Sometimes life is a pain in the neck

That nerve/muscle pain in the right side of my neck is a real adventure, and not an enjoyable one.  My chiropractor has adjusted it twice now, last Monday and the Monday before that, and she's scheduled to do it again tomorrow.  Each time I thought I could detect some relief, but as the week wore on the area seemed to settle back into a painful state.  On any given day it's typically felt better in the morning and worse in the evening, probably because I manage to relax while I'm asleep at night but get stressed and tense during the day.

I guess the good news is that I can still paddle; the neck pain makes my general existence unpleasant but doesn't interfere specifically with what I do in the boat.  This past week I got in steady sessions with lots of stroke practice on Monday, Thursday, and today, and performed workouts Tuesday and yesterday.  On Tuesday I did three 8-minute pieces at anaerobic threshold, with 4 minutes recovery.  Yesterday I paddled for 80 minutes total, and for the hour from 0:10 to 1:10, I did five-minute intervals in which I paddled two minutes at 64 strokes per minute, two minutes at 72 spm, and one minute at 80 spm.  In both workouts I was feeling it in my muscles by the end, but my lungs handled the load just fine.

The unseasonably warm weather has continued over the last week; by late in the week we were flirting with record highs for the date.  When I checked the Internet radar yesterday morning, I could see that heavy rain was on the way, so I got myself down to the river early and was in the boat by a few minutes after 8 o'clock.  I got drizzled on a little, but the serious rain didn't move in until just after I'd gotten back home.  The water level, which has been very low for the last five or six months, has been coming up in recent weeks in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way.  Yesterday morning the Mississippi River was at 4.8 feet on the Memphis gauge, and today it was up to 8.2 feet.  The rain that fell yesterday was part of a large system that moved across the upstream watershed, and by next weekend the river is expected to rise to over 21 feet.

The race down at Ocean Springs is now just two weeks away.  My plan is to continue my preparation and keep trying to find some relief for my neck pain.

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