My annual harbor time trial

In high school I ran on the cross country team, and our program had an annual tradition: The 12 Minute Run.  Once each season the whole team would line up on the school's old 440-yard track and see how much distance each runner could cover in 12 minutes.  I think we usually did it around mid to late September, just before the season started getting more serious, as sort of a "fun" measure of our training progress.

I suppose it would have been a fairly forgettable exercise except for one thing: The Nine Lap Club.  Anybody who could cover at least nine laps in 12 minutes got his name engraved on a plaque that the coach kept in his office.  It was a small fraternity: at the time I was on the team I think there were maybe five or six names on the plaque--the best runners the school had ever had.  I badly wanted to add my name.

I had not yet succeeded going into my senior season.  When I hit the track for my final attempt I was confident that my experience and maturity would carry me through at last.  But when our coach yelled "Stop!" I was a mere 30 yards or so shy of completing that ninth lap.  I stood there in disbelief as the coach went around recording each runner's final position.

I pleaded with the coach to schedule another 12 Minute Run, but he was unyielding, albeit empathetic: "I know it's tough, and I'm sorry, but you had your one last chance," is about what he said.  And just like that, I realized my name would never be on that plaque.  It was a somewhat cruel lesson in the fact that not all goals get achieved, no matter how virtuous and hard-working the aspirer.

In the last few years I've adopted a "12-Minute Run"-like tradition in my canoe and kayak training.  Each year in March, two weekends before my first race of the year down at Ocean Springs, I time myself over a lap of the harbor.  Each time I start at the same spot at the north end and paddle down to the harbor's mouth, round an imaginary buoy in a triangulated location, and return to the north end, finishing at the same place I started.  The distance is not quite six miles; it varies a little depending on the water level, for as the water rises the insides of bends get submerged and provide a straighter path through the more sinuous parts of the harbor.

Four or five years ago I timed myself on this course at about 50 minutes, 30 seconds, and ever since then the 50-minute barrier has been an enticing goal.  But in the years since I don't think I've broken 52 minutes.  Just as I aged out of high school and could no longer take a shot at nine laps in 12 minutes, I suppose I'll eventually age out of my physical ability to break 50 minutes, or even 60 or 70 minutes.

But for the time being, I continue to try.  And today I would have the aid of something I've acquired since last year's trial: my G.P.S. device.  (Yes, I know such things have been around for quite a while now, but I'm slow to adapt to new technology.  I still use an old flip-phone.)  This morning I made the following calculation:

Who says my B.A. in mathematics is doing me no good?

I would have to average 7.2 miles per hour to cover six miles in 50 minutes.  Since the course is actually slightly shorter than that, 7.2 mph would get me across the finish line with time to spare.  "Sure, that shouldn't be a problem," I thought as I sat in the comfort of my home.

I went down to the dock, did a few stretching exercises, got in my boat, and got about a 20-minute warmup by paddling from the marina to the north end of the harbor.  I did three 8-stroke sprints and maneuvered my boat into the "starting gate" between two submerged trees.  I started my G.P.S. timer and off I went.

And I very quickly realized that 7.2 mph was too tall an order, at least for the southbound leg.  There was a south wind blowing that hadn't seemed bad when I was standing on the dock, but now that I was paddling right into it, it felt burdensome indeed.  In the early going I was working hard to maintain about 6.8 mph.

In a typical race I'm paddling in a pack with two or three or four other competitors.  At times I'll take the lead and push the pace, but at other times I'll hang back and ride another boat's wake, conserving energy in the hope of making a breakaway move later on.

A time trial is different.  Time trials hurt.  All you think about during a time trial is your goal time and the pace you must maintain to achieve that goal.  Today there were no wakes to ride; it was just me out there pushing as hard as I could for as long as I could.  Knowing that I could not manage 7.2 mph into that headwind, I tried to keep my boat moving as close to that as I could in the hope of making up the deficit with the wind at my back, while not wearing myself out completely.

But the going would get tougher the closer I got to the harbor's mouth.  In its southern reaches the harbor widens and the exposure to a south wind increases.  In the last mile or so before the turnaround I watched my speed drop down to around 6.2 mph.

I made the turn around my imaginary buoy right at the 27-minute mark.  So I was on pace for a time of 54 minutes.  Even with the wind at my back, that four-minute deficit was a lot to make up.  As I got the boat back up to speed after the turn I found myself managing 7.3 mph without too much trouble, but estimating my average speed in the first half at 6.6 mph, I knew I could not handle the 7.8 mph required to offset that.

By now I was plenty taxed and I settled into the most efficient rhythm I could.  One of the drawbacks to having a tailwind is that sweat starts to sting my eyes, and a couple of times I had to stop paddling and splash water in my face.  As I moved farther and farther north toward the finish line, my goal appearing more and more obviously beyond my reach, my motivation began to wane.  But I tried my best to hang in there, and at least finish with a time I could feel good about.

As I rounded the last bend and the finish line came into view, I realized that a sub-52 time might be possible, and I bore down for one final charge.  In the last 100 meters or so I got my speed up to 7.8 mph.  But it wasn't quite enough to break 52 minutes.  I crossed the line with a time of 52:10.  My G.P.S. device measured the total distance at 5.91 miles.

All told, I'm satisfied.  It was not an ideal day for a fast time, because of both the wind and the water level (a medium-low 11.3 feet on the Memphis gauge).  And I resisted the temptation to give up as I slogged through the last couple of miles.  Maybe I won't ever get under that 50-minute barrier, but that's not anywhere near top of my list of goals in a race season, just like that 12-Minute Run wasn't really one of my top priorities as a cross country runner.

I paddled a relaxed pace back to the marina, trying to flush some fresh blood into my muscles.  The wind seemed to be picking up and I was glad to have the time trial done.

Now it's time to recover and start thinking about racing in thirteen days.  I look forward to competing against somebody besides myself and the clock.

Trying to pull myself together

This week I got myself registered for the first race of the season, the "Battle On The Bayou" down at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  The confirmation list includes one Mike Herbert, the three-time Olympian from Rogers, Arkansas, and he gets my nod for the role of overall favorite.  Meanwhile, it appears that the Pellerin triplets from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, are slated to compete in their Patriot K3.  They were 3-0 against me in that configuration last year and have earned the right to be favored over me at Ocean Springs.

But there's really no point in my even thinking about such things, for I can control nobody's actions but my own.  I intend to head down to the Gulf Coast as prepared and focused as I can be, just like always.  Right now, two weeks out from race day, my greatest challenge is shaking off some physical (lower back) and mental (numerous business-related distractions) discomfort.  Getting my mind right will simply be a matter of discipline and focus, but I'm a bit concerned about the lower back woes.  They started in the aftermath of my long paddle almost two weeks ago, and a mere long hard paddle doesn't usually give me lasting back pain.  I'm wondering if I might have done something else, that I've now forgotten, that put my back out.

As of this afternoon my back does seem to be improving slowly, and I'm just trying to avoid any activities that might aggravate the condition.  I paddled for 60 minutes on both Thursday and today, and besides doing some 8-stroke sprints both days I've done a few surges but otherwise not pushed my luck.  I got in another round of the strength routine yesterday.

My lower back lowers my spirits

Most of last week was unseasonably balmy, but when I went down to the river Saturday morning a blustery cold front had just moved through and I paddled for 100 minutes in a stiff north breeze and a Fahrenheit temperature in the low 40s.

My back stiffness persisted, and I was swamped by a combination of circumstances in my out-of-the-boat life.  So it seemed like a good time to take a little break.  I usually paddle on Sunday and do my strength routine Monday, but I took both those days off.  As a competitive person I was loath to miss a single session, but my more reasonable side told me I need a mental break as well as a physical one.

I was back on the water yesterday doing my usual Tuesday paddle with Joe.  Most Tuesdays we just do a steady loop of the harbor, but this time Joe asked me to come up with a workout that we could do together.  So I gave it some thought, and here's what I dreamed up: Joe would do a 30-second forward sprint; I, meanwhile, would take four backstrokes at the start, and then sprint forward and try to catch Joe before the expiration of the 30 seconds.  I had no idea how this would work out, but it ended up being interesting and fun.  We did about ten of these sprints, and I never did quite catch Joe but I came close several times.  Most importantly, it gave me some technical food for thought.  I'd done backstrokes-then-forward-strokes drills many times before, but this competitive version forced me to think hard about how to get the best transition from going backward to going forward.  I think I got my best results when I used one really good forward stroke to stop my backward motion, followed by several quick strokes to get up to speed from rest.

