at home for one last period of normalcy before I embark on my great Grand Canyon expedition.  My launch date is August 27, and I'm looking at starting the drive out to Arizona a week from tomorrow.

On Tuesday I still wasn't feeling a hundred percent recovered from the exhausting adventure up on the upper Mississippi.  I went down to the riverfront and spent 40 minutes in the whitewater boat.  I eased into it, and pretty soon I had a vigorous round of drills going.  The day was hot, just like we expect here in August, and it felt good to do lots of Eskimo rolls.  There were plenty of forward drills, backpaddling drills, and spin drills, too.  Even though it's been close to a year since I've been on actual whitewater, I'm not too worried about making the adjustment quickly once I put my boat on the Colorado.  Over decades of experience, I've never had a significant problem with that.

Yesterday I rode my bike out the Greater Memphis Greenline and the Wolf River Greenway to the Walnut Grove bridge, and came back.  It felt easy after my post-race ride from Alton to Grafton last Saturday.  I've done a nice volume of riding this summer, and my body feels good and used to it.

This morning I returned to the river and got in the surfski for the first time since the race.  I paddled to the mouth of the harbor hoping to find some wake-surfing action, but the barge rigs I saw on the Mississippi were beyond my reach.  So I returned to the dock and hopped in the whitewater boat for some more rolls and drills.  I felt good when I was finished: there's something satisfying about preparing for one of the world's more famous stretches of whitewater right here in my humble harbor.

My digestive system felt better for several weeks, but for the last couple of weeks it's been a little out of whack again.  Last Saturday morning it was feeling like it might give me some trouble during the race, but it settled down in time for the start.  I'm doing everything I know how to do to get it into a state of equilibrium before I leave town again.

Meanwhile, the news from the Dragon Bravo fire on the Grand Canyon's North Rim is encouraging: as of today firefighters have achieved 54% containment.  I think they've had more cooperation from the weather the last couple of days.

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Monday photo feature

Here we are in Busch Stadium, the home ballpark for my favorite baseball team, the Saint Louis Cardinals.  I was here Friday evening to take in a game between the Cardinals and their most hated rival, those dastardly Chicago Cubs.

It was the fourth time I've seen the Cardinals and Cubs play in person.  In 2011 I attended a game at Wrigley Field on the North Side of Chicago.  The Cubs won that game in a walkoff, and I had to sit there while the insufferable song "Go Cubs Go" blasted over the PA system.  (The Cardinals got the last laugh that year, however, by winning the World Series.)

The following season I saw the Cardinals and Cubs play at Busch Stadium on consecutive days.  The good guys won both games.  And that was the last time I attended a Cardinals game until this past Friday evening.  The Cardinals rewarded my return by playing one of the better games they've played all year: with good pitching and defense, smart base running, and timely hitting, they beat the Cubs 5-0.

Baseball is the only one of the big pro team sports I've followed in the last thirty years or so.  In general, I'd rather be participating in my own athletic pursuits than sitting in a stadium watching other people be athletes.  But baseball is an enjoyable diversion in the summertime.  Most of the time I listen to the games on the radio while I work in my shop or do things around the house.

One of the things about baseball that fascinates me is its organized minor league system.  Guys show up at the single-A level having been superstars throughout childhood, only to have to distinguish themselves in the subtlest of ways to move up.  Many a touted prospect has failed to reach the majors because his reflexes were hundredths of a second too slow, or he swung at a pitch out of the strike zone just a little too often, or his throws were a fraction of a degree off target, or there were simply too many guys with similar skill sets on the big league club.  For every player on a major league roster, there are dozens who were probably capable of being there but fell short for some tiny reason, and that has helped me come to terms with my status as a good-but-not-great canoe and kayaker racer.  If paddling were baseball I'd probably be playing out my career in double-A, and I've accepted that and try to acquit myself there the best I can.

I also enjoy hearing the radio announcers talk about the players' daily training.  Mastering the mechanics of pitching or batting sounds a lot like mastering an effective forward stroke.  A baseball player might have greater potential for fame and wealth than I do, but his daily routine as an athlete is remarkably similar to mine.

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A successful race leaves me feeling "tired" in more ways than one

I attended the Firecracker Race on the upper Mississippi River yesterday.  This event has occurred in several different locations over the years; these days it's a 24-kilometer (15-mile) race from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  I think it took place on Independence Day weekend years ago, and that explains its name.

