Living a legacy

In a typical week I paddle on Tuesday morning, but this was anything but a typical week.  My mother's funeral took place on Tuesday morning, and the morning after that we had the "committal" (interment) ceremony out at the cemetery.  I finally got back in the boat Thursday, and I paddled again yesterday and today.  The sessions were unremarkable--just some steady paddling, a mental health break from all the goings-on.  I also did some bike riding Monday and Friday (when I got another flat tire😠).

Navigating the business of laying my mother to rest, I thought a lot about the extent to which our parents shape the people that we are.  There's no question that my mother and father had a profound influence on the person I have become: how I think, how I talk, how I interact with others, my moral compass... everything.

But seeing as how this is a canoe & kayak blog, I'll focus on my identity as a paddler.  How did the people my parents were lead me into a life of paddling boats?

There are famous examples of great canoe & kayak athletes begetting great canoe & kayak athletes.  British whitewater slalom kayaker Richard Fox, whose competitive career spanned the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, was regarded as one of the greatest the sport had ever seen as he piled up five world championships along with many other medals in international competition.  He married French paddler Myriam Jerusalmi, herself a world champion and top-ranked international competitor.  The couple moved to Australia to accept coaching positions, and one of their daughters, Jessica, has become perhaps the greatest whitewater slalom athlete of all time.

In the world of ocean kayak racing, South African Sam Mocke is one of the most promising young paddlers, and he too is the progeny of internationally successful canoe & kayak athletes: father Dawid Mocke was one of the world's top ocean surfski racers a couple of decades ago, while mother Nikki Mocke was a flatwater sprint kayaker on South Africa's 2008 Olympic team.  Both remain actively involved in paddling or paddling-adjacent activities, Dawid the operator of the Surfski School and Downwind Camps (like the one I attended this past January) and Nikki an organizing force in the local surf lifesaving club.

I'm pretty sure I there's nothing coincidental about Jessica and Sam's success and who their parents are.  They both "grew up in the boat" under the constant supervision of the world's leading experts.  And they're not the only ones: in paddlesports, and for that matter in all other sports, if your parents were elite-level performers, there's an awfully good chance you'll be one, too, if you choose to follow in their footsteps.

Some of the other top athletes I know have family stories that are a little more subtle.  Siblings Davey and Cathy Hearn were both world champions and Olympians in whitewater slalom, and their brother Bill was quite good as well.  Their parents, Carter and Mary Alice Hearn, did not have notable competitive careers on the world stage.  But they paddled recreationally with the DC-based Canoe Cruisers Association, and Carter did some club-level slalom racing at a time when the sport was barely known in the United States.  The family made trips out West nearly every summer because Carter, a geologist, had fieldwork assignments there.  And so the Hearn children grew up around paddling as well as camping and other outdoor activities.  The idea of racing didn't really come into focus until DC-area native Jamie McEwan, whom they knew through their parents' C.C.A. membership, won the C1 bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics at Augsburg, West Germany.  For the next few years Carter and Mary Alice gave their kids all the support they could as they pursued their own slalom excellence.  For example, they enrolled them in a C.C.A. youth racing program overseen by Jamie's mother May McEwan, and sent them to the Madawaska Kanu Centre in Ontario to be coached by some of the world's top paddlers of that era.

Greg Barton, winner of world and Olympic titles as a flatwater kayaker, is another elite athlete whom I've come to know well, and his family background is not so different from the Hearns'.  Greg was born into a farming family in rural Michigan, and paddling was a big part of how the family had fun.  In the summertime they would head north to places like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for a few days of paddling and camping and fishing, and Greg's parents, Mike and Kathy, were involved in North American style marathon canoe racing.  Through this racing activity the family met Marcia Smoke of Buchanan, Michigan, who had won a bronze medal in flatwater kayaking at the 1964 Olympics, and she was a major source of knowledge and inspiration not just for Greg, but also for his brother Bruce, who made the 1976 and 1980 U.S. Olympic teams, and his sister Connie, who raced in the junior world championships.

And so the Hearns and Greg Barton are examples of top paddlers whose parents were not champions themselves, but did lots and lots of "for fun" paddling and had contact with accomplished racers who went on to serve as mentors and role models for the kids.

And now we circle back around to little old me.  My parents were Sara and Elmore.  What were they like?  Well, I wouldn't describe them as sedentary, but they weren't really athletic, either.  (My dad did run some track in school, but by the time I was born he'd settled into life behind a desk as a very busy lawyer.)  They appreciated the value of the outdoors, but they were not "rugged outdoorsmen."  On family outings they liked to get out and walk, but stuck to fairly easy day hikes in gardens and nature centers and similar "developed" areas.  For accommodations, we stayed in motels; we never, ever camped.

They did like to swim and be around the water, though, and we took a few beach vacations on the Gulf coast.  And their best friends had a cabin on a quiet section of the Spring River at Hardy, Arkansas, and that's where I got my first taste of canoeing.

The best thing my parents ever did, as far as my evolution into a paddler goes, was send me to summer camp in western North Carolina.  I spent the first several summers doing some hiking and camping and horseback riding and generally growing to love the outdoors.  Then in my fourth summer, at age 13, I'd become physically mature enough to handle the big open canoes that were the staple of summer camp fleets back then, and that's when I really started to see what paddling was all about.  The canoeing staff taught us the strokes and the skills and techniques for running a whitewater river, and from that point on there was no way I'd rather spend a day than out on a playful mountain stream.  When I got home from camp at the end of the summer my mother could see how excited I was about it all, and promptly enrolled me in an "intro to kayaking" continuing ed course over at Memphis State University.  The sessions were all in a swimming pool and mostly involved learning to roll (which I struggled to do), but it was as good as anything we had here in our whitewater-poor part of the country.

I spent another decade going to camp each summer, and that was my chance to develop as a paddler.  The camp's program was not racing-focused, however, so it wasn't until the early 1990s that I ventured into the sport's competitive realm.  I quickly realized I still had much to learn, and I set about the business of doing so while posting often-humbling results in whitewater slalom races.

There were definitely moments when I wanted to wail in anguish, "Oh... OH........ if only my parents were paddlers too, if I'd gotten started at a younger age, or if I'd gotten to grow up someplace where I could have paddled more often... then I might actually be good at this!"

Now, just a few days before my 59th birthday, I'm pretty much over such feelings.  If my parents taught me anything, it's that no activity I participate in should be about me.  Sure, I should try to do it as well as I possibly can, but I should always look for ways to make the activity better for all the other participants, too.  And the better I am at it, the greater that responsibility is.  (That's a big part of why I started up this blog--I hope that in some small way, somebody will benefit from the thoughts I share here.)

Meanwhile, my parents did everything I could ever have asked of the people they were.  They could have done more if they were expert paddlers, or if they'd known people who were expert paddlers; but they weren't and they didn't.  And that's okay.  What's important is that they cared, and they supported me in every way they could even though I was having to find my own way most of the time.

And even though I never got as good as the people I talk about above, you know... I'm good enough.  Good enough to go out and paddle my boat for a lifetime of enjoyment and physical fitness.  I'll still try to finish as high as I can whenever I line up to race with a few dozen other people, but the greatest privilege is simply being one of that few dozen.  As the narrator of the classic film Fast and Clean puts it, "The road to the top is started by many and finished by few."

