Snow day thoughts: more on whitewater racing

The high temperature yesterday was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  Most of the snow and ice that fell last Friday had melted away by the end of the day.  Then, overnight, a new winter storm moved through the Mid South, and we are now blanketed in a new two to three inches of snow.  So far this winter I'd been stiffening my upper lip and paddling on these icy days, but with the high temperature not even making it out of the teens, I raised the white flag today.

Instead, I spent part of the day dreaming up something to post here on the blog.  Here's a little followup to yesterday's "photo feature" post.  The U.S. team trials for wildwater took place this past weekend, and Jamie McEwan's son Devin has made the team for 2018.  Devin has extensive slalom racing experience and raced C2 at the 2016 Olympics at Rio de Janiero.  But just like his dad, he's doing some wildwater, too.  Here is this year's U.S. wildwater team as reported by Jeff Owen of the USA Wildwater Committee:

Selected to represent the USA at the World Championships in Muotathal, Switzerland, on the Muota River:

~C1 Man - Devin McEwan
~K1 Man - Chris Hipgrave
~K1 Man - Cameron Thacker
~K1 Woman - Alessia Faverio
~K1 Woman - Marin Millar

All of these athletes were also selected to represent the USA at the World Cups in Banja Luka and Celje, with the following additions:

K1 Woman - Joslin Coggan
K1 Woman - Lili Brandon

Additionally we thank Chris Norbury for volunteering to be the USA Team Manager.

Long-time readers of this blog might also recognize the name Chris Hipgrave, a visitor to Memphis for many Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Races over the years.

What exactly is wildwater, you ask?  "Wildwater" is downriver racing through whitewater rapids.  Like I mentioned yesterday, it was partnered with whitewater slalom for decades much like downhill skiing is partnered with the various forms of slalom skiing.  But now that slalom is an Olympic sport and wildwater isn't, wildwater is laboring to get by on its own.  Few athletes compete in both disciplines these days.

That's a shame, because I believe slalom and wildwater are a lot more similar than many people realize.  Sure, the boats are very different: wildwater boats put a premium on forward speed while slalom boats sacrifice forward speed for greater turning ability.  But one skill is absolutely crucial for success in either discipline: boat positioning.

When you're trying to get down a slalom or wildwater course as quickly as possible, you want as many of your strokes as possible to be forward strokes, or at least strokes that propel the boat forward in some way while also effecting some necessary change in direction.  You want to avoid strokes that slow the boat down, like stern rudders and (especially!) back strokes.  A so-called "perfect run" would be one in which you do nothing but forward strokes, using the river's features (waves, holes, eddies, oblique currents) in combination with leans and body English to do all the steering.

To make sure you're doing mostly forward strokes, it's very important that, at every instant during your race run, your boat is in the right place and pointed the right way to allow you to take a good, solid, maximum-blade-pressure forward stroke.  This is what whitewater racers mean when they talk about "boat positioning," and no, it is not easy.  It requires not only a considerable degree of skill, boat control, body control, and balance, but also an intimate familiarity with every aspect of the course.  Accomplished racers spend hours studying the course from their boats and from the riverbank, and going over the course in their minds away from the river.  This is quite a commitment of time in the case of wildwater racers, who have as much as several miles of river to learn.

During the years I spent trying to race slalom in the 1990s, I struggled mightily with boat positioning.  Just gaining an appreciable intellectual understanding of it took me a few years (and I probably didn't help myself by living hundreds of miles from other racers and coaches).  By the early 2000s I had definitely improved and was even winning some club-level races, whose courses are typically pretty easy and take place on non-threatening whitewater.  But the big national-level races like the team trials always required more difficult moves on bigger water, and there my lack of athletic ability was laid bare for the world to see.  I remember sneaking in a lot of rudder strokes and doing a lot of braces while my more gifted competitors powered through all the moves as if they were on flatwater.

Throughout that period, friends of mine would sometimes tell me "You ought to race wildwater!  With your endurance background (I'd been a runner in high school and college) and your river-running experience you'd be a natural!"

Eventually I did enter some wildwater races, and I was not a natural.  Endurance was never a problem, but just because I'd done plenty of river running didn't mean I was ready to get down a river fast.  The main thing I struggled with was exactly the thing that had given me so much trouble in slalom: boat positioning.

One wildwater race I did was the 2000 nationals on the Kern River out in California.  The course had several long flatwater sections, and those were no problem: I paddled through them as hard as I could, just like I do in the races I'm doing these days.  It was in the rapids that I lost an absurd amount of time.  The biggest rapid was a circuitous route through a jumble of rocks, and all I remember now, nearly two decades later, is all the big, fat, ugly back strokes I was doing to get myself through the rapid without wrecking my boat.  Meanwhile, I guarantee you that the top racers were forward-paddling through that rapid as if they were on a lake.  At every instant, their boats were positioned just right so that they didn't have to do any corrective strokes.

Nowadays I'm doing a different type of racing, and while I'm not world-class in it either, at least I'm demonstrating a bit more competence.  Not coincidentally, boat positioning is not really a part of this type of racing.  I've even got a rudder to do almost all the steering.  There are technical challenges, to be sure: I keep working to make my next stroke the perfect forward stroke.  But these challenges seem to fit my particular set of athletic gifts better.

Still, I think a lot about all that whitewater racing I did, and there's a lot I miss about it.  I wasn't winning much--more often, I was fighting to avoid last place.  But in a weird way, that was part of the allure.  Over many years, toiling to get good at something that did not come naturally to me built profound self-confidence and a sense of who I am in this world.  It reminds me of a slogan that was painted on the wall of the basketball locker room at a school where I once taught.  It was a trite slogan, but hey, it didn't become overused by not having any truth to it: "Most players practice what they do best.  Good players practice what they do worst."

I'll leave you with an example of good boat positioning in wildwater racing.  Vladi Panato of Italy was perhaps the greatest wildwater C1 racer ever.  The video below presents a retrospective of his career.  Except on one very technical boulder-strewn course that required some extreme turns, you will not see Mr. Panato switch paddling sides or take any strokes across the bow.  He does all his steering by leaning the boat and by positioning it so that the whitewater features turn the boat for him.  I am in awe every time I watch this footage.

Vladi Panato: Il Mito (The Legend) from WildWater TV Italia www.wwtv.it on Vimeo.

Monday photo feature

Cathy Summers has posted more photos on Face Book since last Monday.  If you use Face Book I encourage you to visit the pages "Catherine Summers' Photography" and "Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends" to check them out.

Her latest albums contain photos from the 1989 season.  1979 had been a special year because U.S. athletes won multiple world championships medals for the first time ever, and 1989 was just as special because the world championships took place in the U.S. for the first time ever.  The best whitewater paddlers in the world put their boats on the Savage River in Maryland to compete for the sport's most prestigious titles, and Cathy Summers was there with her camera once more.

Paddling here are the late Jamie McEwan in the bow and Lecky Haller in the stern.  These two need no introduction to anybody familiar with whitewater slalom racing in the U.S.  Jamie had won the first-ever Olympic medal for the U.S. when he took the C1 bronze in 1972, and Lecky had been a C2 world champion with his brother Fritz in 1983.  After joining forces in the mid 1980s, Jamie and Lecky quickly became one of the top slalom C2s in the world: they were silver medalists at the 1987 world championships, won the overall World Cup title in 1988, took fourth at the 1989 worlds, and finished fourth at the 1992 Olympics.