Turnout for the race was robust.  Because I hadn't decided to register until just a few days before, I missed out on both a post-race meal ticket and a seat on the shuttle bus that transported racers who had left their vehicles down at Alton back to the start.  Meanwhile, race director Craig Heaton decided to split the field into two waves at the start: most boats would start at the advertised time of 9:30 AM, but a couple of men's solo kayak classes, including mine, would start ten minutes later.

Grafton is located where the Illinois River flows into the Mississippi.  As soon as the bulk of the field started in the first wave at 9:30, the rest of us lined up in the mouth of the Illinois as the ten-minute stagger interval ticked down.  Soon enough, we were off.  Within the first ten minutes I found myself all alone in first place among all second-wavers, and from there on out the race would be an exercise in river-reading, pacing, and energy conservation.

I was definitely getting help from the current: I think once or twice the reading on my G.P.S. device went as high as 14.8 kilometers per hour.  Most of the time it hovered in the high 13s and low 14s.  Pretty soon I was overtaking some of the first-wave racers, and that aided my river-reading mission, since the majority of them were local to the region and knew this section of the river better than I.

My speed made it clear that my race would take somewhere between 100 minutes and two hours.  That's well within my comfort zone, but several factors--the heat (around 90 degrees Fahrenheit), the headwind, and the fact that I hadn't been doing any racing this year--compelled me to be conservative to avoid the dreaded "bonk."  I tried to paddle at a controlled 70 strokes per minute; I kept wanting to wander up closer to 75 spm, and continually I had to make myself back off.

Meanwhile, my competitive urges were spurring me along.  While it seemed that I had my own boat class (solo race kayaks) well in hand, I was hoping maybe I could clock the fastest time of the day.  The trouble was, my main competition for that distinction--tandem race boats--had started in the first wave, and so I had no idea how I was doing relative to them.  As the race went on I passed most of the boats in the first wave, and I scanned the river in front of me to see if I could spot any of those fastest boats.

Fatigue was starting to set in as I neared the one-hour mark.  And the water conditions seemed to be getting choppier and choppier.  There was a breeze blowing upriver, as I said, and there were some barges and other motorized boat traffic as well.  By the time I rounded the bend to get my first glimpse of the bridge at Alton, some 8 kilometers off in the distance, all kinds of confused little waves were slapping at my boat.  Though the conditions were nothing I don't see all the time back home on the lower Mississippi, 16 kilometers into a 24-kilometer race my motor coordination was starting to crumble.  More and more I started to concentrate just on staying upright.

With around 7 kilometers to go my speed plummeted as low as 10 kph, and I wondered if I was losing the assistance of the current.  There's a dam not far below the race's finish line, and I thought maybe I had hit the water that was backed up behind it.  Soon, however, I realized I had simply made a river-reading error: I looked to my left and saw that there were sandbars separating me from the main channel.  I worked my way over as aggressively as I dared, and before long I was back up around 14 kph.  Such is life when you race on a big river like the Mississippi: your G.P.S. device shows a drop in your speed, and you ask yourself, "Have I moved into some slower water?  Is the headwind getting worse?  Have I hit the slackwater behind the dam?  Or am I just getting tired and slowing down?"

Ever so painfully, the Alton riverfront inched closer.  By now I was overtaking the fastest female kayakers and could see a tandem surfski in the distance.  As long as I was within ten minutes of a first-wave boat like that one, I would finish with a better time.  Little by little I reeled it in, and with less than two kilometers left I went by it.

I was continuing to move along at over 14 kph.  (I later learned that all of the dam's gates were open, providing us with strong current all the way to the finish.)  Now, the only boat I could see was a four-person "Voyager" canoe.  I tried to pull even with it, but its paddlers were stubbornly keeping it beyond my reach.  The finish line loomed a few hundred meters ahead, alongside a sea wall where the timing officials were perched with their clipboards and stopwatches.  Waves reverberating from the seawall made stability trickier than ever, but I relaxed my core muscles and sprinted as hard as I could.  I advanced to within half a boatlength of beating the canoe, but that was as good as I was going to do: I crossed the line with a time of one hour, 46 minutes, 27 seconds.  The canoe, of course, had had a ten-minute head start on me, so its official time came to 1:56:24.