The day will ultimately come when I join my mom and dad in death, and all I can hope for is that I'll be remembered for the same reasons they are: that I tried to make the world around me better, not worse, and that I lived life the best way I knew how.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Whew, it's hot... but the river is rising

The Mississippi River is on a fairly dramatic rise: a week ago it was flowing at a little below zero on the Memphis gauge, but in the next ten days or so it's forecast to get up to over 11 feet above zero.  That might surprise many locals, considering it's been sunny and hot, with very little rainfall, here in Memphis in the last several weeks.  But up in the Midwest, particularly in Indiana and Ohio, they've had more rain than they can deal with.  As of this writing some 11 inches have fallen in parts of those states, with more rain in the forecast.  One site of catastrophic flooding is the White River watershed northeast of Indianapolis.  The White flows southwesterly across the state of Indiana until it joins the Wabash River, and the Wabash, in turn, flows into the Ohio.  And as everybody knows (or should know), the Ohio is one of the major tributaries of the lower Mississippi.  And so that floodwater from the Midwest will be bringing the river level up here at Memphis over the next few days.

On Thursday I got in the boat for the first time since the race last weekend.  When I reached the mouth of the harbor I found a barge rig coming upriver from beneath the Harahan Bridge, so I went out and did some surfing.  The waves weren't the best ever, but they were decent, and I got a few good rides.

My mother's funeral is scheduled for this Tuesday, and after that my sister and I will begin the long process of handling estate matters and cleaning out my mother's house.  I expect that to dominate my life for the next couple of months, but in these days between my mother's death and the funeral, I'm feeling like I have all kinds of time on my hands.  For months, chores related to my mother were part of my daily routine--grocery shopping, paying bills, speaking with doctors and nurses and caregivers, and just going over to her house and sitting with her as the final weeks of her life ticked away.  Now, suddenly, all those chores have vanished.

On Friday morning I got out for a bike ride, taking the Greater Memphis Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.  This weekend we're having the highest temperatures of the year so far, with the afternoon highs exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  So it was a good, sweaty ride Friday, and maybe that was what the doctor ordered.  For the last month or so I've been having terrible luck with flat tires on my bike, and I got yet another one on this ride.  Fortunately, this flat didn't occur until the very end of the ride, just a few hundred meters from my house.

I was back in the boat yesterday morning.  There was no barge traffic on the river, so I just paddled steady for 50 minutes.  The sun was beating down, but at least there was a breeze from the south that offered some relief.  The only trouble was that I had to paddle the last two kilometers to the dock heading north up the harbor, with the breeze at my back.

It was already 90 degrees as I drove down to the river at a quarter past nine o'clock this morning.  I did much the same thing in the boat as yesterday.  Back on the dock I took a bath under the hose, but even as the cool water flowed over me, sweat oozed from my pores.  As I drove home around 11 o'clock, the temperature display in my car registered as high as 99 degrees.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

If you've been reading this blog in the last few months, then you know that my mother's condition has been a major concern in both my paddling life and my life, period.

She passed away at about ten o'clock yesterday morning.  Her caregiver called me with the news as I was driving home from my weekend in the Saint Louis metro area.

My life won't be getting "back to normal" anytime soon, what with all the funeral arrangements and estate management and chores like that.  But as one of my best friends said, "She is at peace.  The worst part of the journey is over."

I think my dad took the picture above, and I think it's somewhere in Europe--France or Italy, maybe.  My sister might know for sure.  I know my parents traveled to those locations during the decade or so before my dad died in 2005.  But it doesn't matter, really... it's just a good picture that captures the person my mom was very nicely.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Touring around Saint Louis a little

When I arrived in Saint Louis Friday afternoon I made a trip to Ted Drewes Famous Frozen Custard--"A Saint Louis Tradition Since 1929."  Treated myself to a regular-size mint chocolate chip concrete.  Mighty good.  You may think athletic types like me always eat healthy, but you would be wrong!  Okay, I do try my best to eat a healthy diet in the interest of both athletic performance and general health as I move inexorably toward old age.  But I've been known to indulge when I'm on vacation.

After the race yesterday I drove back to Saint Louis to take in a Cardinals baseball game at Busch Stadium.  Before the game I stopped in one of the eateries outside the ballpark and continued my slovenly eating ways by wolfing down a big old cheeseburger and fries.

This was the scene as the Redbirds took the field for the 6:15 PM first pitch against the Colorado Rockies:

Pictured here are Matthew Liberatore on the pitcher's mound; catcher Ivan Herrera; first baseman Alec Burleson; second baseman J.J. Wetherholt; third baseman Blaze Jordan; and shortstop Masyn Winn.  Out of the picture, but no less important, are the outfielders: Everson Pereira in left, Nathan Church in center, and Jordan Walker in right.

I attended a Cardinals game when I came up for this race weekend last year, too.  As I mentioned in my last post, I was the fastest solo finisher in last year's race, and conditions were good for fast times.  And the Cardinals did their part by playing a nice, crisp, well-rounded game in which they beat the Chicago Cubs five runs to zero.  This year's race was more of a slog, and I wasn't able to win my class.  And the Cards picked up on that theme yesterday evening.  It was a slow game with deep pitch counts, lots of walks, heavy traffic on the bases, and many pitching changes.  The game was more than three hours old by the time the Rockies completed their 8-6 defeat of the Cardinals.  I actually left after the eighth inning, because my motel in Alton was more than a half-hour away and I was ready to go to sleep.

Here's the parking lot outside Busch Stadium.  All right, you sharp-eyed readers: can you find my vehicle in this sea of parked automobiles?  Can you?  Can you???  You might need your magnifying glass... or just zoom in, this being the 21st century and all.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

It's summertime, and the racing ain't easy

I was up bright and early yesterday morning so I could have some breakfast, get my boat to the race start at Grafton, drive my vehicle down to the finish at Alton, catch the shuttle bus back to Grafton, and attend to all the myriad details involved in being ready to race.

Finally I was in my boat, warming up in the mouth of the Illinois River, as the 9:30 AM start time approached.  Soon enough the gun fired, and we were off.

As we paddled out of the Illinois and onto the Mississippi River, we found ourselves behind a downstream-moving barge rig.  I moved over to try my luck on its wake, but while I got an occasional brief ride, my speed even shooting up over 15 kilometers per hour a couple of times, mostly it was a confused mess.

Meanwhile, over to my left Missouri resident Bryan Hopkins was starting to build a lead.  Figuring he must be enjoying faster, smoother current over there, I edged that way.  Over to the right, Kristofer Oman and Thien Le, paddling a tandem surfski, were cruising out to an even bigger lead, and I knew it was wise to focus on the solo competition.

Over the next half-hour or so I ate into Bryan's lead, taking advantage of small waves coming off the barge rig that occasionally wandered our way.  They weren't big enough to surf, but I could ride them the same way I ride the wake of another paddler, and at times I was moving at more than 13 kph with minimal effort.  I tried to stay relaxed and paddle as efficiently as I could as the mid-morning sun beat down.

As we moved into the middle third of the 15-mile (~24-km) race, I overtook Bryan and looked to press the advantage with subtle surges, using the little bumps whenever they presented themselves.  This was the first time I'd ever raced Bryan head-to-head, and I was getting the impression that I had the edge on him in speed.  However, he's long been one of the top athletes in the longer-distance races around the state of Missouri, and I knew he would be in his element if the race became a test of endurance, and that was not unlikely on this warm, humid day.