Today I am still feeling a lot of discomfort in my lower back.  It didn't bother me while paddling yesterday, and it hasn't stopped me from doing any of the other things I need to do, but it's just got me feeling out of sorts and irritable.  I did do the strength routine this morning and that went well enough.

Working through some soreness

On Monday I did my strength routine while tired and sore, especially in my lower back area, from Sunday's long paddle.  Those Smart Bell workouts can be quite intense, but on Monday I did a more laid-back version, interspersing some household cleaning chores among the exercises.

By Tuesday I felt slightly more recovered but still a bit sore.  So Joe and I kept things easy while paddling for 75 minutes in the harbor.  We anticipated getting rained on but were spared all but a light mist in the last ten minutes.

Since then I seem to have recovered most of my pep, but my lower back remains a bit stiff and sore.  I've been trying some of my usual tricks to get it to loosen up.  My lower back gave me a lot of problems in the latter part of the last decade, but in the last few years it's been doing remarkably well, and needless to say I'd like that to continue.

Yesterday I felt good in the boat and upped the intensity a bit during a 60-minute session.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did three buildup-tempo pieces of 5-6 minutes each.  It's always satisfying to open up the pace and then not feel worn out afterward.

Wednesday and today I did the strength routine and felt pretty good throughout both times.

Monday photo feature

Somebody moved a boat in front of his face right as the shutter clicked, but that sweet smile could belong to nobody but Sonny Salomon, one of the veterans of Memphis-area paddling.  We're at a mid-1990s edition of the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Back then I was racing in a whitewater boat, for which I am holding the sprayskirt and paddle.  Photo by my dad.

Race schedule update

It has occurred to me that my first race of the season is now less than four weeks away.  So it seems like a good time to re-post the schedule.  This is still very much a "working" document--I probably won't make every race on this list, and there very well might be an event or two I don't yet know about that I'll end up going to.

I'm still not sure of the date of the "Paddle Grapple" race, so for now I've just got it penciled into the same weekend it occurred on last year.  It briefly appeared that the Gator Bait race was in jeopardy when its director of the last few years decided to step down, but somebody has stepped up to take her place and has announced a race date a couple of weeks later than last year's.  Meanwhile, I've added a race up in Nashville at the end of June.

There's a registration link for every event whose registration is now open.


March
18  Battle On The Bayou.  Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  An 8.25-mile out-and-back course on a flatwater coastal bayou.  Register


April
1  Top of the Teche.  Bayou Teche, Leonville to Arnaudville, Louisiana.  A 7.7-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

8  Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Vicksburg, Mississippi.  A 21-mile race down the Mississippi from Madison Parish Port to the Vicksburg front.  Register

22  Pascagoula Run.  Pascagoula River, Pascagoula, Mississippi.  A 12.5-mile race finishing at Lighthouse Park in Pascagoula.  Register

29  Bluegrass River Run.  Kentucky River near Richmond, Kentucky.  A 19-mile race down a scenic deep-water river.  Register


May
13  Osage Spring 12.  Osage River near Jefferson City, Missouri.  A 12-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

20  Chitimacha Race.  Bayou Teche, New Iberia, Louisiana, to Chitimacha Nation.  A 20-mile race down a Class I river.  Register


June
17  Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee.  The 36th edition of this classic.  A 5000-meter race down the Mississippi, finishing at Mississippi River Park in downtown Memphis.

29  Music City SUP and Kayak Race.  Cumberland River, Nashville, Tennessee.  A 6-mile flatwater race.


July
17-22  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  Register


August
5?  The Paddle Grapple.  Fontana Reservoir near Bryson City, North Carolina.  A 6-mile flatwater race.

10-13  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa.  Flatwater marathon races in numerous classes sanctioned by the USCA.


September
9  Lower Atchafalaya Race.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  An 8-mile race on this major distributary of the Mississippi River.


October
7  Gator Bait Race.  Barnett Reservoir outside Jackson, Mississippi.  A 5.5-mile flatwater race.

The short and the long of it

On Friday morning I paddled in the harbor for 60 minutes.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did ten 30-second sprints at three minute intervals.  I've mentioned before that I've been doing this workout occasionally for the last several years.  When I first started doing it I remember finding it very tiring; I remember just sort of hanging on through the last couple of sprints.  But both times I've done the workout so far this year I've felt great throughout, and satisfied and energized afterward.  I'm curious to know if there's any particular explanation for that.  Am I fitter than usual this season?  Stronger?  Is my technique better?  Am I sleeping better at night?  Is my diet better?  Am I at a more ideal body weight?

Body weight is the only one of those variables whose comparison to previous years I know.  I've been a bit heavier lately, tipping the scale between 160 and 165 pounds after being in the mid 150s for a long time.  Like so many people, I've been conditioned to believe that more weight is a bad thing.  But maybe maybe my body needs those few extra pounds for optimum performance... I dunno.

Today is another one of those warm, sunny, non-February-like days, and I got out for my "long" paddle this morning.  At 10.7 feet on the Memphis gauge, the river was too low for paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar, and another one of my long loops, paddling up the Wolf River to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge and back, would be awfully shallow as well.  So I decided to paddle down the Mississippi for 45 minutes and then come back up along the Arkansas bank, a route that I figured would take me about two hours total.

In those first 45 minutes I got about six and a half miles downriver.  The river makes a big S-turn just below downtown Memphis, and I got through the first bend and down to where the bend back the other way was beginning.  Then I turned around and began the long climb back upriver.  My speed going downriver had been around 10 miles per hour, and for quite a while after the turnaround it was between 4 and 5 mph.  When I reached the big eddies in the inside of the bend just below the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas bridges, I got up over 6 mph.

Once back upstream of those bridges I knew I was right on pace to get back to the dock in two hours. I was quite tired but I was still able to paddle pretty hard, and I tried to stay relaxed and take the best strokes I could.  When I re-entered the harbor I threw in a long surge to the monorail bridge, moving as fast as 6.8 mph on the harbor's flatwater.  Considering how tired I was I thought that was pretty good.

I got back to the dock and stopped the timer on my G.P.S. device right at two hours.  I had covered 13.4 miles, so my average speed was 6.7 mph.  Even though I had started and finished at the same place, and therefore had no net gain or loss of elevation, I should note that that was not entirely an "honest" 6.7 mph, for on both the downstream and upstream legs I had taken the path of least resistance: going downstream I had paddled out in the main channel, whereas coming back up I had used the relatively slack water and occasional eddies near the bank.  Oh well... it was a solid workout and it felt good to have the "long" one in the books for another week.

Feeling tired but good

On Tuesday the harbor was calm and the Fahrenheit temperature was in the mid 40s.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints, I did a couple of long (around ten-minute) hard pieces--I didn't have my G.P.S. device with me but my guess is that I was averaging around 7.5 miles per hour.  Then I did a third piece at the same intensity that was about six minutes in duration.  For all three pieces I just picked some landmark in the distance and declared that my finish point--kind of a loosely-structured workout, I guess.  My total time in the boat was 80 minutes.

When I got back in the boat yesterday I was tired, partly from Tuesday's hard work and partly from doing both my strength routine and some logging work on Wednesday.  So I just did 60 minutes of steady paddling at the fast end of my comfortable cruising pace.

Back to business: a new strength routine

I'm definitely feeling better now and I've basically pronounced myself "well" even though I've still got a lot of residual sinus gunk.  It's a nuisance but I'm carrying on.  Among the things I've done this week is start up a new strength routine.

At my last teaching job in the 1990s I became good friends with the school's wrestling coach, and he introduced me to a thing called a Smart Bell, invented by a friend of his, U.S. National Team wrestler Paul Widerman.  A Smart Bell is a steel object that sort of looks like a steering wheel; it is precisely balanced to facilitate numerous strength-in-motion exercises.  My Smart Bell, more than 15 years old, weighs 15 pounds; it appears that modern-day Smart Bells are lighter.  That suits my general attitude toward weight training, that the amount of weight is less important than precise technique.