The paddlers of the tandem surfski I had recently passed congratulated me on my race.  I asked them if they were the fastest tandem, and they replied, "Oh, no.  There were a couple of boats in front of us that we lost sight of long ago."

As it turned out, the fastest time of the day was clocked by a tandem outrigger canoe (OC2) paddled by Rusty Self and Thomas Selva.  They crossed the line one hour, 43 minutes, 30 seconds after they'd started.  Just behind them, a tandem surfski paddled by the husband-and-wife team of Alma and Bryan Hopkins clocked 1:43:42.  So I would have to settle for being the third-fastest boat in the field.  

I really don't think it was necessary to split the field into two waves; there weren't that many people registered, and the Mississippi is a big river that could have accommodated everybody in one mass start.  In that scenario I would have been able to compete directly with the fastest boats, trade some wake rides with them, and maybe have a shot at the "fastest overall" distinction by the end of the race.  Then again, three minutes is a lot... it had taken all I had just to go 1:46, so I don't know if I could have challenged those other two boats or not.

But, honestly... it's foolish of me to quibble over something like that.  The fact is that the paddlers of those fastest boats performed really well and clocked great times.  And I performed well and beat all the other solo racers.  I should just let myself be happy with that.

The complete results are posted here.

I was beat to the socks, but I still had work to do.  Because I'd registered too late to get a seat on the shuttle bus, I had to come up with another plan to retrieve my truck from the start up at Grafton.  And that plan involved my bicycle, which I'd left on the Alton riverfront before driving up to the start.  Now it was time to hop on the bike and start riding.  There's a bike path alongside Illinois highway 100 between the two towns, and I spent the next hour pedaling the 24 kilometers back to where my truck was parked.  All this summer paddling and bike-riding have been staples of my Grand Canyon conditioning program, so yesterday amounted to a massive training day for that expedition that's now just 17 days away.

If racing on the river had worn me out pretty good, the bike ride finished me off completely.  I drove back to Alton and joined in the post-race event at a local brewpub.  I'd registered after all the meal tickets had been spoken for, so I just paid for my own meal--a big old chicken sandwich and french fries.  I wolfed it down, received my first-place award in the men's racing kayak class, and walked out to my truck to begin the five-hour drive back to Memphis.

I was dead-dog tired and hoping I had enough energy for the trip.  But the day's drama wasn't quite over yet.  Driving south on Interstate 255, which bypasses Saint Louis en route to I-55 South to Memphis, I sensed that something wasn't quite right about how the truck was running.  Soon the whole cab was vibrating, and I wasn't sure if the problem was my truck or a bumpy road surface.  Seconds later, I got my answer: my driver's side front tire blew out.  I managed to get to the road's left shoulder, fish the jack and related tools from beneath the bench seat, and get the tire off.  It was clear that this tire had made its final spin:

Fortunately, my truck's spare tire is an actual tire, not one of those silly "donut" wheels.  It would get me back to Memphis just fine (as long as I didn't have another flat, that is).  But it was mounted underneath the chassis at the truck's rear, and to access it I ended up having to remove my bike and the bike rack (and the only reason I'd even brought my bike was that I'd missed out on a shuttle bus ticket... aargh).  Working under the blazing sun in muggy 92-degree heat, I got the spare tire put on and was thoroughly covered in grime and drenched in sweat when it was over.

The rest of the drive home, through southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas, was dull.  But I'd had all the excitement I needed for the day, and then some.  I arrived home a little after nine o'clock.  Glad to have had a sizable late lunch, I whipped up a small, simple supper.  Then I took a shower and went to bed, falling asleep in no time.

I woke up this morning feeling sluggish and achy, but not as sore as I sometimes feel the day after a race.  By way of a recovery session I did some full-body stretching at home, then went to the riverfront for an easy half-hour in the whitewater boat.  A typical round of stroke drills for me is a vigorous affair, with me putting all the explosive power I can into my strokes.  Afterward I feel like I've been in the weight room.  But today I kept the intensity low.  I've continued to feel sluggish and weary the rest of today, but hopefully I'll have some pep back in my step as a new week gets underway.