What fewer people are aware of is that Jamie and Lecky did some wildwater racing as well.  Nowadays the non-Olympic wildwater discipline is sort of the unfortunate stepsister while slalom basks in the Olympic spotlight, but once upon a time the two were considered equal and many athletes, like Davey Hearn and Ron Lugbill in last week's photo feature, participated in both, just as skiers commonly race both the slalom and downhill events.  Slalom's re-inclusion on the Olympic programme in 1992, along with wildwater's non-inclusion, brought that relationship to an end.  1993 was the last year in which the slalom and wildwater world championships took place together on a regular basis.

Because of that, Ms. Summers's photo sets contain many relics of a bygone era.  In this photo Jamie and Lecky switch over to the wildwater boat for a run down the Savage River at the 1989 worlds.

Back in the deep freeze

I paddled without pogies Thursday morning.  The Fahrenheit temperature was in the low 60s.  As I drove home I saw people out in their yards in short sleeves.

"What a difference a day makes," the tired old saying goes.  I woke up before dawn Friday and heard sleet beating against my bedroom window.  By the time I was out of bed a while later the streets were thoroughly iced over.  The sleet changed into plump snowflakes around nine o'clock, and by the time "Winter Storm Hunter," as I later found out it was named, had moved out, our fair city was all but shut down.  Bear in mind that we're one of those Southern cities without much in the way of snow removal equipment.

Ordinarily I'd have done another round of the strength routine Friday, but the beat-up state of my body, combined with the "holiday" feel of a snow day, made me decide to take a break from that.  Instead I did a full-body stretching session and soaked in the bathtub.

It was snowing again yesterday as I headed down to the river, but it didn't seem to be sticking to the streets where the previous day's traffic had blazed some decent trails.  It was 23 degrees when I arrived at the marina, and the scene down at the dock looked like this:

It was definitely a day for the fleece-lined pogies.

The rudder system was all frozen up, of course.  The pedals came free after about five minutes, but the rudder itself remained stuck.  Fortunately it was stuck in an almost perfect straight-ahead position, so I was able to paddle toward the south end of the harbor with virtually no corrective strokes.  When I did have to alter my course with some one-sided paddling, I treated it as a stroke drill and used good precise strokes.  The rudder finally came loose about 20 minutes in, and from then on it was a pretty typical, if cold, 60-minute session.

Yesterday afternoon the sun came out, and that aided the clearing of the streets even though the high temperature was only about 28 degrees.  This morning I headed back down to the riverfront in driving conditions that were about as good as we could ask for two days after a heavy-by-Memphis-standards winter storm.  Down at the marina, where the temperature was 24 degrees, the banks were slightly less snow-covered but the dock seemed just as snowy:

Knowing my rudder would be frozen, I took a hammer with me today so I could tap the rudder-post hatch cover loose and then free the rudder by hand.  The cover shattered:

I'm not really surprised: it was made of a pretty low-grade plastic and had been exposed to years worth of ultraviolet radiation, and the cold temperature just made it that much more brittle.  Fortunately a rudder post hatch cover is not an especially essential piece of equipment.

On my way out of the harbor I did three 8-stroke sprints.  Out on the Mississippi I paddled up along the Tennessee side to the mouth of the Wolf River.  As I came back down there was some turbulence in the water from a couple of barge rigs, and my main priority was staying upright--I did not want to go swimming on a day like today.

Once back in the harbor's safe haven I tried to take the most perfect strokes I could to make up for the de-tuning out on the river.  In his clinic back in October, Morgan House had urged his pupils to focus on one aspect of the stroke at a time, and that's what I did here.  I'd concentrate on exiting close to the boat for a couple dozen strokes, then I'd concentrate on having the shaft as close to vertical as possible at the catch for the next little while, and then I'd concentrate on rotating my body... there's never an end of things to think about.

(1) Warm, wet paddling. (2) Ow!!!! (3) Strength routine struggles.

This week has been significantly warmer than last, the Fahrenheit thermometer hitting 60 degrees by yesterday.  It's also been overcast and rainy and gloomy.  Picture-perfect days are rare in January.  And the forecast calls for the return of sub-freezing temperatures overnight tonight, possibly accompanied by sleet and freezing rain.

Joe and I paddled a loop of the harbor on Tuesday, and today I went back to the river with the intention of paddling for 60 minutes.  I discovered upon arrival that I'd forgotten my watch, so I paddled a loop that usually takes me about an hour to do.  I warmed up, did three 8-stroke sprints, and then practiced my stroke at a variety of speeds.  I got back to the dock about 65 minutes after I'd left--typical of me, I erred toward excess.

I paddled with a bit of discomfort today because as I was leaving the house this morning I slipped on the stairs out back.  I'm glad no one was around to see it because it was one of those spectacular feet-out-from-under-me moves, like when a cartoon character slips on a banana peel.  It had been raining in the early hours of the morning and my back stairs can get very slippery when wet.  My back slammed down hard on a stair just below the shoulder blades.  I don't think I hurt myself seriously--just a deep bruise--but now I'll be living with that soreness for several days.

On Monday and yesterday I did rounds of the current strength routine.  Like I've mentioned before, these exercises are Hard with a capital H.  I'm a little perplexed by the trouble I'm having with the rolling squat burpees: I remember them being difficult when I last did them two years ago, but I'm pretty sure I got the hang of them after just a few days of trying.  But right now I'm struggling to do even one rep.  I realize there's no reason to get too upset: I'm a paddler, after all, not a burpee master.  But I'm feeling discouraged anyway.  The truth is, I don't want to believe that my athletic ability has declined that much between age 48 and age 50.

Wintertime tips

Go back and read this post from two and a half years ago.  I'd forgotten all about it but I think it's quite timely for those of us in the northern hemisphere for whom the new race season is still just a glimmer on the horizon.

Monday photo feature

A lady named Cathy Summers has posted some really neat photos of the 1979 whitewater racing season on Face Book.  Apparently she has had them in the form of slides all these years, and she is now scanning them and sharing them.  Face Book users can view her albums on the page "Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends."

1979 is the season covered in the movie Fast and Clean, a documentary of whitewater slalom racing in the United States and U.S. racers' quests for medals at the world championships.  Having spent most of the 1990s trying my hand at slalom, I've watched Fast and Clean many, many times.  Seeing these photos now makes me feel like I'm learning "The Rest Of The Story."  The photos include all the athletes and events we see in Fast and Clean, plus many other athletes and many other events.

Pictured above are Davey Hearn and Ron Lugbill.  Davey and Ron both appear in Fast and Clean competing in slalom single canoe (C1), the discipline for which they are best known.  But the fact is that they were also on the wildwater national team during the early part of their careers, and in this photo they are paddling a wildwater C2 on Rivière Saguenay at Jonquière, Quebec, the site of the '79 world championships.  I'm guessing this is a practice run since Ron is not wearing a number bib.  (A whitewater racer usually gets a bib to wear rather than a number to tape on the boat's deck.)

It just so happens that Davey and his wife Jennifer have DVD copies of Fast and Clean for sale through their company Sweet Composites.  Anybody reading this who hasn't seen the film should order a copy right away and experience the magic for himself or herself.  Though I don't see this product actually listed on the site, Jennifer has confirmed that they do in fact have it.  25 bucks apiece... money you will not regret spending.  Get busy and call them up, and tell them My Training Blog by Elmore sent you.

Race schedule update

More race directors are beginning to announce their dates for 2018, and online registration is now live for a number of events.  Here is an updated edition of my 2018 schedule.  I'd appreciate a heads-up from anybody who knows of other events within a reasonable drive of Memphis, Tennessee.