I've got a set of Smart Bell exercises that my wrestling-coach friend showed me years ago.  I've looked all over You Tube for video footage of these exercises, but haven't had much luck; perhaps one day I'll post videos of myself doing them.  In the meantime, I'll point you to this video in which a guy does some of my exercises in one approximate form or another.  (Actually, he does some other exercises I'd never seen before that I should consider incorporating into my routine.)

My routine goes like this:

1.  Standing torso-twists (similar to what the guy is doing at 1:37 of the video)

2.  Orbital circle (not on the video)

3.  The Russian (what the guy is doing at 0:28)

4.  Pushups, placing the Smart Bell on the floor and gripping it

5.  Situps, holding the Smart Bell behind my head

6.  Squats (what the guy is doing at 1:10)

7.  Circle (what the guy is doing at 0:44)

8.  Lunges (the guy does lunges at 1:23, but I do them with the Smart Bell behind my head, and I actually walk across the room)

Monday photo feature

I don't often get blisters from paddling, but I got a pretty good one last Sunday (Feb. 5) when I paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This is how it looks eight days later.

What to do when I'm not my usual spunky self

I'm not a hundred percent in the pink yet but I'm pretty sure I'm shaking free of last week's health woes.

I always face a bit of a dilemma during periods like this when I'm feeling crummy.  Should I skip paddling and other exercise entirely, and let my body focus all its energy on healing?  Or should I go out and at least go through some of the motions to preserve some muscle memory and get some blood flowing through the relevant muscles?

On Saturday I opted for the former, taking the day off.  I spent part of the time doing a few light chores and part of it taking a long afternoon nap.

As I pondered the question again yesterday morning, I had some good reasons to repeat yesterday's decision.  Training had been going well before I fell ill, and I wasn't too concerned about missing a few days, knowing that once I'm feeling better I should get right back to where I was quickly.  And slow, lethargic paddling is arguably worse than no paddling at all for a racer who wants to train his body to go fast.

But there was another important point to consider: racing isn't the only reason I paddle.  I paddle because I like to paddle, and to be outdoors and breathe fresh air and move my body at any speed.  Yesterday's warm weather tilted the scales in favor of a "Yes.  I will paddle" decision.

And once I got going, I felt pretty good in the boat.  The result was a session with some decent training value.  I did three 8-stroke sprints and then paddled a strong tempo for twenty minutes or so against the windy front that was moving into the region.  By the end of 60 minutes I felt better than I'd felt before paddling and relished the satisfaction of having spent part of my day outdoors.

I didn't do any strength work at all last week.  Today I plan to ease into a new routine and prepare to resume life among the healthy able-bodied folk.

Blech

I've been sort of sick this week--in other words, I've had a cold that was mild for several days before suddenly getting much nastier overnight into yesterday morning.  It's been an unusual winter that way: I've enjoyed a largely illness-free run in the last decade or so, but this is the second bug I've gotten this season, and just like the last one, this one has behaved differently from most of the bugs I get.

So I've backed off the training a bit.  I did an easy paddle with Joe on Tuesday and another yesterday, but I'm taking a break from the strength routine.  I'm hoping this crud will work itself out soon so I can be back in action by next week.

Immortalized in literature (followup)

Regarding my post a week ago about the fictional character I think is based on Keith Benoist: since then I've had a look at Greg Iles's website and found evidence that Iles does in fact know Keith.  There's a picture of Keith in which he's helping control a water moccasin while a photographer shoots it for the cover of one of Iles's novels.

Monday photo feature

Andre Pellerin looks like a satisfied customer as he secures his new Nelo Vanquish II K1 on his trailer.  I met him down in Jackson, Mississippi, last Tuesday evening, and we closed the deal in a parking lot.  Then Andre made the almost-four-hour drive back to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  I understand his son Conrad paddled the boat on Bayou Teche the following afternoon.

Another winter weekend in the books

We've been sitting in the mid 40s Fahrenheit, with mostly cloudy skies, for a few days now.  I don't like it but it's exactly what one should expect in the first week of February.

Yesterday actually started out bright and sunny, but I was unable to get to the river until late afternoon and by then it was cloudy with a few raindrops falling.  The temperature was 48 degrees.  So it was hard to conjure up much zest as I headed down to paddle.  But once I was in the boat I felt pretty good and by the end of 60 minutes I had a satisfying session under my belt.

I had a slightly warmer day for my "long" paddle today.  The temperature got up into the mid 50s and the sun came out about a half hour before I finished.  I did my clockwise loop of the Loosahatchie Bar that I'd intended to do last weekend but aborted.  My G.P.S. device told me I covered 12.65 miles (compared to 12.66 two weekends ago when I did a counterclockwise loop) and my elapsed time was one hour, 55 minutes, 15 seconds.  Anything under two hours is a pretty good effort for me when I paddle around the bar.  And today I did it while not feeling so great in the boat: my digestion has been a little messed up the last couple of days and that made things unpleasant.

With a river level of 19.7 feet on the Memphis gauge, I encountered only a small patch of shallow water up at the north end of the bar.

Weather weirdness, delivering a boat, pace work

Joe and I did our usual paddle on Tuesday.  It was another springlike day to close out a weird January: the Fahrenheit temperature got up around 70 in the afternoon.

But I would spend most of the day in the car.  I finally made that trip down to Jackson, Mississippi, to deliver the K1 to its new owner, Mr. Andre Pellerin of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  His 15-year-old triplet sons Carson, Conrad, and Peyton plan to get more involved in flatwater sprint racing this year after spending the last few years cutting their teeth in many of the same races I compete in.  I'm glad I could provide one of the boats that will carry them through this journey and I hope the new challenges will give them some fresh motivation and enthusiasm.  I feel certain that all kinds of fun is in store for them: chances are they'll find more people their age pursuing the Olympic discipline of flatwater sprint.

As I lay in bed this morning I could hear the wind whistling outside, and by the time I was up and heading down to the river it was an overcast 42 degrees.  When I got down to the dock I realized I'd forgotten to bring the shell I'd planned to wear over the couple of shirts I had on.

I gritted my teeth and got in the boat, and once I was paddling I didn't feel too bad.  The wind was blowing from the northeast and I went up into the north end of the harbor where the trees and high banks offered about as much protection as any place I could go.  After warming up for ten minutes and then doing three 8-stroke sprints, I commenced today's workout: three ten-minute pieces with five minutes recovery in between.  My goal pace for each piece was 7 miles per hour; I had to adjust a little depending whether I was paddling upwind or downwind, but in general the workout went smoothly enough.

I'm still observing my Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for the current strength routine.  I might do this routine one more week, or I might start a new one next week... I haven't decided yet.

Immortalized in literature

There's a canoe and kayak racer down in Natchez, Mississippi, named Keith Benoist.  I haven't seen or heard from Keith out on the race circuit in several years, but he and his girlfriend Melissa used to give me some good competition in their tandem boat, and Keith was perhaps best known as the founder and director of the Phatwater race that took place on the Mississippi River at Natchez for about a decade.

Greg Iles is a best-selling author who lives in Natchez, and right now I'm reading his novel Natchez Burning (published 2014).  There's a character named Kirk in the story who I'm pretty certain is based on Keith.  If you know Keith, check out this passage and tell me if you disagree (the narrator is the novel's main character, Natchez Mayor Penn Cage):

Kirk graduated from St. Stephen's Preparatory School four years ahead of me.  After a truncated career in the Marine Corps--a Force Recon unit--he spent several years working as a commercial diver, both in the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.  Kirk owns an earthmoving company now, but he devotes much of his time to kayak racing on the Mississippi River.  Guys like Kirk never quite adjust to civilian life, and thus are usually open to pushing the envelope, especially in a good cause. 

"Mayor Cage," he says by way of answering his cell phone.  "Don't tell me--research question for a novel.  Could I really cut somebody's throat with a Visa card?" 

"Not this time." 

"You've finally found the funding for my white-water park?" 

"Uh... no.  Sorry." 

"Then what the hell are you bothering me for?"

