My neck continues to be a source of misery. The chiropractor adjusted it again last Monday, and for the next couple of days I could tell that the discomfort had eased, but by the end of the week it was feeling as bad as ever. When I return to the chiropractor's office tomorrow, she's going to perform some dry needling in hopes of stimulating a more lasting healing process.
After paddling just an easy 40 minutes yesterday, I planned to do something more substantial today: a lap around the Loosahatchie Bar. Right now the Mississippi River, at 21.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, is high enough to do it for the first time in at least six months. (The bare minimum for doing it is around 16 feet, but at that level there's a big sandbar at the north end of the Bar that you have to paddle around, and even then you're either scraping the bottom or getting out and portaging.)
Yep, that was my plan. But the weather had other ideas. Today there's a fierce south wind blowing, with some strong thunderstorms and maybe even a tornado or two moving through this evening. On top of my neck woes, that made it seem unwise for me to be out all alone on the big river. Paddling around the Bar is something I feel like I ought to do at least once a year, but the year is young, and surely this isn't the only time in 2026 that the river will be high enough for me to do it.
Instead, I paddled for 70 minutes, mostly in the harbor. I pushed the pace at times, especially while coming back north with the wind at my back. I did an impromptu bridge-to-bridge sprint for time, and clocked 2:11. One might think that with such a strong tailwind I should be much faster than that, but it's been my experience that there are limits to that advantage. When the wind is dead calm I have a smooth surface to paddle on, while with the wind blowing like it is today the surface is very bumpy, and I think those bumps slow the boat down just like bumpy dry-land terrain slows down a car or a bike or a similar vehicle.
After that sprint I got a good full recovery while paddling easy, and then I timed myself over the second half of the bridge-to-bridge course (the approximate halfway point is noted in the video). In my workouts this winter I've been covering this distance in 64-65 seconds, but this time I wanted to see if I could do it at or below 60 seconds. I pushed the stroke rate up over a hundred per minute, and reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge right at 60 seconds.
After that I paddled mostly steady for the rest of the 70 minutes. My neck ailment, while not directly impeding the act of paddling, continued to make me blue. I really hope tomorrow's dry-needling session will help me turn a corner on that.
I do have one bit of more positive health news. If you've read this blog's posts from last fall, then you know I came down with a case of shingles shortly after my return from the Grand Canyon. I haven't mentioned it here in a long time, and that's because the symptoms were pretty much gone by mid November. But I could still see remnants of the rash for a long time after that. Just in the last week, however, it occurred to me that the rash is now all gone. Well, almost, anyway--there are still faint traces of it. But I doubt anybody who doesn't know I had shingles could look at it and tell there was ever anything there.
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