March
18  Battle On The Bayou.  Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  8.5 miles on flatwater.  Register


April
7  Top Of The Teche.  Bayou Teche, Leonville, Louisiana, to Arnaudville, Louisiana.  7.7 miles down a Class I river.  Register

7 Kayak Trader Oyster City Challenge.  Apalachicola River, Apalachicola, Florida.  15 miles down a coastal river.  Register

21  Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River from Madison Parish Port, Louisiana, to Vicksburg, Mississippi.  21 miles down the largest river in North America.  Register


May
12  Osage Spring 12.  Osage River near Osage City, Missouri.  12 miles total (10 miles downriver and then 2 miles back up) on a Class I river.  Register

12  Bluegrass River Run.  Kentucky River near Richmond, Kentucky.  19 miles down a Class I river. Register


June
9  Taylorsville Lake Paddle Battle.  Taylorsville Lake, Taylorsville, Kentucky.  A flatwater race of "TBD" distance.

16  Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee.  The 37th edition of this classic.  5000 meters down the largest river in North America.  Register


July
7  The Lovely Laurel River Lake Paddle Blast.  Laurel River Lake, Corbin, Kentucky.  A 10-mile flatwater race.  Register

16-21  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  A race for surf skis and outrigger canoes in the legendary downwind conditions of the Columbia River Gorge.


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

9-12  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Onondaga Lake and Erie Canal, Syracuse, New York.  Marathon races in a variety of boat classes sanctioned by the USCA.


September
1  Big River Regional.  Mississippi River, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  13 miles down the largest river in North America.

8  Lower Atchafalaya Sprints.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  A series of 3-mile races on flatwater.

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

29  River Rat Paddle Challenge.  Ouachita River at Monroe, Louisiana.  6.5 miles on a Class I river.

Winter backs off a little

It was 16 degrees Fahrenheit when I got out of bed Friday morning.  The temperature was forecast to go all the way up to 39 by the afternoon, so, weary of fighting with a frozen rudder and having icicles all over my clothes, I waited until the afternoon to paddle.  The high for the day was in fact 42 degrees, and when I arrived down at the riverfront it was amazing how warm it felt after a whole week of almost constant subfreezing temperatures.  It helped a lot that the sun was out and there was very little wind.

I happily swapped out my fleece-lined pogies for the unlined ones and set out on a 60-minute paddle. I did three 8-stroke sprints, during which it wasn't easy to use my "new and (I hope) improved" stroke.  I'll just keep practicing, I guess.  I paddled steady for the rest of the hour.  During the last ten minutes or so, as I headed back toward the dock, some soft ice started forming on my deck.  I'm curious to know how that was happening, seeing as how the air temperature was still well above freezing at that moment.

Yesterday I did another round of the new strength routine.  I'd started it by doing sort of a cursory round Thursday, and yesterday I did it the usual two times through.  As I mentioned before, most of the exercises I'm doing come from this video; I'd last done them about two years ago, and I'm now being reminded of just how much more technically difficult they are than they look in the vid.  The Hannibal pushups, rolling squat burpees, and 180 depth-tuck jumps are particularly tricky, and right now I'm struggling to do just a few reps of each even close to respectably.  Two years ago I did manage to get reasonably proficient, so now I just need to have faith that I will again with continued practice.

Today's weather is pretty emblematic of winter as I have come to know it on this particular parcel of our planet's surface: not bone-jarring cold, but cold nevertheless, and overcast and gloomy as well.  The temperature was in the high 30s when I got down to the riverfront this morning, and it was quite breezy as well.  The wind was from the southeast, and that's not as bad as a north wind, but it was still a wind and it was not exactly warm.

In recent years Sunday has been my day for a long paddle.  To me, "long" is two hours or more.  Since I'm building back toward a full training load for the new race season, I settled for a mere 90 minutes today.  After doing another three 8-stroke sprints I paddled out of the harbor and up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Wolf River.  As I came back down the river there were two barge rigs coming up and they created somewhat turbulent conditions.  I de-tuned my stroke and focused on staying upright until I was safely back in the harbor.  The temperature may have been above freezing but I still didn't want to go for a swim.

A new strength routine

It's a new month!  Time to get going with a new strength routine.

It's been a long time since I've done any of the exercises in the video that appears at the bottom of my last post--in fact, I'd almost forgotten about that video, to be honest.  So five of the six exercises in this new routine are covered in that video.  These exercises involve near-constant motion, and I figure that's a good thing to focus on during these cold days we've been having in which getting moving at all takes a bit of willpower.

1.  Hannibal pushups

2.  Pendulum planks

3.  Bent-over rows with a dumbbell

4.  Rolling squat burped

5.  Glute/ham single-leg plyo bridge

6.  180 depth-tuck jumps

Reposting some good exercise videos

This is something I repost about once a year.  Below are several videos from which I have drawn exercises for my strength routines in the last few years.  While I believe traditional "pumping iron" has its place, I'm always on the lookout for exercises that emphasize precise movements and full ranges of motion.  Not only are these things important for paddlers, but also I think they promote "later-life" general fitness and wellness.  I, for one, am not getting any younger.

Core strength is an asset for paddlers of all disciplines.  Here's Chinese slalom racer Jing Jing Li demonstrating some simple core exercises one can do with a stability ball:




I love exercises that require little or no equipment.  In this video, slalom kayak world and Olympic champion Daniele Molmenti of Italy shows us some "backpacker" exercises, so named because they're easy to do anyplace on the planet you might find yourself:




The guy in this video, Michele Ramazza, has excelled in "extreme" or "freeride" racing--downriver kayaking in pretty gnarly whitewater:

  


Finally, here are some exercises that focus on explosive power.  They are technically quite tricky, and I typically have to spend the first several sessions of a strength routine just learning them: I watch an exercise in the video, then I get down on the floor and try it myself, I see where I'm having difficulty, and I watch the video footage again to see how this athlete handles it.

F-f-f-frigid wa-wa-wa-water

I understand that yesterday was among the coldest New Year's Days on record for the greater Memphis area.  When I got down to the river yesterday afternoon the temperature display in my car said it was 22 degrees Fahrenheit.  That was about as warm as it got the entire day.  My boat's rudder and its cables were frozen in place, and the best remedy I've found is to put the boat in the water and start paddling and hope that the slightly-above-freezing water, along with any sunlight there might be, will help free them up.  This time it took between five and ten minutes for me to have steering.  After that I paddled steady to complete a 60-minute session.  The north wind had some bite to it and I think it picked up while I was out there: the last 20 minutes or so, during which I paddled from the south end of the harbor back to the marina, was particularly uncomfortable.  By the time I'd changed into dry clothes and put my boat away back at the dock, I was chilled to the core.

Ever the glutton for punishment, I returned to the riverfront this morning for another round.  The temperature as I parked in the lot up the hill from the marina: 15 degrees.  I realized I'd forgotten the shell I usually wear in such weather, so I decided to keep today's session short: 40 minutes.  I put the boat in the water and began the usual effort to free the rudder.  I mentioned in my last post that I don't usually do drills and stuff when it's this cold, but with no steering I found myself doing many one-sided strokes just to get the boat to go where I wanted.  I paid the same attention to stroke mechanics as I always do when doing stroke drills.

After 15 minutes the rudder was showing no signs of coming unfrozen.  I stopped at the dock to try to work it free by hand, but to no avail.  I finally gave up and resolved to paddle as well as I could under the circumstances.  As it turned out, the rudder was positioned in such a way that I was able to do smooth clockwise laps of the marina with only a little bit of one-sided paddling or backpaddling to adjust the boat's direction.  In the end, I achieved what I thought was a good-quality training session, and I was pleased to have done something good in such less-than-ideal conditions.