And so on.  I've only just finished the chapter in which Kirk first appears, so I don't know yet how much more of him I'll be seeing in the book.  But I'll let you pick up the book and read it yourself if you're curious.

Monday photo feature

During the big Mississippi River flood in May, 2011, I was able to paddle across Mud Island River Park.

Fun vs. "fun"

The Mid South weather has settled into standard January fare: not freezing cold, but cold nevertheless, with pesky breezes adding some bite.  Maybe we'll have some more warm spells like we did last weekend, but right now we're at the time of year when winter really starts to feel like a drag, and there's at least another month of it to go.

Yesterday I went out on my "long" paddle for the week.  Around two hours is what I consider "long," seeing as how the longest races I enter are in that category of duration.

I was hoping to do another trip around the Loosahatchie Bar--I figured I'd do a clockwise loop yesterday since I'd done it counterclockwise a week before.  But the wind was more of a problem than I'd expected.  It was blowing from the west, kind of unusual in a region where north and south winds are the most common.  Once I was out of the harbor and paddling up the Tennessee side of the Mississippi, I found myself dealing with a beam wind that was driving waves from left to right, and those waves were bouncing off the bank and moving back to the left.  By the time I was above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge I had spent a lot of energy in those messy conditions.  I ferried across to the Arkansas side, where the forested banks gave me nice protection, but I was pretty tired, and I began thinking ahead: if I were to continue paddling up the Loosahatchie Chute all the way to the top of the bar, I'd be paddling back down a choppy river on a practically empty tank, and in that condition I'd be ripe for hypothermia in the event of an untimely flip.  And a not-so-existential hazard was simply having a lot of paddling left to do after exhaustion had set in: the main reason I almost never do any ultra-long training paddles is that a person can go for only so long before his stroke mechanics begin to fall apart, and then from that point on he is ingraining bad habits as he plods along with one poor stroke after another.

So discretion was the better part of valor yesterday: I paddled about two-thirds of the way up the chute and then turned around.  I returned to the south end of the Loosahatchie Bar, then paddled back into the main channel, then re-entered the harbor, then paddled the 2000 meters or so back to the marina.  I did a couple of loops around the marina until I had paddled an even 120 minutes.

When I returned to the river today the temperature was again hovering in the chilly mid-40s-Fahrenheit range, and the wind had shifted to the west-northwest and was blowing even harder.  My motivation was low, but with a stiff upper lip I got back in my boat and paddled for 60 minutes.

I firmly believe that you should choose something you genuinely consider fun when you're looking for an activity that will improve your fitness.  In general there's not anything I consider more fun than paddling a boat, but times like this weekend put that attitude to the test.  It would have been very easy to skip paddling altogether this weekend, and some might argue that that's what I should have done, but I justify my decision with the "delayed gratification" argument.  I enjoy showing up at races feeling good about my fitness and confident in my ability to compete hard.  Paddling this weekend felt like a real chore, but the reward will come later.

Maintaining morale and improving endurance

Since I put up my "tentative" race schedule the other day, our friends down in Vicksburg have announced the date for their event: April 8.  I have updated my schedule accordingly.

Also, I have been sticking to my plan of doing my strength routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  I'm getting a little bit better at those feet lifts, but I still have to be careful not to cheat by thrusting my legs to create momentum.

And, of course, I've been paddling.  Joe and I did our usual thing on Tuesday, and I put in another 60 minutes yesterday.

Yesterday was a perfect example of a time when I felt grumpy and unmotivated going down to the river but felt great once I was in the boat paddling.  We've returned to typical January temperatures here--low to mid 40s Fahrenheit--and when I got to the dock yesterday there was a northwest breeze blowing just hard enough to make things unpleasant as I got my boat off the rack and did a few stretches.  I was tempted to scrap the whole plan and go someplace warm to deal with the dozen other things that were gnawing at me yesterday, but instead I got in the boat and started to paddle.  After a ten-minute warmup I did three 8-stroke sprints and then commenced my main workout, a set of ten 30-second sprints at three-minute intervals.  My strokes felt good and all the muscles in my body were working in fluid harmony to move the boat, and before I knew it I'd done something I could feel good about for the rest of the day.

I started incorporating this 30-second-sprint workout into my training two or three years ago after reading this post on Ron Lugbill's blog.  Lugbill cites research that suggests that sprint sessions are better than longer steady-state sessions for developing endurance--not just for short-duration events like whitewater slalom (in which Lugbill is a coach and a former U.S. Team athlete), but also for longer events like the racing I'm now doing.

I haven't scrapped long paddles completely--right now I'm doing a long paddle each weekend--but the idea of sprinting to improve endurance fits nicely with my desire to make the best use of my limited time on the water.

Monday photo feature

Mark Clarke carves into an upstream gate at the 1993 Rattlesnake Slalom on the Housatonic River at Falls Village, Connecticut.

An easier day

My trip to Jackson has been postponed until later in the week.  But it nevertheless felt good this morning to have gotten the long paddle out of the way yesterday.  I went downtown and paddled pretty easy for 60 minutes.

I checked the Internet radar before I left the house, and it seemed certain that I'd be getting rained on. But the rain held off until after I'd finished paddling.  A shower moved in as I was driving home.

On a day like today, when I'm giving my body a break from the stress of long, hard, fast paddling, I focus more of my attention on the technical aspects.  I try to make each stroke a really good one: I look for a nice clean catch, full rotation of my torso from the hips up, and a state of relaxation that lets all the relevant muscles from my shoulders down through my legs fire in unison.

Just in case anybody's curious about this trip down to Jackson: I have found a buyer for the K1 I've had up for sale.  He's in Louisiana, and we've agreed to meet at Jackson to close the deal.

Springlike

It's been a surreal January week with Fahrenheit temperatures climbing into the 70s at times.  There's been a fair amount of rain along with it, but during breaks in the rain I've seen people sitting out on decks and patios at restaurants around town.

One thing we've barely seen this week is sunshine.  I for one feel a bit vulnerable to that Seasonal Affective Disorder.  The annoying hassles of everyday life start to feel like real bummers at times like this.

It hasn't quite been shorts-and-short-sleeved-tee-shirt weather down on the river, but I've been dressing lighter than usual for this time of year.  I haven't worn pogies since the sub-freezing spell we had two weekends ago.

On Tuesday I joined Joe for a lap of the harbor.  Joe had missed several previous Tuesdays because of business travel and other conflicts, and it was good to catch up with him.

Thursday was foggy and rainy.  My outer layers got soaked as I walked down to the marina from the car; that rain let up after a short time, and I spent the next 60 minutes paddling in a heavy, drizzly fog.  Another heavy shower moved through as I paddled the last several hundred meters back to the dock.  The temperature was in the mid 60s, but wet is wet, and I was glad to get into the dry clothes that I had stored safely out of the rain.

The sun finally came out for a few hours this morning.  By late morning the temperature was in the low 70s, and I saw a few people walking around in shorts and short sleeves along the riverfront.  I decided to do my "long" paddle for the week, usually a Sunday ritual, today.  Tomorrow's weather isn't looking nearly as nice as today's, and I also have to make a little road trip down to Jackson, Mississippi, and back tomorrow, and I'd just as soon not do that while exhausted from a long, hard paddle.

So today I went down to the river planning to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This circumnavigation becomes possible once the river rises above 12 or 13 feet on the Memphis gauge.  In recent years I haven't considered doing it below about 16 feet: the 2011 flood deposited a bunch of sand up at the north (upstream) end of the bar, making for very shallow water at lower levels.  The reading this morning was 17.2 feet, so I was hopeful I'd have adequate depth up there.

A trip around the Loosahatchie Bar, starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina, is roughly twelve and a half miles.  This varies according to the water level and how tight I make my lines along the way.  When I finished today's paddle my G.P.S. device told me I had traveled 12.66 miles.

Most of the time, paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar takes me a little over two hours.  There are many variables that affect this elapsed time.  Water level is a big one: the higher the water, the smaller the bar is because more of it is underwater; the southern tip of Mud Island is also more submerged.  Meanwhile, the long upstream paddle to get to the north end of the bar is easier at some levels than at others.