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Some impromptu race prep

I've made sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision to attend a race this weekend.  The Firecracker Race is a 24-kilometer (15-mile) trek down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  It's something like a five-hour drive from where I live.  I plan to leave Friday, spend the night in Saint Louis, and come home after the race on Saturday.

I don't consider myself particularly trained up, but my fitness seems good.  I've been recovering quickly whenever I do hard sprints, such as when surfing barge wakes, and that's always a good sign.  The course is on the upper Mississippi--upstream of where the Ohio River comes in--so I'm unsure how much help I'll get from the current, but I'm pretty sure I can do it in less than two hours.  I don't know what other racers might show up--the registration site doesn't have a list of registrants.  I just want to go up there and see what I can do after months of mostly unstructured paddling.  My guess is I won't be setting any kind of torrid pace, but I hope I can compete well with whoever is there.

After a bike ride on Monday, Tuesday morning I paddled the surfski for 30 minutes and the whitewater boat for 30 minutes.  With a race coming up this Saturday, I did six short (12-stroke) sprints in the surfski to give my ATP-CP energy system a bit of work.  In the whitewater boat I did the usual round of stroke drills and Eskimo rolls, preparing myself for whatever the Colorado River might throw at me later this month.

The highlight of Tuesday's paddling session was seeing a gar jump straight up out of the water right in front of me.  The gar are always very active at this time of year, but they don't often catch air above the surface--that's more the M.O. of those invasive Asian carp.  I got a good look at this gar's long, needlelike nose.  Gar are truly unique-looking creatures.

This morning I was back on the riverfront for a short session in the surfski.  I did another six 12-stroke sprints in the hope of feeling sharp and ready to go on Saturday.

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Monday photo feature

Twenty years ago, I paddled a section of the Colorado River in the state of Utah, from Moab down to the community of Potash.

In just over three weeks, I plan to put my boat on the same river some distance downstream, at Lee's Ferry, Arizona.

In the photo above, I'm paddling my old beat-up wildwater K1.  These days that boat is hanging underneath the deck on the rear side of my house, unused for years.  My boat of choice for the trip through the Grand Canyon is a polyethylene C1 that's designed for general whitewater river-running.

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Nicer weather, a mental break from the fire, and, of course, some paddling

We're finally getting a break from the suffocating moist heat that tormented the Mid South--and quite a bit of the wider nation--for several weeks.  This weekend the Fahrenheit temperatures are in the mid 80s, and north breezes have brought in not-so-humid air.

Yesterday I got in the surfski and paddled from the dock to the mouth of the harbor.  There I looked out over the Mississippi and saw a big barge rig that was perfectly positioned for an extended session of wake surfing.  It was moving up from beneath the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges, so I could make my leisurely way down to it and then surf the waves back upriver.

Maybe these waves were especially well tuned to my particular skill set, but whatever the case, I felt like a surfing stud as I carried my speed from one wave to another, linking runs.  Having spent the last couple of weeks sort of puttering through workouts, it felt good to feel like I was doing something successfully again.

This morning I paddled the ski to the mouth of the harbor again, and found no barge traffic on the river.  So I returned to the marina and got in the whitewater boat for the first time in over a week.  I did a bunch of stroke drills and Eskimo rolls.

Of course, I'm still looking ahead to the Grand Canyon trip, and unfortunately that means keeping an eye on the Dragon Bravo fire on the North Rim.  By the end of this past week it had grown to over 111,000 acres and was just 9% contained.  The smoke appeared very bad, especially in the first 80 miles or so of the Colorado River below Lee's Ferry.

On Friday evening I chatted on the phone with Emily, one of the members of my party, and I remarked that keeping my eyes glued to the fire situation probably wasn't very good for my mental health.  Her response was to order me to take the weekend off from looking at fire data.  "Promise me," she commanded, and reluctantly I said, "I promise."  And so, both yesterday and today, I have stayed away from the app and the websites I've been using to follow the firefighters' progress.  I don't say "I promise" unless I mean it.  Tomorrow morning I'll look back at those things because each Monday I send an email out to the group, and I want them to be aware of what's going on out in the Grand Canyon.  It has indeed been a good thing to take a break from that--it's not like my being informed up to the minute is going to change anything that's happening.  I'm hoping that when I do check tomorrow morning, maybe things will be a little bit better than they were, rather than worse.

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