The paddling itself is generally the least-unpleasant part of paddling on a frigid day: once I get going I generate plenty of body heat.  The chores back on the dock are what's tough, changing into dry clothes and putting the boat away.  Today I just put the boat away and skipped the change of clothes, dashing back up the hill to the car.  I drove home and peeled off the paddling gear and hopped in the shower to warm myself back up.

I guess one obvious question is, Why wasn't the harbor iced over?  And I don't really know the answer.  I've seen the harbor freeze over a few times over the years, but yesterday and today it was as liquid as could be even though the temperature has been well below freezing for a good three days running now.  All I can think of is that there must be certain atmospheric conditions required for ice to form.

The last time I'd paddled in this kind of cold was almost exactly a year ago.  Last winter went on to be quite mild after that cold snap.  So I guess there's some hope that we won't be subjected to too much more of this deep freeze.  But you never know.  I'll just keep taking it a day at a time.

Monday photo feature

I'm trying to be chill about the chill

I do believe winter has arrived for real.  When I put my boat in the water Thursday morning the Fahrenheit temperature was about 25 degrees, and after 60 minutes of paddling it had warmed up to 30 or so.

I own two pairs of pogies: a simple nylon pair that protects my hands from the wind, and a fleece-lined pair for more frigid conditions.  The unlined pogies are adequate for a good 95 percent of the winter days we have in Memphis and the Mid South; I don't break out the fleece-lined ones until it's below freezing.  Since that was the case on Thursday, fleece-lined it was.

Yesterday was balmy by comparison: about 40 degrees.  The unlined pogies worked fine. And yet, paddling yesterday felt like more of a chore than it had Thursday: on Thursday it was sunny and there was little wind, so once I got going I felt perfectly toasty.  Yesterday it was overcast with a pesky north wind, and the paddling felt labored and my body not so comfortable.  I tell people often that 30 degrees and sunny and calm is much more pleasant than 40 degrees and overcast and windy.

On these cold winter days I usually just do a steady paddle.  Sure, I'm working on my stroke--I'm always working on my stroke--but I give myself a break from sprints and drills and stuff.  Even in our colder winters we have a good number of days in the 40s and 50s, and the drills can wait until those days come back around.

Today we're back to frigid.  A new front came in yesterday afternoon: by four o'clock the temperature had dropped below freezing, and the overnight low was in the teens.  With today's high predicted to be about 25 degrees, I was happy to stay in and do the current strength routine.  With a new month about to begin, this was probably my last time doing this routine.

More freezing weather is in store for the next several days, with highs in the low to mid 20s and single-digit overnight lows possible.  Those fleece-lined pogies will probably be back on the next time I get in the boat.  I tentatively plan to paddle tomorrow--I can think of few better ways to start a new year that paddle a boat--and as far as I know my Tuesday morning paddle with Joe is on this week.

A day at a time, closer to the start of another race season

I'm doing what I usually do for the Christmas holiday--hanging out at my sister's family's house on the North Carolina Piedmont.  We're doing the sort of things I expect most families do: lots of sitting around and visiting and consuming all the seasonal sweets and eats.

But I did find time for a smidgen of exercise this morning.  I did an abbreviated version of the current strength routine--that is, I did exercises 2, 4, and 5.  Exercises 1 and 3 require dumbbells and I don't have those with me.  Normally I go through the routine twice, but today I did it three times since I was doing fewer exercises.

I've continued to get in the boat twice a week--Tuesday and Thursday this past week--and work to get more comfortable with the mechanical adjustments to my stroke.  Slowly but surely I'm getting there.  Once I'm back home I'll start to dial up the volume toward my usual training workload.  I won't be doing as much as a 20-year-old Olympic hopeful would be, of course, but with any luck it'll be respectable for a 50-year-old man.

Monday photo feature

I've mentioned that I've been catching up on some out-of-the-boat things lately.  That includes the things that provide my livelihood--my woodworking business and my rental properties.  But you can always count on me having something frivolous going on to distract me from my "real" job.  A couple of months ago I took a class at the Five In One Social Club in which I learned some simple block-printing techniques, and since then I've been gleefully geeking out on that stuff, carving all kinds of little designs and printing them in a variety of colors.

Is this relevant to a paddling blog?  Why, of course it is.  Don't forget that I am a canoe-and-kayak nerd as well as an arts-and-crafts nerd, and I made sure to carve a couple of paddling-related blocks.  The blue kayak above is based on the cover design of the book The Barton Mold: A Study In Sprint Kayaking by William T. Endicott.  The black whitewater C1 paddler is based on a photo of German slalom racer Nele Bayn that I saw on the "Planet Canoe" Face Book page.  Both blocks still need some touching up so they'll print a little cleaner, but don't forget that I'm a complete amateur at this and will probably stay that way... in other words, I've got a right to do it badly.  In any case, I'm having fun with it.

Laying some good groundwork

The training volume has definitely been lower in this early part of the offseason; I've been paddling twice a week and doing a strength routine twice a week.  But I think I'm doing more than simply going through the motions.

In the boat I've been working to incorporate the things I learned in Morgan House's clinic back in October.  Making even small changes to your stroke mechanics can be tiring even though the paddling intensity is low.  The biggest challenge is staying relaxed: we humans like things that are familiar, and doing something you're not used to makes you want to tense your body and burn more energy than you should.  I think the best thing I can do is follow Morgan's advice and work on my stroke just a little bit at a time, every time in the boat, rather than try to get it all right in the space of a day or a week.

I've been doing the new strength routine for a week now.  As with most of my routines I get it done in less than a half hour, but it's a good intense workout.

2018 race schedule (first draft)

Here is how my 2018 race schedule looks right now.  As usual, this is a working document.  I probably won't make it to every event on this list, and as other events announce their dates I'll be adding them to this schedule.

You can count on seeing me at one event: that would be my hometown race, the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  Other events I attend pretty regularly are the ones at Ocean Springs in March and at Vicksburg in April.  And of course, I had to register early for the Gorge Downwind Championships because of its registration cap, so that's a go as long as no unforeseen complications arise.

Since I've attended the USCA Nationals the last two years I put it on my schedule for this coming year as well.  But I seriously doubt I'll make it there this time.  Going out to the Pacific Northwest in July will be an epic trip, and I just don't see myself making a trip to New York less than a month later.

Anyway, here we go: an early look at where I might be racing this coming year.

March
18  Battle On The Bayou.  Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  8.5 miles on flatwater.


April
7  Top Of The Teche.  Bayou Teche, Leonville, Louisiana, to Arnaudville, Louisiana.  7.7 miles down a Class I river.

21  Bluz Cruz Canoe and Kayak Race.  Mississippi River from Madison Parish Port, Louisiana, to Vicksburg, Mississippi.  21 miles down the largest river in North America.


May
12  Bluegrass River Run.  Kentucky River near Richmond, Kentucky.  19 miles down a Class I river.


June
16  Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race.  The 37th edition of this classic.  5000 meters down the largest river in North America.


July
16-21  Gorge Downwind Championships.  Columbia River, Hood River, Oregon.  A race for surf skis and outrigger canoes in the legendary downwind conditions of the Columbia River Gorge.


August
9-12  U.S. Canoe Association National Championships.  Onondaga Lake and Erie Canal, Syracuse, New York.  Marathon races in a variety of boat classes sanctioned by the USCA.