Today's level wasn't bad for that upstream leg: I had some good long eddies in which I got the boat moving over 7 miles per hour at times.  But up at the north end of the bar there was a lot of exposed sand, and I had to paddle farther north than usual to get up and around it.  So it was a good day for a fast time, but perhaps not the best day.  Whatever the case, I completed the trip two hours, 30 seconds after I'd started.  I think that's the fastest I've done a trip around the bar in a few years.  I think I've done it under two hours once or twice, and I'd have to refer to my old handwritten journals to see what the conditions were like when I did so.

(To learn more about the Loosahatchie Bar, look at the Google map on my harbor page.  Scroll up a little bit, and you'll see a big island in the river upstream of the Hernando DeSoto (Interstate 40) Bridge.  That's the Loosahatchie Bar.)

I understand a stormy front is supposed to come through overnight tonight, with cooler weather moving in behind it for tomorrow.  It's not supposed to be freezing cold--I think tomorrow's high will be in the high 50s--but I probably won't see people out in shorts.

Where am I going this year?

We're in that time of year now when I'm ramping my training back up, and I ask myself, "What am I doing this for?"  Hmm, yes.  Good question.  I'd better draw up at least a tentative race schedule.

What follows is just that: a tentative schedule--or, every event I could think of that's making even faint blips on my radar screen:


March
18  Battle On The Bayou.  Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  An 8.5-mile out-and-back course on a flatwater coastal bayou.  Register


April
1  Top of the Teche.  Bayou Teche, Leonville to Arnaudville, Louisiana.  A 7.7-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

8  Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Vicksburg, Mississippi.  A 21-mile race down the Mississippi from Madison Parish Port to the Vicksburg front.  Register

22  Pascagoula Run.  Pascagoula River, Pascagoula, Mississippi.  A 12.5-mile race finishing at Lighthouse Park in Pascagoula.  Register


May
13  Osage Spring 12.  Osage River near Jefferson City, Missouri.  A 12-mile race down a Class I river.  Register

20  Chitimacha Race.  Bayou Teche, New Iberia, Louisiana, to Chitimacha Nation.  A 20-mile race down a Class I river.  Register


June
17  Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee.  The 36th edition of this classic.  A 5000-meter race down the Mississippi, finishing at Mississippi River Park in downtown Memphis.  Register

29  Music City SUP and Kayak Race.  Cumberland River, Nashville, Tennessee.  A 6-mile race on flatwater.


July
17-22  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  Register


August
5?  The Paddle Grapple.  Fontana Reservoir near Bryson City, North Carolina.  A 6-mile flatwater race.

10-13  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Mississippi River, Dubuque, Iowa.  Flatwater marathon races in numerous classes sanctioned by the USCA.  Register


September
9  Lower Atchafalaya Race.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  An 8-mile race on this major distributary of the Mississippi River.

16?  Gator Bait Race.  Barnett Reservoir outside Jackson, Mississippi.  A 5.5-mile flatwater race.



You can pretty well count on me to be at several of these races.  The OICK Race here at Memphis on June 17 is always a season highlight.  The race at Ocean Springs is another one I always plan to go to barring injury or any other unfortunate circumstance.  I've been racing at Vicksburg for many years now, and I expect I'll plan to go back on the 8th of April.

Meanwhile, I've got the Paddle Grapple and Gator Bait events penciled into the same weekends they were on last year.

A more distant event I'd love to do is the Gorge Downwind Championships in July.  I visited the Columbia River Gorge area back in 1998; I spent that trip paddling whitewater on the White Salmon River.  I'd love to go back and experience what I understand are epic surf ski conditions on the Columbia.  But it sure is a long way away... driving there and back would almost certainly make it a three-week endeavor at least, and I have to decide soon if I can be away from home that long, and if so I'll have to arrange pet care and stuff like that.

The USCA Nationals the next month are a good distance away as well, but more accessible.  This year's event in Iowa is probably as close to where I live as the USCA Nationals will ever get, seeing as how the August heat here in the South makes hosting such an event practically out of the question.

Anyway...  I probably won't make it to every event listed here, and new events might be added as the year moves along.  But I've got at least a rough outline of a race schedule.

Monday photo feature

How quaint... a selfie!  This photo is from March of last year.  I had just finished paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar.

An enveloping shroud

The weather has settled down into what I'd call normal for the Mid South in January: chilly but not freezing cold, overcast and moist but not pouring down rain, a bit of breeze but not excessively windy.

The story of the weekend on the Memphis riverfront has been fog.  Both yesterday and today I got down to the river and found it covered in an even denser fog than I paddled in back on Thursday the 5th.  Paddling up the Mississippi from the mouth of the harbor, I couldn't see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge at all until I was within a quarter-mile of it; its M-shaped steel trusses weren't visible until I was within a hundred yards of it.

I felt tired in the boat yesterday, probably because I'd paddled hard on Thursday and started a new strength routine on Friday.  Knowing I'd be going longer and harder today, I kept the intensity moderate and spent my 60 minutes on the water focusing on good precise strokes and full rotation.

Today it was a bit chillier--around 46 degrees Fahrenheit versus 50 degrees yesterday--but the water was calm and I set out on my trek up the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge over the Wolf and back.

I hadn't checked the river level and I was sort of assuming the Mississippi was high enough to back up the Wolf a couple of miles, sparing me from paddling against the current until just a short distance from my turnaround point.  What I didn't know was that the river had dropped almost three feet since Thursday--from over 13 feet on the Memphis gauge to 10.8 feet this morning.  And so I found myself fighting the Wolf's current almost the entire way from its mouth up to the Danny Thomas bridge.

It wasn't that big a deal, really, except that it interfered with my G.P.S.-aided pace plan.  I did a couple of mile-long surges on the Wolf with the intention of maintaining around 6.8 to 7.0 miles per hour.  But going against the current I had to work unexpectedly hard to exceed 6.5 mph, and then coming back down with the current I was making 7.0 while not paddling hard at all.  Basically, I had to rely on my inner sense of pace to do the workout the way I'd intended.

By the time I got back down to the mouth of the Wolf, the fog had lifted enough for me to see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge from there.  I was able to paddle out in the main flow of the Mississippi without worrying about a barge rig coming out of nowhere right in front of me.

When I eased back alongside the dock at the end of 120 minutes, the G.P.S. told me I'd covered about 12.5 miles.

A new strength routine

I started up a new strength routine today.  Here's how it goes:

1.  Hindu squats (demonstrated starting at 1:20 of this video)
2.  Military press with dumbbells
3.  Feet lifts (demonstrated at 4:13 of this video)
4.  Bent-over rows with a dumbbell
5.  Lateral abdominals (demonstrated at 3:52 of this video)


The first day of a new strength routine is always something of a dry run, where I go fairly easy to give my muscles a chance to adapt to their new jobs and I also make sure I've got the correct technique down.  It looks like my biggest challenge in this routine will be the feet lifts: I've never been much good at acrobatic/gymnastic stuff.  My difficulty doing this exercise today is also probably a sign that the relevant muscles are weak, so it'll be satisfying if I can get better at it in the coming weeks.

Blowin' in the wind

As I mentioned before, warmer weather was set to move in early this week, and in fact it did: the Fahrenheit temperature was in the mid 60s when I paddled on Tuesday and in the low 70s when I paddled yesterday.  But warm weather at this time of year almost never means tranquil summer-like days.  When it gets unseasonably warm in the winter and early spring you can expect some unsettled conditions to come along with it, and this week wind was the big weather story.

I heard on the radio Tuesday that the wind was blowing from the south at 30 to 40 miles per hour, with gusts exceeding 50 mph.  I couldn't tell you the exact wind speeds when I arrived at the dock that morning, but I do know the wind was as strong as I've ever paddled in on the Memphis riverfront.  There might have been some epic surfing conditions out on the river, but since I was by myself and the water is cold, I played it safe and stayed in the harbor.

I was hoping I might find some surfable stuff in the harbor, but the waves weren't quite there.  I ended up working on keeping my boat moving in rough sloppy conditions.  I spent much of my 50 minutes out there doing laps around the Memphis Yacht Club Marina (the one just south of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge), trying to surf the waves running north on the marina's east side, "eddying out" of the wind on the north (lee) side, paddling back upwind in the protected area on the west side of the marina, and so on.