As that middle third of the race wore on, I maintained a lead of a few boatlengths and I was starting to think I had Bryan and the other competitors where I wanted them.  But, as if on cue, Bryan surged back into the picture over to my left.  I edged over to get onto his right-side wake, and he didn't seem to like me doing that.  A minute or so later I dropped back onto his stern wake, and I intended to stay there as long as I could.  If I could keep it close enough for the race to come down to a sprint in the final few hundred meters, I liked my chances.

Unfortunately, as we moved past the Ameren Ue Sioux power plant on the Missouri side of the river, I could feel some deeper fatigue creeping in.  Around that same time, I fell off Bryan's stern wake.  I told myself not to panic: I'd reeled him in before, and hopefully I could do it again.

Just past the power plant the Mississippi makes a gradual bend to the right to reveal the town of Alton, and the Clark Bridge that carries U.S. 67 across the river.  According to race director Craig Heaton in the pre-race meeting, it's about 5 miles (8 km) to the finish from here.  The finish line is a short distance upstream of the bridge.

And so, I spent the final third of the race gazing at that bridge, which didn't seem to be drawing any closer no matter how much I paddled.  And it was clear that Bryan had the edge on me in strength.  As we entered the final straightaway toward the finish, he built his lead on me to over a minute.  Once in a while I would take a noticeable chunk out of that lead--I seemed to be better than he at keeping my boat speed up in rough water from passing motorboats.  But in general it seemed that Bryan was pretty safe where he was.  I held out hope that I could inch close enough to make it a race in the closing meters, but at the same time I was feeling worse and worse, and just ready for the whole silly thing to be done with.

In the end, there were no miracles.  Bryan kept me at bay and crossed the finish line 91 seconds ahead of me with a time of two hours, 2 minutes, 24 seconds.  Tandem surfskiers Oman and Le had cruised to the overall victory in 1:56:57, so Bryan and I settled for second and third overall and first and second in the solo competition.

Alma Hopkins, Bryan's wife, was the fastest female finisher.  The complete results are posted here.

My time was more than 17 minutes slower than what I clocked in last year's race.  Ouch.  Last year we had quite a bit more help from the current: I think last summer was wetter in the region than this summer has been, and also last year the lock and dam just below the Clark Bridge had its gates open, so we had good flow all the way through the finish.  Yesterday we seemed to hit the pool above the dam with three or four thousand meters to go, and I watched helplessly as the speed reading on my G.P.S. device plummeted to under 11 kph.  Meanwhile, though it wasn't the worst heat I've ever raced in, it was bad enough: I'm pretty sure we were pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we finished, and I could feel the humidity sucking it right out of me.  And of course there's no escape from the sun out on the Mississippi.  The race distance was indeed the advertised 15 miles, and then some: my G.P.S. device measured it at about 24.5 kilometers, and that's almost fifteen and a quarter miles.

All told, the race yesterday kind of felt like a death march compared to last year's.  Of course, I won the solo class in last year's race, and it's always easy to feel good after a win.  Watching Bryan walk away from me in the final third of the race yesterday was a little disheartening.  But, you know... he's a formidable competitor, and I haven't exactly been ramping up the training this year, for the reasons I've discussed in previous posts.  So, in most respects things went the way they should have gone yesterday, and I should be glad to have finished as high as second place.

I put the boat back on the car and drove to my motel for a shower and a catnap.  The awards were to take place at the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary across the river in West Alton, Missouri, and I thought I understood that they wouldn't be happening until around 3 o'clock, but when I got there around 2:30 I discovered that they'd already been given out.  Fortunately I was able to collect my medal and, more importantly, shake Bryan's hand and congratulate him on his effort.

I'm having a somewhat leisurely morning here in my motel in Alton.  In a little while I'll grind my gears into motion and head back to Memphis and resume life there.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

I'm ready to try another race

We started this week with some remarkably cool weather.  I think we only just barely hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday.  But now the wind has shifted to the south, and the heat is slowly but surely creeping back in.   It's feeling like a Memphis summer again.  I've tried my best this week to prepare myself for this Saturday's race, 15 miles (24.14 kilometers) down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.

I had a doctor's appointment Tuesday morning, so I didn't get down to the river until the mid afternoon.  I'm definitely a morning person when it comes to athletic stuff: by afternoon my energy is starting to wane a bit, and on many days my digestion acts up at that time of day.  I much prefer to do my training in the morning and spend the rest of the day working in the shop or whatever else needs doing in my non-athletic life.

And so it was that my stomach was a little upset Tuesday afternoon, but I managed to paddle for 40 minutes and do a set of six 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.

I was back on my morning schedule yesterday, and I did pretty much the same thing: 40 minutes in the boat, six 12-stroke sprints.

This morning I paddled for 30 minutes and did four 12-stroke sprints.  Then I started driving north--upriver--toward the greater Saint Louis area.  I'm in a motel now and hoping for a good night's sleep so I'll be ready to go in the morning.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

I can't believe this was an entire decade ago.  It's August of 2016, and here I am paddling on the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky.

I was on my way home after attending the USCA Nationals up in western Massachusetts.  Over the course of that trip I had paddled on the Connecticut River and the Deerfield River in Massachusetts, the Seekonk River in Rhode Island, the Hudson River in New York, and Salt Fork Reservoir in Ohio.  This little romp on the Ohio River concluded my tour of a few of our nation's great waterways.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Criminal charges, the temperature, and my time in the boat: all dropped

I'll start with a bit of good news: on Friday, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia announced that her office was dropping its charges against my friend David Hearn, a world champion and three-time U.S. Olympian in whitewater slalom.  In her motion to dismiss, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro noted

Based upon the initial reports provided by the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) and the USS. Park Police (“USPP”), the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia (“USAO-DC") presented the grand jury with evidence that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn. However, it was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional document.

While shrugging the blame off onto other agencies, Ms. Pirro provided no acknowledgement that her office had gone off half-cocked without a full grasp of the facts.  She certainly conveyed no remorse that I could discern.  At the very least, the government, including his ultimate accuser in the White House, owes Davey an apology.  But I expect none will be forthcoming.

Many are urging Davey to sue for the damages he's suffered as a result of this baseless indictment.  To be sure, he was forced to spend time and money that he'll never get back, and he admitted in an interview with The Atlantic that he was suffering mental stress as well.  Maybe he'll sue, but then again I can understand completely if he'd rather just put this all behind him and get on with his life.  The saddest thing is that Davey is almost certainly not the last person who will be subjected to this kind of harassment.

Hopefully right now Davey is just out there doing his thing, and that probably includes some bike riding (his preferred athletic pursuit in his post-Olympic life).  I'm trying to do my thing as much as possible, too, and for me that still involves paddling a boat.  Yesterday I was feeling sort of tired and sluggish, and I did a fairly easy 50-minute paddle in the harbor and out on the Mississippi.  Some cooler, more pleasant weather has moved in here, with the Fahrenheit temperature expected to stay below 90 degrees at least through tomorrow.

This morning I still wasn't feeling much giddy-up.  Fortunately, with a race coming up next weekend I can keep the sessions short.  I stayed in the harbor and paddled for 40 minutes, doing a set of eight 12-stroke sprints at two-minute intervals.  It was one of those sessions that had me feeling better afterward than I'd felt before.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Surfing! Riding! And there's a race coming up!

Memphis and the Mid South is known for its sweltering summer heat, and we've had just such weather here in the second half of July.  In the last couple of weeks the mercury has climbed up to about 100 degrees on the Fahrenheit thermometer, with heat index values exceeding 110.