September
8  Lower Atchafalaya Sprints.  Atchafalaya River, Patterson, Louisiana.  A series of 3-mile races on flatwater.

A new strength routine

This past week I started up a new strength routine that I'll probably do through the end of the year.  The exercises are as follows:

1.  A compound exercise similar to what U.S. slalom racer Casey Eichfeld is doing in this video.  Lacking the weight-room equipment he's using, I use a stability ball instead.

2.  Hindu squats (demonstrated in this video)

3.  Bicep curls with a dumbbell

4.  A simple plank on the floor

5.  Dips



And now, what follows is something I re-post from time to time, explaining my general approach to strength training:

I've said many times before that strength work is my least favorite part of training, and because of that I've developed a give-and-take relationship with it.  I try to follow a few simple guidelines:

1.  Keep the routines short and simple.  I focus on quality, not quantity.  This way I'm not dreading spending a big chunk of my day doing tedious and sometimes uncomfortable exercises.  I try to work in exercises for each general area of the body--legs, core, and arms/shoulders.

2.  Good technique is more important than the amount of weight.  Paddling is a highly technical sport and I think it's important to be precise in the gym as well as in the boat.  And on a similar note, let's not forget that I'm a paddler, not a body builder, so those commercial gym slogans like "Exercise your right to look good" don't really resonate with me.  I happen to think that accomplished paddlers do in fact "look good," but there's a difference between "show muscle" and muscle that actually performs useful tasks.  A bulky body is generally not an asset in our sport, so I do stuff to bring about good lean muscle tone, "prehab" exercises to prevent injuries, and explosive power.  Also, at age 50 I'm thinking more and more about the issues of aging, and I look for exercises that emphasize continued flexibility and range of motion.

3.  Don't get all upset if you miss a session.  Most of the time I try to do strength work three times a week, but if life gets in the way and I have to miss a session, I just tell myself it's not a big deal, and I'll get back on track the next time.

I do my strength work in the comfort of my own home, where I listen to whatever music I want and can play with my cats in between exercises.  I've got some dumbbells, a rubber band, a pair of gymnast's rings, and a few other simple things, and that's more than I need for a good routine.

Another guy getting older but still having fun

The world championships of whitewater rodeo took place this past week at San Juan, Argentina.  Spectators there saw a sport that's quite different from the type of paddling I do: competitors execute freestyle moves in the maw of a hole, and their scores are determined by a panel of judges.

The event also included a squirt boat competition.  Squirt boats are extremely low-volume craft, designed to perform maneuvers beneath the surface called "mystery moves."  The men's champion last week was one Clay Wright of Rock Island, Tennessee.  Clay and I go back nearly 35 years, as we attended the same summer camp in the mid 1980s.  Like me, Clay is 50 years old, but his "advanced" age didn't stop him from making a better impression on the judges than paddlers 30 years younger.

I'm sure Clay was thrilled to stand atop the podium and be recognized among his peers.  But according to this account of the competition, his motivation comes from a much deeper place.  This is consistent with the point I made in this post almost two months ago: the top performers in any field, in terms of excellence or longevity or both, derive their greatest pleasure from the everyday process of what they do.

Monday photo feature

That's me cruising down a frothy, pothole-rich rapid on the "Farmlands" section of the White Salmon River near Trout Lake, Washington.  A lady named Wendy Peterson took this photo in July, 1998.  I'd met Wendy and her husband Dan that morning in the campground I was staying in, and we ended up running the river together.

The White Salmon flows into the Columbia River across from the town of Hood River, Oregon.  I plan to return to this region almost exactly 20 years after that '98 visit.  This past week I signed up to participate in the 2018 Gorge Downwind Championships, a surf ski and outrigger canoe race that takes place each July on the Columbia.

Registration opened this month, and I really would have preferred to sign up much closer to the race date.  After all, there's no telling what could be going on next July: I could be injured, or I could hit a rash of unforeseen expenses, or I could have a death in the family, or who knows what else.  But registration for the GDC is capped at 600 racers and it fills up fast, and so there's not much I can do but pay the hefty entry fee a full eight months ahead of time and keep my fingers crossed that it will all work out.  I certainly hope it does, because I sure did enjoy my trip out there all those years ago.

More going on than it seems

I'll start with a bit of inspirational fare.  Eric Jackson, a whitewater rodeo world champion and a whitewater slalom Olympian, has raised his children with this three-step motto in their paddling life:

1. Be happy, be motivated, be helpful.
2. Paddle early, paddle late, paddle hard.
3. Impress with what you are good at, work on what you are not good at, and put your best foot forward on competition day.

Eric's daughter Emily and son Dane, in their twenties now, are both among the world's elite whitewater paddlers.  His nine-year-old son K.C. will likely be there himself eventually.

Down here at the non-elite level, meanwhile, I continue to keep a little something going to stave off the early-offseason doldrums.  This past week I did the new strength routine on Monday and Thursday.  And I paddled a loop of the harbor with Joe on Tuesday and out on the Mississippi a little bit yesterday.

I continued the work on my stroke mechanics yesterday, and I'm happy to say that the adjustments Morgan House suggested in that clinic I took are beginning to feel more natural.  The main thing I have to keep reminding myself is that I was already doing a lot of things pretty well and I shouldn't throw those things out.  Morgan said as much in this message he wrote me:

Your technique is not bad and the fundamentals of your stroke are quite good. All of the things I taught during the clinic should be practiced in each training session. It is important, though, to not try and force each aspect of the stroke to be perfect as the kayak stroke is very fluid. Keep your focus on one thing for an interval of time or distance and then change to another thing for another interval and so on. Eventually it will all start to come together.

In other words, my stroke really doesn't need much more than some tweaking.  My shaft needs to be more vertical throughout each stroke, and exiting closer to the boat helps make sure that happens.  So I'll continue to work on that but I'll try not to wear out my brain obsessing over it.

A new strength routine

After several weeks off from strength work, it's time to start settling into some offseason conditioning.  I think the biggest mental hurdle is simply sitting down and picking out the exercises to make up a new routine; once that's done it's easy enough to get right to it on each appointed day.  I've carried out that chore once more, and so here's what I'm doing for the next little while.

1.  Lat pulls

2.  Dead lifts

3.  Military press

4.  Stability ball drill demonstrated by Jing Jing Li at 2:55 of her video on this page

5.  Pullups

Recommended reading

Regarding this post from a couple of weeks ago: I should point out that the "fascination with the process" concept is not something I came up with myself.  Former U.S. whitewater slalom team coach Bill Endicott has mentioned this concept many times in his various books.

The reason I bring this up now is that I've just seen the topic brought up by slalom-racer-turned-English-teacher Alden Bird on his blog.  He's written a good review of the book Every Crushing Stroke by U.S. slalom Olympian Scott Shipley, whose influences include Mr. Endicott.

I got myself a copy of Shipley's book shortly after it came out just like Alden did.  Even though it's more about whitewater paddling than the sort of paddling I'm mostly doing these days, it's still been a significant influence on my overall approach to training and even to life itself.  Longtime readers of this blog have seen me refer to it once in a while.  I don't think it's in print anymore but there are probably copies floating around here in cyberspace.  I recommend it highly.

Monday photo feature

I'm a little speck in the middle of El Horrendo, a big drop on the Russell Fork of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River.  The Russell Fork, which crosses from Virginia into Kentucky near Elkhorn City, Kentucky, sees water releases each October and is a wonderful place to enjoy the fall foliage.  Ward Graham took this photo in October of 1997.