The windy conditions continued Wednesday and yesterday, but they weren't quite as ferocious.  Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes in the harbor as the wind blew steadily from the south around 20 mph.

It always feels hard when you're paddling into a headwind, but I've always tended to wonder whether the wind was really having an effect on my speed.  I'm a pretty skinny guy; could the wind really be slowing me down that much?  Well, yesterday I had my G.P.S. device on board, and the answer it gave me was yes.  Yes it is.  Paddling at a normal cruising pace, I was moving around 6.5 miles per hour with the wind at my back, but when I paddled into the wind that pace dropped down around 4.5 mph.

It's pretty well established in sports like track and field that the wind makes a significant difference in an athlete's performance.  100-meter sprinters move faster and long jumpers travel farther with a tailwind.  If the wind is above an allowable limit, an effort is deemed "wind-aided" and is not eligible for world-record consideration.

While a tailwind certainly makes a difference for a paddler, I believe the advantage is less obvious because unlike in a track race, the surface the athlete travels on is affected by the wind in canoe and kayak racing.  Waves of any size can slow a paddler down because he is constantly having to climb up and over them.  The ICF does't keep world records for flatwater sprint racing like the IAAF does in track and field, but if I were a paddler hoping to post a really fast time in the 500 meters, for instance, I think I would rather have dead-calm conditions than a robust tailwind.

I bring all this up to explain why, as I lined up to time myself in a sprint from the Hernando DeSoto Bridge to the Auction Avenue (A.W. Willis) bridge, I was not expecting miracles even though I was curious to see how much the strong tailwind might help me.  My fastest time ever in this sprint is about 2 minutes, 57 seconds, and I think that was on a calm day when I was a lot closer to peak racing form than I am now.

I got off to a pretty good start and whizzing past the waves made me feel fast, but I knew they were probably slowing me down a little.  Then, once I was out from under the HDB, the water started to flatten out, and as I came abreast of The Pyramid I saw that I had a pretty good split going.  I dug in and as I passed the two-minute mark I thought I might have a shot at a sub-3 time.  But the seconds always slip by quickly when I'm sprinting for a time barrier like that, and I crossed the southern edge of the Auction/Willis bridge at 3:06.  It was still my best time in quite a while, I think.

Once my breathing and heart rate had settled down I spent the rest of the hour paddling near anaerobic threshold before cooling down and taking out.

Monday photo feature

Joe Royer snapped this photo of his wife Carol Lee as they paddled their tandem boat in 20-degrees-Fahrenheit weather on Saturday.  It's clear to me that Carol Lee's paddling style differs from mine--to wit: she splashes up a lot more water, and on days like Saturday the result is icicles all over her person.  When I paddled both Saturday and yesterday, I ended up with some ice on my pogies and on my boat's deck, but nowhere else, really.

While we're on the topic of cold weather...

I heard an interesting and timely piece on the radio this morning: an interview with a guy named Scott Carney, whose new book What Doesn't Kill Us looks at the human body's ability to withstand extreme conditions, including cold temperatures.  The upshot is that even though in modern times we have the ability to live almost exclusively in a climate-controlled environment, our bodies still have the tools inherited from our ancestors for whom seasonal fluctuations were a part of life.

The thing Carney said that I thought was the most interesting was

...you can activate things like vasoconstriction, which are all of these muscles in your veins through your body which contract when they interact with cold. But you have no conscious way to make those muscles contract. You have to get cold to do that. And if you never get cold, those muscles get weak. And so by reintroducing and intentionally altering your environment, you can really do cool things.

You can listen to the piece and/or read the transcript here.

This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with a canoe racer from Parry Sound, Ontario.  The guy operated a fishing boat up there, and had some Native Americans on his crew, and he said that in the middle of winter when the Fahrenheit temperature was forty degrees below zero, those guys would hang out on deck wearing nothing but jeans and tee shirts.  They were simply doing something their ancestors had done for thousands of years.

A winter blast

We had our first snow of this winter on Friday, and it was a decent one by Mid South standards.  I think we got close to an inch in places, and there's a fair amount of it still around since the temperature hasn't risen above freezing since then.  This is the scene that greeted me when I got to the dock yesterday morning:

That's my boat in the purple cover on the top rack.

According to the in-dash display in my car, it was 15 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived at the marina yesterday, and by the time I was driving home it was 19, so it's pretty safe to say it was below 20 degrees the whole time I was on the water.  I think it's been a few years since I've paddled in that kind of cold.  I'd sort of expected to find the harbor iced over, but it was entirely open.  I think there are atmospheric factors besides the air temperature that affect ice formation, because sometimes the harbor stays liquid even when we've had several days of sub-freezing temperatures.

Anyway... it actually wasn't such a bad day to paddle.  The sun was out and the wind wasn't that bad, and I was bundled up.  I paddled for 60 minutes and kept the pace above six miles per hour with a couple of long surges close to 7 mph.  By the end of the hour I'd made a bit of ice art.  Here's a nice layer on the deck of my boat:

And here's one of the better paddlecicles I've ever achieved:

According to today's forecast we were due to warm up into the mid 30s, but commitments from midday on compelled me to paddle in the morning when it was still pretty frigid.  My car told me it was 22 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived at the marina and 29 when I was driving home afterward.

The sun was out first thing this morning, but by the time I was in the boat the clouds were moving in and I would do most of my 110-minute paddle under overcast skies.  The longer session and the lack of solar radiation combined to leave me quite chilled by the time I was walking back up to the parking lot.

Both yesterday and today I dealt with a familiar problem on sub-freezing days: my rudder was frozen up.  Once upon a time I would fuss with it on the dock until I'd gotten it free, but now that I'm older and mellower I just get in the boat and start paddling with the thing still frozen.  As long as the water I'm paddling on is liquid, its temperature is above freezing and it will thaw out the rudder eventually.  If the sun is out like it was yesterday, the rudder should free up even faster because the sun warms up the boat and the rudder cables within.

Paddling when it's this cold is fun to do once or twice a year--if nothing else, it gives me something to brag to my friends about--but I'll be perfectly happy to avoid it the rest of the winter if I can.  It's still the first half of January and we should expect another cold snap or two before winter is over, but on Tuesday, when I next plan to paddle, the forecast calls for rain and a high temperature around 60 degrees.  I might even be able to ditch the pogies.

Relishing the season

After a stretch of rather balmy weather, winter has returned to the Mid South.

It was still balmy when I paddled on Tuesday--in the mid 50s Fahrenheit--but a dense fog blanketed the river.  I stayed close to the bank, out of the main channel that the barge rigs use.  Even so, I got a little surprise as I was coming back downstream toward the mouth of the harbor.  The city of Memphis sits on the outside of a large bend in the river, and most of the time the downstream-moving barge traffic uses the outside half of the bend (the Tennessee side) while the rigs traveling upstream use the inside of the bend (the Arkansas side).

So there I was paddling downriver near the Tennessee bank on Tuesday, figuring that any big commercial vessels would be approaching from my rear, when suddenly out of the fog comes this huge upstream-bound raft of barges right in front of me.

Mind you, it was not a close call--I was well out of the main channel and in no danger of being run over.  But it was startling nevertheless, and a reminder of why it's a good idea to be cautious when the visibility is so limited.  Meanwhile, the towboat pilot seemed to think I wasn't being cautious enough--my guess is he was miffed that I was there at all--and he gave me a loud ten-second blast on his horn.

Colder temperatures began to move in Tuesday night and yesterday, and when I got to the river this morning the temperature display in my car registered 34 degrees Fahrenheit.  I felt the chill as I readied my boat, but once I was on the water I warmed right up.  I was dressed in wetsuit pants, a couple of layers of fleece, a wool cap, and pogies, and soon enough I was toasty.

After a 15-minute warmup with three 8-stroke sprints, I did three ten-minute pieces with five minutes recovery in between.  I'd intended to do each piece between 6.5 and 7.0 miles per hour on my G.P.S. device, but I went off and left the thing at home, plugged into its charger on my kitchen counter.  So I had to trust my gut during the workout.  Actually, I would bet that I was pretty close to the target pace while paddling by feel.