But we've also had some pretty nice days during this period.  The weather here seems to go in cycles: it'll be oppressively hot, but then a front will come through, often with thunderstorms, and then for a couple of days we'll have a north breeze that brings in more pleasant air.  At some point the wind will shift back to the south, bringing in humidity from the Gulf of Mexico, and then we'll be back to miserably hot weather for several days.

Early last week we had some of the worst heat and humidity I can remember in at least the last decade.  Then a line of thunderstorms came through, and by Wednesday the weather was quite pleasant.  It was still pretty warm, with afternoon highs reaching the high 80s and even low 90s, but the wind was blowing from the north and the air was much less humid.  Over the next several days the wind shifted back to the south, bringing that humidity with it, and another hot spell settled in here over the weekend and lasted through Tuesday.  Then yesterday the wind shifted to the north and we had some scattered showers, and by this morning it was again much more bearable.

Back and forth it goes, and that's the story of summer around here.

It was still very hot on Tuesday, and I got in the boat hoping for some wet fun.  For much of this summer I haven't had much luck finding surfing opportunities on the Mississippi; most days there has been no commercial traffic in sight during the times I've paddled out there.  But on Tuesday I reached the mouth of the harbor and found a huge barge rig just below the trio of old bridges, coming upriver.  I moved onto the river and proceeded downstream at a leisurely pace, doing a few warmup sprints along the way, aiming to meet the rig once it was just above the Harahan Bridge.

I made my rendezvous with the commercial vessel and found some of the best surfing conditions I've seen in a long, long time.  The waves were big and beautiful, and they were linkable, too.  I would ride one for close to a minute, and "follow the hole" to keep myself in a trough or move onto a building wave.  I could almost hear Dawid Mocke's voice in my head: Nose in the hole, Elmore!  Okay, now FOLLOW the hole!!  Where's it going???

Once in a while my bow would plunge into the trough and throw up a burst of spray that sure was pleasant under the scorching sun.

I rode the waves for maybe a third of the distance between the Harahan Bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  That's not bad considering I was moving against the big river's current.  But no matter how well I navigate the waves, those towboats always move upriver faster than I do.  And so the waves eventually petered out as the barge rig put more and more distance on me.  Finally I ferried back over to the Tennessee bank and paddled back up toward the harbor.  The sun continued to beat down and I was baking by the time I was back in the harbor, so I remedied that with some remount practice.  At this time of year it's more about cooling off than practicing a skill, but it pays off nevertheless, especially when I travel someplace like the Miller's Run in South Africa.

I got back to the dock and treated myself to a lovely cool bath under the hose.  Too many of my paddling sessions this summer have felt like slogs, but with some awesome surfing and the attendant adrenaline and endorphin rushes, some remount practice, and a refreshing hose bath, Tuesday's visit to the river was about as perfect as it could have been on a blazing hot July morning, and I left the dock with a smile on my face.

Yesterday afternoon I rode my bike for a little over an hour.  This time last year I had a solid general fitness program going in preparation for the Grand Canyon, with lots of paddling and bike riding as well as stroke drills in the whitewater boat and some strength exercises.  This summer I haven't had the motivation of a big wilderness trip, and I've had numerous distractions that I've talked about in previous posts.  And so I haven't been on the bike as much, or done much of anything else besides bare-minimum surfski sessions on the riverfront downtown.  But in the last week I've gotten in a couple of decent rides and I hope I can keep that going for the rest of the summer.

This morning I got even bolder and signed up for a race!  The Firecracker canoe & kayak race is scheduled for a week from this Saturday on the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois.  I did this race last year, and for the last several weeks I've been debating whether to return: I'm not nearly as fit as I was a year ago, and of course it's always possible that a development in my mother's condition could require my presence here at home.  But this morning I made up my mind to go ahead and enter.  If it turns out I can't go, at least I'll have made a donation to the Mississippi River Water Trail organization that puts the event on.

Knowing that I might do this race, I've stepped up my efforts in the boat a little in the last couple of weeks--just some long surges and stuff, nothing too sophisticated.  Today, nine days out, was pretty much the last day to do any kind of substantial workout that my body will be able to internalize by race day.  So I went down to the river this morning with a simple but solid plan: I would paddle for 60 minutes, and from 0:10 to 0:50 I would do some two-minute pieces starting every fifth minute.  Within each piece, I would paddle at my likely Firecracker race pace for 90 seconds, and then push it up to sub-maximum intensity for 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, with Tuesday's fun in mind, I was also in the mood for some more surfing.  So I made a deal with myself: I would start my workout in the harbor, and if there was any well-positioned commercial traffic out on the river when I reached the harbor's mouth, I would suspend the workout and go out and try to surf.  After that, I would resume the workout for whatever portion of my 60 minutes remained.

It takes me around 15 minutes to paddle from the dock to the harbor's mouth, so at the 10-minute mark I started the first workout piece.  At the 15-minute mark I was able to see out onto the river, and there was indeed a barge rig in a good spot out there.  So I did my second piece en route to the towboat's wake, and then spent a few minutes seeing what kind of surfing I could do.  The waves weren't nearly as user-friendly as what I'd seen on Tuesday; they were sort of wandering right and left.  But I got a handful of brief rides.  Then I resumed the workout having missed just one of my pieces.

By the 40-minute mark I was headed back toward the harbor, planning to finish the workout there.  But there was a bigger barge rig coming upriver from beneath the Harahan Bridge, and even though I had planned to paddle for just 60 minutes, I had no pressing commitments back in my non-athletic life, and I reminded myself that this was my last day to get in some good hard paddling before race day.  So I finished the workout near the harbor's mouth, and then, with the barge rig now in a good spot for me to access it, I paddled toward it with high hopes for the kind of surfing I'd enjoyed on Tuesday.

On my approach I could see that the waves were big and beautiful.  But once I was in the middle of them, I realized that they were slightly out of my league.  Like the ground swell that I saw in South Africa six months ago, these waves were a little too big and moving a little too fast for a mere mortal like me to catch them.  I gave it my best effort, but I didn't get a single ride.

By now I was feeling pretty spent, so I headed back to the harbor.  I did a couple of remounts on the way back to the dock, and took out after 80 minutes of paddling.

So... it's been quite a week here in the dog days of summer.  Between now and race day I'll shorten the sessions a little, work on my speed, and hopefully get some rest.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

In my post yesterday I "name-checked" Mr. Bill Endicott, who served as coach of the U.S. whitewater team in the 1970s and 80s and 90s.  Under his leadership, the U.S. team went from barely noticed to a force to be reckoned with on the international stage.

Endicott was part of the crowd that showed up outside DC Superior Court last Thursday in support of Davey Hearn, who is charged with a felony count for allegedly "vandalizing" the Reflecting Pool.  That's him wearing the "Davey's a champ, not a scamp!" sign, which sums up perfectly the post I put up here on Saturday.

Taking the "selfie" alongside Bill & friends is Adam Van Grack, a paddler and former administrator in canoe & kayak racing's governing body, and now a member of the town council of Rockville, Maryland.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Regardless of water level, I try to savor the process

It's been an underwhelming high-water season on the Mississippi River.  The river typically reaches its peak flows in May and June each year, and more often than not that means topping the 30-foot mark on the Memphis gauge.  In the last decade we've seen it exceed 40 feet a couple of times.

But this year the river has struggled to rise above 20 feet.  That's the result of meager precipitation across the Midwest from the Rockies to the Appalachians.  In the last few weeks there have been some thunderstorm systems in the watershed, but they have not been large enough, intense enough, or long-lasting enough to bring about a significant rise in the river level.  Storms in the last few days are currently bringing the Memphis gauge reading from 9 feet to 16 feet--a noticeable rise, but not anything to write home about, really.