Knowledge is power. At least, I hope it eventually will be.

I got up at 5 AM CDT yesterday and was on the road by six.  According to my car's in-dash temperature display it was 63 degrees Fahrenheit at that hour, but the voices in the car's radio were talking about a front heading toward Memphis that would send the temperature plummeting into the 40s by the mid-afternoon.  That same front would eventually reach Chattanooga, where I was headed, but I hoped it wouldn't get over there until well after my stroke clinic.

I arrived in 'Nooga around one o'clock eastern time and parked in Coolidge Park, the announced site of the clinic, on the river-right side of the Tennessee River.  The clinic was scheduled to start at 2:00, and I started getting worried when nobody had shown up by 1:45.  Two o'clock came and went, and it was clear to me that some change had occurred for which I had been out of the loop.  (No, I was not able to check my e-mail on my phone.  I am about a decade behind the times in the hand-held technology department.)

In a state of panic, I ended up paddling across the river to Ross's Landing Park, and there I finally found the clinic in progress.  Morgan House, the instructor, was very apologetic about the communication failure and promised to give me a refund, but I replied that we should just get on with the clinic and worry about that later.

In the end, I got more than my fifty bucks' worth and the refund talk was put to rest.  I had just missed the dry-land lecture but was able to get up to speed quickly as we put our boats in the water.  My eight or so fellow students included familiar faces Ted Burnell of Chattanooga; Joseph DiChiacchio of nearby Rising Fawn, Georgia; Lauren Drummond of Gulfport, Mississippi; and Myrlene Marsa of Rising Fawn.  The temperature was balmy (low 70s) but it was quite windy, and we paddled upstream to find some calmer water on the river-left side of MacLellan Island.

Morgan had been watching our strokes during the paddle up there and he had pointers for each of us once we were gathered back together.  His critique of my stroke centered around my exit: I was bringing my blade out of the water too far out from the boat.  He told me to bring my stroke-side hand up closer to my head: said hand would now be the top hand for my next stroke, and with it closer to my head I would be set up for a more vertical next stroke.  The way I had been exiting, he explained, was setting me up with a more horizontal shaft on my next stroke, and the result would be more of a forward sweep than a pure forward stroke.

Since I first tried using a wing paddle about 20 years ago, I have understood that the blade is supposed to move away from the boat during the course of a stroke, and I guess I had developed a stroke that overdid that detail.  Morgan said that while a wing blade is in fact supposed to move away from the boat, it doesn't have to do so as much as mine was doing.  My objective, he said, should be to put as much of my effort into the "straight-back" motion of the blade as possible, and keep the away-from-the-boat drift to a minimum.

Another point of emphasis for Morgan was to hesitate between strokes, and allow the boat to glide for that half-second or so.  He said we should strive to get all the boat movement we can out of each stroke, and go faster with a lower stroke rate.

After an hour of working on these things, I felt as though I'd entirely forgotten how to paddle, and a day later I'm a bit sore from movements that my middle-aged body hadn't been used to.  But that's normal.  Every time I've made even a minor change to my mechanics in the past, it's been a tiring process that required much effort and concentration to get used to.  And that's what's in store for me now as I head into this offseason.  There are definitely some stroke drills in my future.  Morgan showed us a few good ones, including the "one-two-three-four-FIVE" drill where you take four easy, relaxed strokes and then take the fifth one as hard as you can; a one-sided paddling drill, something I've done many times before, except that Morgan's version has a more specific focus; and drills that isolate each discrete component of the stroke, such as the catch and the exit.

There's a little uneasiness here, as I wonder whether I'm truly capable of internalizing Morgan's advice and emerging with a stroke that's better than ever.  But mostly I'm excited to have a "mission" for this offseason as opposed to just putting my time in on the water.

With things to do back here in Memphis this morning, I started heading back west shortly after the clinic's conclusion.  The temperature remained in the 70s all the way to Murfreesboro; then, once I'd turned onto Interstate 840 that bypasses Nashville to the southwest, it began to drop quickly.  It took less than a half-hour to sink into the 40s, and soon I was driving through some heavy rain that the front brought with it.  By the time I reached Jackson I was out of the rain, and back here at home we're in for a few partly-sunny and cooler-than-normal days.  I'll be bundling up a bit when I get back in the boat to start working on my stroke.

Monday photo feature

The second torso from the right in this photo is that of Morgan House, a member of the U.S. flatwater sprint team for most of the last decade.  A native of Gainesville, Georgia, House is training here with his K4 teammates on the Ala Wai Canal on the island of Oahu.  The photo appeared in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser as part of this article on August 13, 2010.

This Friday House will be taking a good hard look at what I and a few other pupils are doing in our boats.  The two-hour clinic will take place on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.  The last time I checked there were some spots still available; anybody interested in taking this clinic may sign up here.

My search for this photo began when I typed "Morgan House" into Google Images.  All I got was a bunch of pictures of houses.  Typing "Morgan House kayak" still brought up a bunch of houses, but it led me to this photo as well.

Back to school

I'm signed up for a clinic this Friday.  It's on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga, and it will be coached by former U.S. flatwater sprint team member Morgan House.

I can't say this is the most convenient time for me to drive someplace five and a half hours away, but I'm doing it because it's been a long time since I've had a pair of expert eyes take a good look at what I'm doing in the boat.  And this early stage of the offseason is an ideal time for attending a clinic.  The day of the clinic is not when you actually improve what you're doing; the improvement comes in the weeks and months after the clinic, as you incorporate the things you learned into your skill set.  So with any luck at all, by the time I line up for a race next spring I'll have spent a solid few months refining my mechanics and technique.

Anyway, when the clinic's over I'll tell you how it went.

One more thought

So I have declared my 2017 season at an end.  "Declared" seems like a funny word, because when we think of sports we tend to think of a regular season followed by playoffs that lead to the crowning of a champion.  Athletes in those sports don't "declare" their seasons over; they either make it all the way to the final or are eliminated by somebody else.

Canoe and kayak racing doesn't really work that way.  Sure, there's the possibility of making the Olympic team (but only in the disciplines of flatwater sprint and whitewater slalom) or some other national team.  That's all but reserved for much younger people than I, however--people at the peak age for human athletic potential.  For folks my age there's just an assortment of races over the course of the year, and you pick out a few, and you go and race in them, and when they're over, they're over.

What's my point?  Oh, I don't know.  I guess it's similar to what I was saying in my previous post: that paddling is just a hobby that I devote myself to and enjoy.

Takin' away some takeaways

I have done my last race for 2017.  So, what wisdom has been gained?  What lessons have we learned here at My Training Blog by Elmore?

To begin to answer that question, I'll share an experience from a previous life.  I had been a decent high school distance runner, but not a great one, and now, as a college sophomore, I'd been training hard hoping to achieve mere respectability among Division I competition.  I was at the Mason Dixon Games, an annual indoor meet in Louisville's Broadbent Arena.  I was entered in the 3000-meter run, for which there would be two heats: a "fast" heat and a "slow" heat.  My previous PR was just barely fast enough for me to be put in the "fast" heat.  I was scared.  I didn't think I was going to beat anybody.  My heart pounded as I warmed up and timidly stepped up to the starting line alongside maybe twenty other guys.  As we embarked on 15 laps of a 200-meter track I hung near the back of the pack, cautiously gauging my body's response to the quick pace.  After about four laps it was finally sinking in that I felt pretty good, and when I heard my coach shout "Go by him, Elmore!" I surged past the guy in front of me.  After collecting myself for a few moments I realized I was still feeling good, and I surged past another guy.  My confidence growing, I began to overtake more guys on each straight while tucking to the inside of each curve.  The race went on, and I kept passing people, and then it was over before I'd even realized it.  I had no idea what place I'd finished because the field had strung out all around the 200-meter track, but then I saw my coach (actually a graduate assistant who'd been working closely with me) walking toward me in a state of utter giddiness.  He told me I'd finished sixth, and showed me his watch.  My time was 8 minutes, 52 seconds--more than 40 seconds faster than I'd ever run a 3000 before.