By the end of the 60-minute session I was still warm, but it was a wet warm.  An hour's worth of my own sweating and dripping water from my paddle had wet me down pretty good, and once out of the boat I became cold and clammy in no time.  The worst part of paddling on cold winter days is not the paddling itself but the time on the dock afterward trying to get my boat put away so I can go someplace warm.

Monday photo feature

Most people who paddle with me these days know me as a kayaker, but my earliest paddling was done in canoes, and on a whitewater river my preferred boat has always been a decked canoe (C1).  In a whitewater C1 you kneel and use a single-bladed paddle.

My first C1 was a Gyra-Max manufactured by the Perception company of Liberty, South Carolina.  If I'm not mistaken, the Gyra was the first roto-molded C1 commercially available.  Eventually I would move on to some more sophisticated designs, including slalom race boats; but that Gyra saw me through some epic formative experiences.

It took me a while to get the hang of the balance and boat control that a C1 demands on whitewater.  I guess one positive result is that I developed a pretty bombproof roll.  This photo was taken on the Pigeon River near Hartford, Tennessee, in 1993, at which time I'd owned the boat for a year.  I think Mike Davis was the photographer.

Pain without suffering

“Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.”

I'm afraid I don't know the origin of this quote, but it sums up nicely the whole idea of participating in sports.

I did a two-hour paddle this morning, and I experienced what I would call more discomfort than pain.  By the time I re-entered the harbor and saw the marina some fifteen minutes in the distance, my efforts of the previous one hundred five minutes had left me fatigued and achy, but it was a feeling I've had thousands of times and I've learned to take it in stride and know it will be over soon enough.

In other words, I wasn't suffering.  The chilly temperatures and grey skies gave me some lovely sights to see.  From the marina I paddled out of the harbor and up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Wolf River, and then up the Wolf a couple of miles to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge.  Then I turned around and came back.

My plan for the next several months is to do a longer paddle once a week, usually on Sunday.  My other sessions during the week will be the usual 60 to 90 minutes.

I'm trying to change whatever I've been doing that has caused the plantar fasciitis, and I'm starting that with an effort to relax my feet as much as I can.  I still want to use my legs to get maximum rotation, but I think I need to make sure I'm using my legs against the footboard and the footstrap, and not my feet.

I got home from North Carolina last Monday and paddled on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I also did my current strength routine Tuesday, Thursday, and yesterday.  So it's been a good solid week of offseason work.

Rebounding from a brief setback

I'm in North Carolina visiting my sister's family for the Christmas holiday weekend.  I did a round of my current strength routine today, but I didn't paddle: my mother and I drove over here in her car, which isn't equipped to carry a boat.  So I'm out of the boat until I get back home Monday or Tuesday.

I was sick the week before last.  I had either a mild flu or (more likely) a very bad cold, and it was a stubborn crud that kept me on the down-low for almost the entire week.  But I did manage to get in the boat a couple of times that week.  I met Joe for our usual get-together on Tuesday, and between my feeling crummy and his being on a very tight schedule, we settled for an easy paddle from the marina to the mouth of the harbor and back, a 35- to 40-minute undertaking.  By Saturday I was finally regaining some energy, and it was an unseasonably warm day (mid 70s Fahrenheit), so I went down and got in a one-hour session in the harbor.

This past week I was more or less back to normal, and knowing I'd be boatless this weekend I paddled Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  On Tuesday Joe and I did a lap of the harbor in 80 minutes or so, and on each of the next two days I paddled a one-hour session with some long surges (Wednesday) and some short sprints (Thursday) thrown in.

I mentioned up above that I've got a strength routine going.  I picked out six exercises from the Michele Ramazza video that require almost no equipment so I wouldn't have to bring a bunch of stuff to my sister's with me.  Here's how the routine goes:

1.  Leg kicks and leg kicks-swim (demonstrated by Michele at 3:33 and 3:44 of the video)
2.  Pushups (done with dumbbells like Michele is doing them at 4:54)
3.  Butterfly crunches (demonstrated at 3:22)
4.  "Draw stroke" with rubber band (demonstrated at 4:37)
5.  Plank crunches (demonstrated at 4:03)
6.  Air squats (demonstrated at 2:15)

I do the routine three times a week, going through it twice each time.

I mentioned in my last post how my plantar fasciitis seems to come and go, and these last two weeks have provided a good example of that.  During my week of being sick I was in bed for much of each day but did make a point of stretching my calves, and there were moments when I almost thought I was rid of the pain at last.  But in the last week, as I got back in the boat and went through the usual motions with my feet against the footboard, the pain flared up again.  During the long trip over here it hurt bad every time I got out of the car and walked around.  I'm trying to be diligent with the stretching during this otherwise leisurely stay at my sister's house.

Offseason conditioning, the pains in my feets, and other news

During baseball season, my favorite team's website gets updated several times a day.  The team plays a game almost every day, after all, and there are always subplots like injuries, trade rumors, shuffling of the lineup, and the like to report on.  In the offseason, by contrast, two or three days might go by in between website updates.  It's not that there isn't anything going on: the players are busy with winter ball or carrying out their offseason conditioning regimes, and the front office is constantly looking for ways to assemble the best possible roster for the next season.  But without a new game each day and a chance for the team to improve its place in the standings, the urgency just isn't there to deliver up-to-the-minute news to the fans.

And so I offer my excuse for the lack of activity here on this website.  Even though I am definitely laying some groundwork for next season, it's hard to get inspired to write a lot of stuff when there are no competitions right around the corner.

Life has been full of the usual adult responsibilities along with the family obligations that accompany the holiday season.  But there is, in fact, plenty training happening, albeit in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way.  I've just finished three solid weeks of my latest strength routine, and starting this coming week I'll be doing a new one.  I got in the boat twice a week all through November, and since the beginning of December I've bumped that up to thrice a week.  Most days I paddle for 60 to 80 minutes, and it's generally steady paddling though I do try to throw in some 8-stroke sprints and some long surges and stuff like that to keep my body used to the idea of going harder.

On the injury front, I'm happy to say that most of my body is feeling good, but I've spent a full year now trying to get rid of some pain in an unlikely place for a paddler: my feet.  My right foot started hurting around this time last year and after spending a few months hoping it would go away I finally saw a doctor about it.  The doctor said it was a textbook case of plantar fasciitis, and he gave me one of those splints to wear in bed at night and recommended a couple of stretching exercises.  These remedies helped some but never quite solved the problem for good; by the time I took my trip to the Northeast in August the pain was flaring up again and was threatening to get into my left foot as well.  My buddy Rob, the chiropractor in New York, showed me a better stretching exercise and he also agreed with my suspicion that the condition was caused by my more aggressive use of my feet while paddling, pushing against the footboard with my onside foot while pulling against the strap with my offside foot.  So there you go: paddling has given me a foot injury.  I never would have predicted such a thing.

Since seeing Rob in August I have tried to push and pull less intensely with my feet while paddling, and I have been pretty conscientious about doing the stretch he showed me.  I think it has definitely helped: as I write this the pain in my left foot is gone.  But I can't quite seem to shake it from my right foot.  There are periods where it feels almost pain-free, but then it flares up again.  I have had all kinds of stubborn ailments in the past that did finally work themselves out, and I hope this one will too, but I'm trying to stay on top of it and keep it from developing into a bone spur.

Winter does seem to be moving into the Mid South.  This past Thursday a stiff north wind and a Fahrenheit temperature in the mid 30s prompted me to break out the pogies for the first time.  On Saturday it was about ten degrees warmer and less windy, but I didn't get down to paddle until late afternoon and it was almost dark when I finished.  I was chilled to the core as I put my boat away and by the time I'd walked up the ramp to my car I was shivering violently.  At this early stage there's no telling what kind of winter we'll end up having, but in most years I'm utterly weary of winter by the beginning of February.

Monday photo feature

This is a photo Sonny Salomon shot of me during a late-1990s trip to the Caney Fork River in Rock Island State Park.  He was taking pictures of members of our group surfing on the top wave, and in most cases this would be a throw-away shot because I've just been blown off of it.  But I like it.  My not-unbiased opinion has long been that a C1 paddler cuts the most striking figure on a whitewater river, and at least for this one instant I assumed that iconic image against the backdrop of the Great Falls of Middle Tennessee.