The "dry" season in the Mississippi basin occurs in the late summer and fall, and unless it's less dry than usual this year, I predict we'll be seeing a record-low river stage by late fall.

The nice thing about the Mississippi is that even at its lowest-ever flows, it's still got plenty of water for paddling.  And I've been doing so regularly, four times a week most weeks.  As I've noted in previous posts, I've been feeling pressed for time because of the demands of checking in with my mother on top of the duties of ordinary life.  A typical session has been less than an hour.  But once in a while I let myself linger on the river for over an hour, especially when there are opportunities for barge wake surfing.

I don't have any races planned, but that's not really so disheartening for me, as I've grown to realize that practice is where the magic happens.  Bill Endicott, the longtime coach of the U.S. whitewater team, has written that the high-achieving people he knows all share one thing: a fascination with the process.  The late Jerry Peters, who coached basketball at the high school I attended and was admired statewide for the consistent success of his teams, used to say that going to the gym for practice each afternoon was by far his favorite part of the job.

We've got a teenage athlete here in Memphis who has gained national recognition.  Miles Nesmith, who just graduated from Central High School, has been the nation's top high school triple jumper for the last couple of seasons.  He recently took the TJ title at the Nike Outdoor Nationals and qualified for the U.S team that will attend the under-20 world championships.  He'll embark on his collegiate career at Kansas State this fall.

This weekend Nesmith competed in the Ed Murphey Classic, an elite meet that occurs annually here in Memphis, and the Daily Memphian ran this story about his experience.  (There's a paywall, so I'll paste the text of the story at the bottom of this post.)

The reason I'm sharing this story here is that it's another example of somebody embracing the process.  Here was Nesmith in his first pro meet that he had no chance of winning, basically using it as a practice session by tinkering with his technique.  It was an opportunity to learn something about himself and the performances he might be capable of in the future, and in the end he actually exceeded expectations by finishing fifth overall among much more seasoned jumpers.

I love stories like that, and they provide me with inspiration during periods like this, when it feels like I'm doing the bare minimum in my athletic life while grappling with weightier issues elsewhere.  Even when I have time to paddle just a half hour or 40 minutes, no session is wasted.  I haven't mentioned it lately, but I'm still working hard on leg drive and rotating down in my hips, and these "quickie" paddles give me a chance to focus hard on that, whereas that's harder to do during longer paddles.

That's my profound thought for today.  Here's the text of that Daily Memphian article, written by high school sports reporter John Varlas:

Miles Nesmith has accomplished plenty in the few weeks since graduating from Central High.

A second straight state championship in the triple jump? Check.

An under-20 national title and a spot in the world championships next month? Check and check.

Competing and beating the pros? That’s also a check.

“My first pro meet,” the future Kansas State athlete said after rubbing elbows with some top-flight competition at the Ed Murphey Classic at the University of Memphis. The youngest competitor in the field — and the lowest seed — Nesmith gave a fine accounting for himself.

His second jump of 53 feet, 6.5 inches qualified him for the eight-man final. Nesmith then went 53-5, 52-1 and 53.1 to place fifth overall.”

Compared to last month’s nationals, when his winning jump was 52-5, it was a stronger performance overall. And it’s one that Nesmith said he needed now that he’s essentially “starting over” after accomplishing everything you could accomplish in the high school ranks.

“I was looking forward to it because I knew it was going to be kind of a precursor to what I’m going to see in college,” Nesmith said. “I’ve kind of established myself as the best (among high schoolers) so now it’s like starting all over again.

“Everybody here is better than me. Pro guys. College guys. But I just came out here and competed and got a PR.”

And from the moments that he took off the green Central polo shirt that he warmed up in, Nesmith looked like he belonged. His longest jump came after a several-minute delay while staff members tried to get a finicky laser measuring device to work.

He then rounded out the day by going over 53 two more times— all while using a shorter approach that allowed him to concentrate on some of the finer points perhaps more so than speed as he tunes up for the U20 worlds in Eugene, Oregon.

“It’s basically just bringing less steps, Nesmith said. “I went from 72 feet; usually I’m going from 102. The idea is just going back to the basics, working on the technique of the jump. Then you add more speed with the idea that you’ll jump a little farther.

“I’ve got a lot more in tank.”

And when he wasn’t jumping, Nesmith stationed himself at the end of the runway in an effort to soak up anything he could from his older and more experienced competitors.

After all, they’ve already been where Nesmith is hoping to get to.

“I’m watching these guys who have been to world championships, been to Olympic Games,” he said. “Jordan Scott, he’s No. 3 in the world. I could have been in the tent but I was watching.

“It was surreal and I was just trying to take everything in.”

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Character under indictment

I mentioned back on June 21 that David Hearn, a world champion and three-time U.S. Olympian in whitewater slalom, had been arrested for touching the peeling liner of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, not far from his home.  A grand jury went on to grant U.S. Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro an indictment of Davey for doing $1000 of damage to the monument.  $1000 is the amount that makes such a crime a felony rather than a misdemeanor.

Davey's arraignment took place in District of Columbia Superior Court this past Thursday.  When he emerged with his legal team, he was greeted by a throng of supporters:

Personally, I am distressed to see a friend of mine forced to defend himself against this charge, which I believe has no merit.  As his lawyer points out, it’s an outrageous misuse of government power.

At the same time, I am heartened to see the robust turnout of people in support of Davey.  It's a reminder of a pretty basic truth: if you go through life being nice to people, treating them with respect, then people will show up for you when times are tough.  In the video I see dozens of people doing what they could and wishing they could do more.

Davey’s congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives, Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), released this statement:

Davey Hearn would never desecrate a federal building or landmark by writing his name on it or affixing his name illegally to it or engaging in any other kind of political graffiti, vandalism or delinquency. He would never intentionally damage government property. Whether we are talking about the White House, the Reflecting Pool or the Kennedy Center, Davey would never try to alter, bulldoze or redesign federal property or buildings without explicit Congressional authorization and direction. Davey is an honorable and law-abiding citizen who has won real giant prizes, including eight world championships. He did so without any corrupt practices and only through his magnificent hard work and surpassing dedication to the team. He would never try to undercut or sabotage anyone, much less our entire community.

"I hope—and will do everything I can to guarantee—that Davey gets true due process and a fair trial on these absurdly trumped-up charges. It is only a matter of time before an impartial judge and jury recognize that this case has been built on a Kafkaesque arrest and Orwellian charges.

I know some people will read that and say “Pssh.  Just another politician exploiting this incident to make some political hay.”  And yes, it is a political statement, with its thinly-veiled digs at our nation’s 47th president.

But the thing is, I’ve known Davey myself for several decades.  At first I was just a fan as I began to dabble in racing after a decade or so of recreational whitewater paddling.  Eventually, as my involvement in racing increased, I got to know Davey and become his friend, and I learned that all the things I'd admired about him as a wide-eyed fanboy were in fact honest-to-God true.  If you took the Scholastic Aptitude Test in high school, then maybe you encountered this analogy:

ostensible : real :: reputation : character

Throughout his career as a celebrated athlete in the paddling world, Davey's reputation and his character were one and the same.  His sportsmanlike way of conducting himself at big races, both in the boat and on the bank, was the same way he conducted himself at practice on the Potomac/C&O Feeder Canal in the dead of winter.  What you saw was what he was.  Always.