For the next couple of weeks I basked in the glow of my achievement.  There was buzz all around the team about how I'd "taken it to the next level."  I wouldn't say I let it go to my head--I knew I had to keep working hard if I wanted to keep performing so well--but I was feeling pretty special just the same.  But I'd get sort of a harsh reality check at my next race, an indoor 2-mile up at Cincinnati.  I had none of the "pep" I'd had in Louisville, and felt flat from start to finish.  My time was 10:02.  Two miles is about 3219 meters, and so my equivalent 3000-meter time would have been 9:25 or thereabouts.

I was bummed out, but my coach reminded me that bad races happen to everybody and that I'd bounce back soon enough.  And he was right.  Unfortunately, neither one of us could foresee what was to come: a week or two later I was doing a set of 400-meter intervals and felt an awful surge of pain in my upper left leg.  It turned out I had a severe case of iliotibial band syndrome, a fairly common overuse injury for runners.  The intensity of training I'd been doing was more than my body was ready for, and this was the price.  I was unable to run at all for the next three or four months, and when I finally did start running again I couldn't build any kind of base because the injury kept threatening to return.  I'd end up spending the next half-dozen years dealing with one nagging ailment or another, and trying and failing to regain the form of that evening in Louisville.  Eventually I shelved my running career and redirected my energy into canoe and kayak racing.

The main point I'm trying to make in sharing this story is that moments of glory are fleeting.  You spend all these hours training.  You're careful to make sure you're getting enough rest and eating good food.  You pay close attention to your technique and your mechanics to maximize your quality of performance and minimize your chances of injury.  Then, finally, you go out and accomplish something truly special.  And then it's over, and unless you're in a sport with millions of fans and lots of media attention, nobody will even remember it but you.  And there's no guarantee you'll ever do something as impressive again.

So why does anybody even bother?  Well, I suppose everybody who participates in any sport has his own reason.  But I believe that the people who achieve sustained success--and by "success" I mean not only winning major medals or titles but also simply sticking with it for decades like I've done as a paddler--derive deep fulfillment from the process.  They enjoy the everyday routine: the workouts, the technique, the intellectual challenges, the solitude, the camaraderie with other athletes.

While sparing you the whole sob story, I'll just say that this past year or so hasn't been the easiest in my out-of-the-boat life.  There have been some things going on that have brought me more than my share of stress and grief.  I think that's helped me appreciate the ritual of going down to the river more than ever.  Rarely this year have I not felt better after paddling than I'd felt before.  I've enjoyed working on my mechanics, trying to make each stroke a little better than the previous one.  I've enjoyed paddling hard pieces and getting my heart rate up.  I've enjoyed cruising along and watching the turtles and the birds and the fish and the beavers.  I've enjoyed the beautiful calm sunny days and the days of not-so-ideal weather.  I've enjoyed communing with the mighty Mississippi River in all its many moods over its broad range of water levels.

And I've enjoyed mostly good health this year.  There were certainly aches and pains here and there, but not once did I have to miss a training session because of a physical ailment.

It all added up to my best competitive season in at least several years.  I even had a race reminiscent of that 3000-meter race in Louisville all those years ago: at our race here at Memphis in June, everything just seemed to fall into place and I felt fantastic even as I was paddling as hard as I could. Good performances continued for the rest of the summer.

And that brings me back to the main point.  Competitive success is fleeting.  Peak form can last only so long.  I want to believe I'll achieve it again next year, and the next year, and the next, but there's no guarantee of that.  And so, I continue to savor the process.  Every time I am physically able to get in a boat and paddle it is a precious gift, and I've got to remember that.

Right now I'm enjoying another nice gift: a bit of time off.  Believe it or not there are some positive things in my out-of-the-boat life too, and I'm looking forward to spending a bit more time with those.

Thanks for reading all this, and thanks to everybody who's said nice things about this blog.  Nothing makes me happier than knowing that other people might be getting some benefit from this stuff I scribble out on my computer keyboard.

Relishing the offseason

I finally got back in the boat today.  Joe made it this time, and the harbor looked lovely after last week's yucky conditions.  Some extra water helped: although the remnants of Hurricane Nate veered well to the east of the Memphis area ten days ago, it dropped a good bit of rain in the Tennessee River basin, and that water is now flowing past Memphis.  Today's level was 4.85 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That's still quite a low level, but around our dock it makes all the difference in the world.  Compare this photo, taken this morning, with the one I posted back on September 25:

The overnight temperature had been in the 40s Fahrenheit, but by the time I got to the river it was rising above 60 degrees.  Joe and I did a lap of the harbor in 80 minutes.  Every spring I do a timed lap of the harbor, clocking almost a half hour faster than that.  Clearly, Joe and I were just cruising and talking and enjoying the beautiful sunny day.

Monday photo feature

This past week ended with no appreciable canoe and kayak activity taking place.  I was busy with out-of-the-boat concerns.  To wit: the Pink Palace Crafts Fair, an annual event at which I demonstrate the craft of bowl carving.

One of the other artists I met over the weekend was photographer Lorri Honeycutt of Carolina Beach, North Carolina.  She creates all kinds of quirky scapes using tiny figurines, and photographs them.  I purchased a couple of her pieces including the one above, entitled "Koolaid Challenge."

Motivation killer

My friend Joe and I have a standing appointment to paddle together each Tuesday, but yesterday he had to go to the dentist and couldn't make it.  So I went down there myself, planning to do another easy paddle for an hour or less.

Some heavy thunderstorms had passed through here overnight.  We'd barely had any rain since the remnants of Hurricane Harvey came through here in early September, so this rain was welcome.  But when I got down to the riverfront I saw the downside: the harbor, already very low as I've reported here before, was choked with litter that had washed in from the storm drains and tributary creeks.

I am constantly defending our riverfront against the myth that it's nothing but a big open sewer with no possible recreational value whatsoever.  People who believe that are typically longtime Memphians (and therefore self-proclaimed experts on all things Mississippi River) whose only contact with the river is the occasional trip downtown for the nightlife or a music festival or some such thing.

I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you that the river is pristine.  In fact, it faces constant pollution threats that require ongoing vigilance among those to whom the river belongs (that would be me, you, and every other human being).  But it's not a place where you have to hold your nose, either.  I would say that nine days out of ten it's no less appealing than the waterfront of any other large city in the world.

But there's always that tenth day out of ten, and that's what I found yesterday.  Because of the rain, along with the low water and the prevailing wind and the barometric pressure and who knows what other variables, the harbor surface was as unappealing as I've ever seen it.

If Joe had been there I'd have gone ahead and paddled with him.  And if there were competitions coming up, I'd have done my work.  But standing there alone I thought, it's my offseason now, I'm tired, I'm ready for a break, and I really don't feel like hosing a bunch of scum off my boat when I'm done paddling.  I think I'll skip it today.