The gears are grinding

This week I started up a strength routine for the first time since August.

Each fall I take a bit of time off after my last race of the year.  How much of a break I take depends on a whole variety of circumstances.  In some years I've stayed out of the boat entirely for as much as six weeks; in other years, like this one, I've kept up a paddling routine of once or twice a week.

In no year have I ever had trouble finding other things to do.  And every fall, these other things promptly expand to fill the time I have freed up by backing off the paddling and training for a while.  There's always work to do in my workshop, and this fall I've had a couple of projects going on.  Also this fall I've been having some major renovation work done on a rental property I own.  Even without canoe and kayak racing to think about, I have felt nothing but busy-busy-busy.

I've mentioned here a number of times before that strength work is my least favorite part of training.  Sitting inside lifting weights or doing repetitive exercises just doesn't appeal to me that much.  But my biggest challenge in getting a routine going again is not the tedium or the discomfort, but the time that I must take back from my non-training activities.

This week I took back that time.  This little routine is what I hope to do three times a week for the next few weeks:

1.  Torso twists with 10-lb. medicine ball
2.  Pullups
3.  Core exercise demonstrated by Jing-Jing Li at 1:34 of this video
4.  Shoulder "pre-hab" exercise demonstrated by Michele Ramazza at 5:47 of this video

I started on Wednesday, doing just one set of each exercise to ease my muscles into their new jobs.  Not surprisingly I was quite sore Thursday and yesterday, but yesterday I moved into my normal practice of doing two sets of each exercise.

After the strength work yesterday I went down to the river for a 60-minute paddle.  Still quite sore, I slogged toward the mouth of the harbor against the stiff south wind that was blowing.  Once out on the river I played around a bit in the small downwind conditions that said wind had created.

With a high temperature around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, yesterday might have been the last day that was warm enough for me to do so without a serious threat of hypothermia should I swim.  Indeed, a front came through in the late afternoon, and today's high will be in the mid 50s.  Winter is on its way.

Monday photo feature

Okay, one more shot from my recent Go Pro obsession and then maybe I'll give it a rest.  In this one I'm heading downriver toward the entrance to the harbor.  You can sort of see the flags on the southern tip of Mud Island: they're right next to that tree at the left side of the photo.  You can also see the Harahan, Frisco, and Memphis-Arkansas bridges off to the right.

I got this effect by clicking the "Fade" button a whole bunch of times.  The iPhoto program on my laptop offers all kinds of ways to make my paddling world look surreal.

Cuttin' loose with my paddle and my photo-editing software

Fall is low-water season on the lower Mississippi River, and the river has indeed been low this fall, but not as low as it can be.  Below-zero readings on the Memphis gauge are typical, but through September and October the level hovered between 5 and 10 feet.  As the dry weather drags on across the U.S., the river is only just now dropping lower: when I paddled yesterday the gauge reading was about 2.8 feet, and the forecast has it dropping below zero in the middle of next week.

I paddled for 60 minutes yesterday morning, and revved the engines more than I had done lately.  After doing three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, I paddled out onto the Mississippi and headed for the waves behind an upstream-bound barge rig.  In the beginning my surfing attempts were on the timid side due to the cooler air and water temperatures, but eventually my confidence grew and I threw in some hard sprints that resulted in several decent rides.

Once the waves petered out I paddled up the Arkansas side toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge until there were less than 20 minutes left in my hour; then I surged long and hard across the river and up the harbor to the monorail bridge.  It wore me out, but it felt really good just to paddle as hard as I could.

I haven't taken the Go Pro camera out since my last post, but I've been playing around a little with some of the editing features on iPhoto.  Here are a few more shots from last Sunday's set:


Number Four

My boat is pointed south/southwest; that's the Hernando DeSoto Bridge on my right, and you can see the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas bridges off to my left.  I clicked the "cooler" button several times to enhance the cooler colors in this photo.


Number Five

This photo got taken just a few moments later, by which time I was turning upstream toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  I clicked the "cooler" button a bunch of times to make this photo look really cool.


Number Six

In this photo I'm heading into the mouth of the harbor toward the central part of downtown Memphis.  Here, I availed myself of iPhoto's option to turn a photo from color to black-and-white.


Number Seven

Now I'm a bit farther up into the harbor.  For this photo I clicked the "sepia" button, which I guess is supposed to give it sort of an old-timey look.


Thanks to everybody who commented on the photos in my last post.  If you have an opinion on any of these, feel free to share it.

Amateur photography

I continue to paddle a couple of times a week.  When Joe and I get together on Tuesdays our pace allows for conversation.  When I get back out by myself on Saturday or Sunday I push the pace a bit more to keep my body used to the idea of training and racing.

I won't bore you with the details, but I've been exceptionally busy on numerous fronts lately, and as much as ever an hour or so on the river has been a welcome respite from all the other things going on.  Each time I prepare to head downtown I ask myself if paddling is the best use of my time that day, or if I shouldn't be "getting things done" in one of those other areas.  But once I'm down at the dock stretching and readying my boat and gear, the sudden relaxation I feel gives me confidence that I'm doing the right thing.

Of course, even in the boat I have to have a side project, and my project for the last few weeks has been to try to get a really good photograph of the Memphis riverfront with my Go Pro camera.  I usually set the camera to take a shot every ten seconds and have hundreds of photos by the time I'm finished, and you'd think surely I'd end up with at least one winner each time out.  But while I've gotten a lot of pretty good pictures, and certainly some very interesting ones, that iconic image that begs to be on the cover of Life magazine hasn't quite materialized yet.

Anytime I see a thing or a landscape I like, I just point my boat in that direction and paddle toward it... not the most precise method of point-and-shoot.  I'm often disappointed when I try to get a particular object in a photo because the camera's lens has a very wide angle and the object looks much smaller and more distant in the picture than it had appeared to my eyes.  Back in August when I paddled on the Hudson River I tried several times to get shots of Amtrak and Metro North trains going by, but they're barely visible in the photos.

Perhaps what I'll do for the next little while is share a few photos here and see what readers think.  I hope you might be inclined to say something in the "Comments" section or, if you're my Face Book friend, to tell me what you think there.  Here's today's offering:

Number One

This one has many of the elements I'm looking for: the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, the river, a good chunk of the downtown skyline.  And the late-afternoon light looks pretty good.  I wish the sky were a bit more interesting... it's lovely and blue, but I like some clouds and stuff.


Number Two

This was taken in the late morning.  I remember being all excited to get a barge rig in the photo: one of the things I love about the Mississippi is that it has incredible natural beauty and recreational value even while being a major artery for commercial transportation.  But just like those trains on the Hudson, it turned out not quite as prominent in the photo as I would have liked.  Another problem with Number Two is that the camera was tilted farther upward than I realized and the Outdoors, Inc., sticker didn't get in the photo.  Outdoors has been a good friend and sponsor of mine for many years, and is largely responsible for the very existence of sports like paddling in Memphis and the Mid South, so I'd like it to be acknowledged in that one great photo I come up with.


Number Three

Number Four

Numbers Three and Four were both taken yesterday when the sky was much more overcast, and I like the effect that has on the lighting.  Both photos have pretty good composition, with the bridge and the skyline and The Pyramid on display.  But is either of them the photo?  Hmmm....


Anyhoo, I'd be grateful to anybody who weighs in.  If nothing else, I'm always thrilled to know when somebody has actually read all this stuff I write.

Monday photo feature

Fall has been slow to arrive this year.  Through last week the daytime Fahrenheit temperatures in the Mid South were still well into the 80s.  It was nice in a way, but in another way it didn't feel quite right for the beginning of November.

Some cooler weather finally moved in over the weekend--the kind that makes you want to put on a sweater or even a jacket between 5 PM and 9 AM or thereabouts.

It's always with a sigh of resignation that I start pulling out more clothes to wear in the boat.  Soon wetsuit pants and a paddle jacket and a variety of layering garments will be part of my everyday gear, and I'll yearn for those carefree days when I could head out the door with nothing on but a pair of swim trunks and a short-sleeve shirt.

But winter isn't here just yet.  Yesterday I decided it was cool enough for a long-sleeve shirt, but I stubbornly stuck to wearing shorts.  And it turned out I felt just fine in the boat.