And everything Rep. Raskin says about Davey in his statement is consistent with everything I've observed first-hand.  Davey is an honorable and law-abiding citizen.  He does believe in hard work and dedication to the team.  I have never seen him try to undercut or sabotage anyone.  Just consider Davey's career-long rivalry with fellow U.S. team member Jon Lugbill, to whom Davey settled for second place at five (five!) world championships.  I have to believe that that gnawed at Davey sometimes, but in public statements he always strove to see the good in his results and always spoke well of his rival.  And, he knew that his own success was ultimately tied to a healthy training relationship with Lugbill.

I mention above that I believe the criminal charge against Davey is false.  This belief does have some basis in fact, most notably that there had been news reports of the Reflecting Pool's liner peeling loose at least few days before Davey's arrest on the 19th of June.  But my knowledge of Davey's character is the main reason I believe he is innocent.  I'm not at all surprised that Davey would be curious about a delaminating liner, because such things are literally his field: as a racer he designed and built his own boats by laminating composite materials, and he later owned a business that sold composite materials to boatbuilders and other craftsmen.  Meanwhile, anybody privy to Davey's social media posts knows that he's not a fan of the current administration in Washington, but it's just not his style to act out destructively.  It's not the Davey I know.  These words would probably not get anywhere in a court of law, nor should they.  But they are sufficient for my own peace of mind, and I will be very surprised if the prosecution produces even a scrap of evidence that proves me wrong.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

I'm not doing any racing or any real training these days, but a number of my friends are, so here's a photo I lifted from the Face Book page of my friend Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas.  He participated in the Freedom Race in Missouri on Saturday, and this is what he wrote about it:

Great day to be racing. The Freedom race is a 63 mile trip down the beautiful Missouri River. We had almost ideal conditions with only a slight but persistent headwind with only one barge to deal with. Got the solo surfski win and was 3rd overall behind 7-man Joe’s boat and one good double surfski. Christel shuttled me with Nebo waiting at the finish line!

"Joe's boat" was a 7-person craft led by race director Joe Mann.  The "one good double surfski" was paddled by my friend Scott Cummins, with whom I paddled and camped in Kentucky a couple of weeks ago, and a guy named Jeff Behrns.  Christel?  That would be Mike's wife, while Nebo is another very important member of his family, his dog.  That's Nebo helping Mike celebrate in the picture.

Mike covered the 63 miles (approx. 102 kilometers) in six hours, 10 minutes.  He got some help from the river's flow, but not as much in a previous year when he clocked five hours, 39 minutes.  Even that latter time is longer than I care to be sitting in a boat competing, but like I said, these days I'm not racing and Mike is, so Mike has the right to do whatever he wants.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

A not-so-sunny outlook as summer settles in

This time a week ago I was nursing some strained oblique muscles.  I'm happy to report that that particular ailment seems to be a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, I'm still living with pain and tightness in the right side of my neck.  I haven't mentioned it in a while, so here's a quick history: I arrived home from my trip to South Africa on the 5th of February.  On February 9, I received the second of two shingles vaccine shots, and by the following day I was feeling awful.  For some 24 hours I suffered from severe chills that made me clench into a fetal position as I lay in bed.

By the day after that, I was feeling better.  But the one thing that lingered was the discomfort in my neck, and that condition has lingered, and lingered, and lingered some more.  I sought treatment from my chiropractor, who performed adjustments and some dry needling, but after a few weeks of that I was doing no better.  My chiropractor suggested I get a neck brace to stretch the area, and I did, but after trying that for a couple of weeks I was seeing no change.

I'm pretty sure this is the result of the impinged nerves in my upper spinal cord that an MRI revealed in 2023.  Back then I got a couple of nerve-block injections that had no lasting effect; the next step would have been a surgical procedure that I think would have entailed fusing a couple of vertebrae, but that would have resulted in a loss of range of motion in my neck, and at that time, at least, that seemed worse than what I was already dealing with.

So, these days I'm just living with the discomfort, and I'm really at a loss as to what else I can do.  I keep hoping it'll all run its course and loosen up on its own, but as of now it's showing no signs of doing that.  Will it be with me for the rest of my life?  Hell if I know.  Meanwhile, I'm spending so much time worrying over my 90-year-old mother's condition that navigating the medical care system for my own woes is simply more than I can bear to consider right now.

The neck discomfort is definitely with me in the boat, but it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, so I'm trying my best to find some solace on the water.  There are no big races coming up, so I'm not really training for anything.  It's not like this time last year, when I had a robust fitness program going to get myself lean and mean for a trip through the Grand Canyon.  No, these days my paddling sessions are just mental health breaks, something that allows me to look back on each day and think, "At least one decent thing happened today."

On Saturday I went down to the river and paddled for 50 minutes.  Yesterday I paddled for 40 minutes.  I got something in.  It feels like the best I can do these days.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Poking along in early summer

I paddled Tuesday morning after a day of heavy rain on Monday.  The water was muddy in the harbor, and once I got out to the Mississippi I found lots of woody debris, including whole trees, floating down the river.  I suspect most of it had been flushed out of the Wolf and Loosahatchie Rivers, as it was all close to the Tennessee bank.

The pain was all gone from my right oblique abdominal area, and as if on cue, there were a couple of upstream-moving barge rigs down below the trio of bridges at the south end of downtown.  I decided I was ready to surf.  The rigs were moving in close succession, so I moved down and fell in behind the second one.  The waves in its train were tall with small, deep troughs, and I confess to being a little spooked by them, but a bit farther back the waves began to smooth out and I was able to get a few good rides.  Once the fun had run its course, I ferried over to the Tennessee bank for the paddle back up to the harbor, and I found myself threading through a gauntlet of sticks, logs, branches, and tree trunks.  I currently have a big surf rudder on my ski, and several times I got debris stuck on it and once I even had to get out of the boat to clear it off.  It all probably added close to ten minutes to my trek back to the dock.

I planned to do a bike ride Wednesday, but my rear tire was flat.  On further inspection, I discovered that the tire's wire lattice was starting to poke out.  In other words, I need a new tire, probably two, since I bought the two tires at the same time several years ago.  So I called off Wednesday's ride, and now I need to make time for some maintenance work.

[Edit: it turns out that what I thought was the wire lattice poking out was actually a small nail that had stuck into the tire.  As soon as my neighbor the Victory Bicycle Studio opens today, I'll go get their expert opinion on the condition of my tires.]

I went back to the river yesterday and, feeling tired in the boat, I was perfectly happy to find no barge traffic out on the river.  I paddled for a relaxed 40 minutes.  After several pleasant days, hotter weather was starting to move in by yesterday.  The forecast is showing Fahrenheit temperatures in the high 90s next week.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

My friend Joe Royer shot this lovely photo of Muscovy ducks on my dock at dusk six years ago.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Ebbing pain for me and some legal pain for a friend

I rode my bike for a little over an hour on Friday.  I hadn't been riding that much lately and it felt good to get back to some of that.

I'm happy to report that by yesterday morning the oblique muscles in the right side of my torso were feeling significantly better.  I could still feel some tenderness in the area once I was in the boat, however, so I limited myself to 40 minutes of easy paddling, and I stayed in the northern half of the harbor, because if I paddled down to the harbor's mouth and saw barge traffic out on the Mississippi, I might have been tempted to go out and surf.

This morning there was again just a hint of discomfort in my oblique as I launched from the dock, so again I kept the paddling to 40 minutes.  This time I did go down to the mouth of the harbor, but there was no commercial traffic on the river, so I was led not into temptation.

