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.

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