In other canoe & kayak news, one of this country's most decorated athletes was arrested next to the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.  Davey Hearn, a two-time world champion and three-time Olympian in whitewater slalom, was out on a bike ride and stopped to have a look at the pool's peeling paint.  When he reached down to touch one of the big loose flakes, National Park police swooped in, handcuffed him, and booked him on charges of vandalism.  The story has been picked up by news outlets across the nation and the world; you can read the BBC account here.  In the 30-plus years that I've known Davey I've never heard him utter anything even approaching a lie, so his claims in the story are perfectly credible to me.  Of course, I wasn't there and I don't know precisely what took place, but I'm happy to offer that bit of character-witness testimony.

It's actually not the first time Davey has run afoul of the authorities while doing little more than living his life.  30 years ago, a few months after Davey had won the second of his two world titles and a few months before he made the second of his three U.S. Olympic teams, the Potomac River rose to flood levels.  While most people looked out over the river and saw danger (and they weren't wrong, I should note), Davey looked out over the river near his home in Bethesda and saw "the perfect wave," and decided to go out and surf.  Before long there was a helicopter circling overhead, and police were yelling at Davey to get off the river.  When he did so, the cops descended and put him in cuffs, and the response of one officer in particular was way out of proportion with what the situation called for.  Eventually a judge dismissed the case, and I hope the same will occur when Davey reports to court on the 9th of July.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

A good weekend getaway and some muscle pain

My paddling friend from Louisville, Scott Cummins, and I agreed we were ready to escape the grinds of our respective lives for a couple of days.  So we met up for some camping and paddling last weekend at Land Between The Lakes.  This National Recreation Area sits between Kentucky Lake, a reservoir on the Tennessee River, and Lake Barkley, an impoundment on the Cumberland River.  It's roughly equidistant from our hometowns.

As I mentioned in a post back in January, Scott is now the owner of Venture Sport, Inc., an importer of racing kayaks from several South African manufacturers.  He brought along a couple of boats made by the Fenn company for me to try.

I've never claimed any great expertise in canoe and kayak design.  To be honest, it's just not an aspect of the sport that interests me all that much.  That doesn't mean I don't consider it important to have a well-designed boat; I absolutely do.  It's just that when the time comes for me to get a new boat, the process of evaluating the available designs and selecting the best one for me feels like kind of a nuisance that I want to be done with as quickly as possible so that I can get back on the water and, you know... paddle.

Over the years I've relied on this rule of thumb when shopping for a new boat: try out a few designs from the most reputable manufacturers, and go with the one that you feel most comfortable in.  My rule might not be especially empirical or grounded in scientific method, but it has served me well enough.  Last weekend I started out in a Sailfish, and I felt very comfortable in that boat.  It was stable but also glided very nicely.  After a while I switched to a Cuda, and I found it much less comfortable, mainly because of its lower primary stability.  The secondary stability was good, and I never really felt like I was going to flip, but I was still expending lots of energy just keeping my balance so I could take good effective strokes.  I should add that there was a great deal of slop out on Kentucky Lake from all the motorized boat traffic, especially on Saturday afternoon, so a fair amount of open-water survival skill was required.

If I were going to buy a new boat today (and I am not looking to do so at this moment, to be clear), it would seem that the Sailfish would be an obvious choice.  But Scott, who is sort of the opposite of me in his enthusiasm for boat design, had a lot to say that muddied the waters for me.  Like I said, it felt like the Sailfish was gliding very well, but Scott said the Cuda was the better boat in terms of hull speed.  Most of the races I do in my part of the country are on flatwater and easy water, so I do want my boat for these races to have the best hull speed possible.  But I also consider it very important to be comfortable in the boat, and I wasn't feeling that way in the Cuda.  When I was younger, simply logging more "seat time" in a boat was all I needed to achieve a greater comfort level, but I'm finding that less effective now as I approach my 59th birthday.

Anyway... like I said, I'm not really in the market for a new boat at this time.  My current boats are still in reasonably good condition, and having spent a lot of money lately on my forays into the Grand Canyon and South Africa, I'm in a mood to lay low and live simply for a while.  Nevertheless, it was good for me to get out and try something new, and I'm grateful to Scott for giving me that opportunity.  Hopefully in the coming months I'll have more chances to try out some boats and ready myself to make a good informed decision whenever I do spring for a new boat.  I encourage anybody reading this to consider Scott and Venture Sport for future purchases of high-performance kayaks.  The Venture Sport website doesn't seem to be working at this time, but you can find it on Face Book and other social media platforms.

Scott and I camped at Hillman Ferry Campground on the eastern shore of Kentucky Lake, where we enjoyed good access to the water.  We paddled a couple of hours each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  The area also has an interesting trail system, and we did a fun, if sweaty, day hike Saturday morning.  We spent some time soaking up the culture of small-town western Kentucky, and conversing by the campfire in the evenings.

Of course, here in the 21st Century every great adventure must be capped with a selfie:

I'm back home in Memphis now, and was back on the Memphis riverfront Tuesday morning for a relaxed 50-minute paddle.  I spent Tuesday afternoon working on a project I've had going for the last couple of months: my 110-year-old house has a lot of interior brickwork that has needed rehab work for as long as I've owned the place, and I've been "tuck-pointing," or scraping out the old crumbling mortar and replacing it with new mortar.

Wednesday morning I woke up with pain in the right side of my torso, and I'm pretty sure it was the tuck-pointing, not the paddling, I'd done on Tuesday that caused it.  I'd been up on the ladder and using lots of elbow grease to press the new mortar into all the crevices I wanted to get it into, and it was just the sort of effort that could strain my oblique abdominal muscles.

Over years of following baseball, I've learned that players who sustain "oblique" injuries often end up missing lots and lots of games, so I knew I had to proceed gingerly in the boat when I went back down to the river yesterday morning.  Sure enough, I was feeling a little stab of pain with each stroke on my right, so I limited myself to just 20 minutes of very easy paddling.  I hoped that some light engagement of the ailing muscles would be helpful in the healing process, and since then that seems to be what's happened: this morning the area is still sore, but not nearly as bad as it was on Wednesday.

Summer begins for real this Sunday, and I'm settling in for a long, hot, and relatively quiet one.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

In 2020, Adam Davis and I got together many Saturdays to paddle all up and down the Mississippi River at Memphis.  It was our way of making the best of a global pandemic.

The Mississippi was quite high that spring and summer, providing vast liquid real estate for us to explore.  In this photo, we're nearing the lower end of the Loosahatchie Chute, from which there is a lovely view of the downtown skyline.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

I'm still here, I promise

Well, it's been nearly two months since I last posted something on this blog.  That's as long a break from blogging as I can remember taking since I started this thing up in 2012.  I thank any readers who are still checking in here, who haven't given up on me.

I've had a lot to deal with in my non-athletic life, most notably a sharp decline in my mother's health.  I've been spending much less attention to paddling and all the other things I do.

That doesn't mean I haven't been paddling at all.  I've been getting in the boat four times a week most weeks.  But most of my sessions have been short--40 or 50 minutes, occasionally 60.  It's been feeling like an effort "just to get something in."

But that doesn't mean my paddling sessions haven't been valuable.  Certainly, they're vital to my mental health, and I've been using them to focus on stroke mechanics and other technical matters.

Meanwhile, there's one particular course on my local landscape that I try to navigate at least once a year: a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This image, which Adam Davis generated with his G.P.S. device when he and I paddled around the Bar a few years ago, shows what's involved:

Paddling around the Bar isn't possible when the Mississippi is low, because the Loosahatchie Chute is dry land.  A level of 15 or 16 feet on the Memphis gauge is what I'd call the minimum for a trip around the Bar, but because of a large sandbar up at the north end (deposited in the big flood of 2011), you have to either do some portaging or paddle a lot of extra distance to get around it.  So I like to wait until the river is flowing higher than 20 feet.

The numbers on the image above are mile markers.  Adam started and finished at the cobblestone landing, and as you can see, his total distance was a little over 10 miles.  I, meanwhile, keep my boat at the marina (circled in yellow) a mile or so up the harbor from where Adam launched.  So my total distance for a trip around the Bar is about 12.5 miles.

Besides doing this paddle at least once a year, I have one other goal each time I do it: to break two hours.  I think the fastest I've ever done it is a little under an hour and 50 minutes.  I also sometimes fail to break two hours.  There are all kinds of variables that have an impact on my speed.  The eddies along the Tennessee bank are stronger at some levels than at others, and that affects how fast I can do the long pull upriver.  The higher the river is, the more the northern end of the Bar and the southern end of Mud Island are underwater, and the more distance I can therefore cut off.  A north strong wind slows me down as I paddle upstream, and a strong wind slows me down in the downstream leg; a strong south wind also creates rough water out in the river's main channel, and that slows me down further.  And of course, sometimes I'm fit or well-rested or otherwise ready to go fast, and sometimes I'm not.

SO... with all that background info laid out, I'll get on with the main topic of this blog post: my circumnavigation of the Loosahatchie Bar yesterday, at which time the Mississippi River was at 20.4 feet on the Memphis gauge, thanks to rain in the Southeast and Midwest during the week.  The wind was just a light northwest breeze and the river was calm, and I was feeling reasonably good, so I figured I could break two hours without too much trouble.

I eased into a comfortable pace as I paddled out of the harbor and headed upstream.  I passed a couple of checkpoints seemingly on pace for a comfortable sub-two-hour trip: I passed beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge (at the 1-mark on the image above) less than 25 minutes in, and I reached the mouth of the Wolf River (at the 3-mark on the image above) less than 50 minutes in.

I continued on up past the Maynard C. Stiles sewage treatment plant, and ferried across the main channel in the same place that Adam and I did the day he generated the image above.  That last stretch to the upper end of the Loosahatchie Bar is always a bit of a slog, as there's a lot of current to fight.  I think of it as the paddling equivalent of summiting a mountain peak.  The water was quite shallow up there, and I hit the bottom with my paddle a few times and even dragged my rudder a time or two.  But it was better than having to portage.

There's a narrow little channel, somewhat visible in the image above, that I was able to navigate yesterday, although it was quite overgrown with brush--maybe the result of the river being low for so long this spring.  For a minute I was afraid I was paddling into a dead end, but I found a slot that spit me out into the open Loosahatchie Chute.

I tried to stay relaxed as I moved down the Chute, and let the current do as much of the work as possible.  But I was starting to sense that I'd fallen off the pace a bit.  There are a couple of houses on the river-right bank that I like to get to by the 90-minute mark, and I came a couple of minutes short of doing that.  Then, as I reached the lower end of the Bar and started working my way back into the current of the main channel, I saw a barge rig coming upriver that would force me to make an abrupt crossing of the channel rather than take a more direct line toward the entrance to the harbor.  I looked at my watch and realized I would have to keep the hammer down the rest of the way to have any chance of breaking two hours.

Did I mention that I was getting tired?  Paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar always takes it out of me.  The long upstream leg, the ferry across the channel, the fight to reach the "summit"... it all combines to make this 12.5-mile circuit more like 16 or 17 miles on flatwater.

Paddling from the harbor's mouth back to my marina typically takes me about 15 minutes at a comfortable cruising pace.  Yesterday I had passed the one-hour-47-minute mark when reached the harbor's mouth, so there would be nothing comfortable about this home stretch if I was going to come in under two hours.  As soon as the marina came into view, I pointed my boat at the end of it where my dock is, and tried to stay locked on that line the rest of the way.  I passed familiar landmarks like the monorail bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and these gave me a good idea of the minimum pace I had to maintain.  I passed beneath the A.W. Willis Bridge at about 1:58:30, and I knew then that I would make it... barely.  I kept the boat gliding and reached the dock with less than 20 seconds to spare.

I have now paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar for 2026.  It's possible I'll do it a time or two more; historically, I've gotten it in three or four times each year.  But my goal is to do it once, and now I have.

I was dead tired the rest of the day yesterday, and this morning I knew an easy recovery paddle was in order.  I went back to the river and got in the boat and just tried to relax and enjoy the morning.  Paddling felt labored because of my fatigue, but I knew that doing some easy paddling would help me recover and feel better sooner rather than later.

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Who's ready to get OCEAN FIT?

The South African championships in surf lifesaving took place last week at Kings Beach, Nelson Mandela Bay, near the Eastern Cape city of Gqeberha (Port Elisabeth).

I've mentioned before that participation in surf lifesaving is a cultural staple in South African beach communities including Fish Hoek, where I was back in January.  It's also popular in Australia and New Zealand, and I believe it's no coincidence that these nations are the cream of the global crop in ocean sports like surfski racing.  My coaches during the camp I attended in January, Dawid and Jasper Mocke, are both many-time medalists in surf lifesaving competition, and their children are well on their way to distinguished careers of their own.  Dawid, who served as a venue announcer at the South African championships, is one of the voices calling the action in the video below.

In utilitarian terms, the main purpose of this activity is to train people for employment as beach lifeguards.  But for many participants it leads to a lifetime of exploring what they can do with their bodies.  In the video, you'll see athletes running both on the sand and into the surf, swimming, paddling surfskis, and competing on boards.  It's not hard to see how a kid who starts surf lifesaving before age ten develops a Herculean cardiopulmonary capacity by his late teens.  I thought about that a lot as I was gasping for breath on the Miller's Run back in January.

I'll point out one more detail: each surf lifesaving club has its own color scheme for the caps that the athletes wear.  Those are Fish Hoek caps in the thumbnail image for the video.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

It’s a sure sign of spring: the arrival of the purple martins down at the marina on the riverfront where I keep my boat.  I first noticed them the morning of March 21: that day there were just two, and I think they were “scouts” getting the house ready for their flock.  By this past Friday morning there were at least a half dozen of them here.  (The two visible in the photo were the only ones bold enough to stick around when I approached with my camera.)

The purple martins are one of those simple pleasures I enjoy when I go down to the dock, and I think that's an important part of being an athlete, to savor the little things about the places you go to train.  To like those places.  I genuinely like the environs of the harbor and the entire Memphis riverfront, and I think that helps motivate me to get my paddling in on a regular basis.  Similarly, when I had my little dry-land routine going this past winter, I chose a spot in the Greenbelt Park overlooking the Mississippi River to do it.  The routine felt hard and tedious at times, but I enjoyed being down there and I almost always came away feeling better than I'd felt beforehand.

I think this identification with a place is something accomplished athletes in all sports share.  A dedicated basketball player will probably tell you that he enjoys being in the gym each day, with the echoes of the ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor, the popping sound he hears when he takes a shot and hits nothing but net, even the sweaty smell in the locker room.

The more you like the place where you do your sport, the more eager you'll be to get to work each day and make yourself accomplished in that sport.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.