To make myself feel better, I picked up all the aluminum cans from the water that I could reach from the dock--well over a dozen of them--and carried them up to the collection bin outside the grocery store.  The proceeds from the redemption of those cans is supposed to benefit the Humane Society, and I can't imagine who would object to that.

I do want to get in my boat at least once a week for the next little while, and carry on some sort of strength routine, too.  But I doubt much will happen the rest of this week because the big annual crafts fair that I'm always involved in is this Friday through Sunday.  I'll start setting up for that this afternoon.

I guess I'll conclude this post with a moral: do not litter!  Seriously.  Once in a while I even see somebody I consider a good person drop something on the ground.  Stop doing that!  And if you see some litter, pick it up!  I can tell you exactly where it will end up if you don't.

Monday photo feature

There were canoe and kayak races all over the place this past weekend, and it's hard to believe there are enough paddlers for each of them to have had a decent turnout.  But apparently there are.  In addition to the Gator Bait Race that I attended down at Jackson, Mississippi, there was the Tour du Teche on southern Louisiana's Bayou Teche, an event that had to be cut short as Hurricane Nate approached; the Kayak Trader Challenge, hosted by the 1996 Olympics flatwater sprint venue on Lake Lanier at Gainesville, Georgia; and the Middle States Divisional Championships, hosted by the venerable Washington Canoe Club on the Potomac River at Washington, DC.  And there were probably more that I simply don't know about... in the upper Midwest or out on the West Coast, perhaps.

The photo above, taken by Craig Impens of Toms River, New Jersey, shows a bustle of activity on the Washington Canoe Club dock along the beautiful Potomac.  That's the Francis Scott Key Bridge over yonder.

Oh buoy! I've won a race at last.

I got up at 4:15 AM CDT yesterday.  The Gator Bait Race was scheduled to start at 9:30 AM.  I like to get to a race site an hour and a half before the start so I can go through my whole pre-race routine--readying my boat and gear, stretching, warming up, and so on--at a relaxed pace.  So eight o'clock was the goal.  It typically takes me three hours to drive to Jackson, so I wanted to be on the road by five.

I made some coffee, ate a bowl of cereal, prepared some fruit to eat in the car, and pulled out of my driveway at 4:55... right on schedule.  Unfortunately, my digestive system wasn't being entirely cooperative: my body is used to being fed two hours later than it was this morning.  So I had to make a lengthy rest stop south of Batesville.  Then, as I entered the northern outskirts of Jackson, the warning light came on telling me I needed to refuel.  I'd thought I had enough gasoline that I wouldn't have to get more until after the race, but now, with at least 20 miles still between me and the race site, I didn't want to push my luck.  So I stopped for gas, and visited the restroom again while I was at it.

In the end, it wasn't until 8:30 that I finally pulled into Pelahatchie Shore Park near the southeast corner of Barnett Reservoir.  So I had just an hour to get ready.  But I would be fine.  I'm a cautious guy who always overestimates how much time he'll need, and the fact is that an hour was plenty.  The nice ladies at the registration table got me checked in without delay, and I went through my stretches during the pre-race competitors' meeting.  Soon I was in the water getting loose and ready to start.

The gun went off at 9:30 sharp.  I sprinted off the line and spent the first few hundred meters with Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi, on my stern wake and Seth Garland of Brandon, Mississippi, off to my left.  The course crosses a stretch of open water before entering a network of backwater channels, and by the end of the open-water stretch I was alone in first place.

Barnett Reservoir was created by the construction of a dam on the Pearl River, and like most reservoirs in non-mountainous regions it's a vast, open body of water.  But this race takes place on one of the more interesting parts of the lake.  Pelahatchie Bay is the inundated bottom portion of Pelahatchie Creek, and it's a smaller, more intimate place with a trail through a marshy area behind some islands (there's a good course map posted on this page; racers proceed in a clockwise direction).  So the race course, 5.5 miles or about 9 kilometers in total distance, has a nice mix of open water and secluded channels to engage and challenge the participants.  The drawback is that the water is not particularly deep.  It was never hit-the-bottom-with-your-paddle shallow, but in those back channels it was shallow enough to create some bottom-drag ("suck water," some racers like to call it).

And so as I made my way through that back part of the course I was feeling the strain in my arms and shoulders and upper back.  This stretch is maybe 2000 or 2500 meters and I yearned to be out of it and back on deeper water.

Finally, I got my wish: I emerged from the back channel and entered the course's second open-water crossing.  Now I had a new challenge: to find the buoy at the end of it (the one in the bottom right corner on the course map) and point my boat at it.  I looked and I looked, and could spot no buoy.  My long-distance vision has never been very good, and I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm now in my second half-century, but I was hoping I could at least find a color that contrasted with the water and the surrounding landscape.  Most of the previous buoys I'd seen on the course were pinkish and that's what I hoped to see now.

But I never saw a thing.  So I paddled toward where I thought the buoy should be, based on my past participation in this event.  I drew closer and closer to the bay's southern shore, and still saw no buoy. Finally, convinced I was veering much too far to my left, I made a hard right turn and started the last leg of the course, toward the finish line.  Moments later I saw the buoy: it was a green alligator pool toy (purchased several years ago in keeping with the "Gator Bait" theme).  My feeling was a mixture of relief that I hadn't cut a corner of the course and annoyance that I'd added a couple hundred meters to my distance.  Over my right shoulder I could see my nearest pursuers, who had seen my mistake and were now gaining some distance on me.  I still had a comfortable lead and didn't really think they would be able to catch me, but nevertheless I spent the last two thousand meters of the race plagued with nightmarish visions of being run down just before the finish line (hey, it's happened to me before).  By this time my muscles were severely taxed from the shallow-water paddling and any kind of late-race surge would be a tall order.

Stroke after stroke I pulled myself toward the finish, trying to paddle as efficiently as I could.  The nightmare never came true and I finished in first place with a time of 47 minutes, 21 seconds.  It was my first overall victory in two years.  I won the 2015 edition of this race, and since then victory had eluded me until now.

96 seconds later Jeb Berry came in to finish second overall.  Jeb has been a tough adversary for me this year, pushing me hard at Ocean Springs in March and then edging me out for the win at Pascagoula in April.  I learned that he was dealing with some acute tendinitis in his elbow and that's the main reason I was able to build a cushion on him yesterday.

Adam Davis of Memphis took third place; Henry Lawrence of Brandon, Mississippi, was fourth; and Mike Womack, who lives just over the Mississippi state line from Memphis, rounded out the top five.  Camille Richards of Ridgeland, Mississippi, was the top overall female finisher.  The complete results are posted here.

I told the race organizers that they really ought to mark the end of an open-water crossing with a more visible buoy, and they very kindly said they would in the future.  Fortunately I don't think the buoy issue caused any major trouble yesterday: once the leaders had figured out where it was, the rest of the field was able to follow them.

We were all treated to a lovely catered lunch and a chance at winning some door prizes.  Awards were handed out and we parted company in high spirits after a good morning of competition and camaraderie.

Back here at home I woke up this morning remarkably less sore than I'd expected.  Yesterday's course was quite similar in character to the USCA Nationals course I raced on in August, and I was sore for days after that race.  Of course, I raced 13 miles on that course, compared with just five and a half yesterday.  In any case, a recovery paddle was in order today, and I went down to the riverfront and stretched thoroughly on the dock before getting in the boat and paddling a mostly-easy 40 minutes.

Is there one more in me?

The week has gone about the way I'd hoped it would.  I did the strength routine on Monday and Wednesday and paddled a loop of the harbor with Joe on Tuesday.  Yesterday and today I did shorter sessions in the boat--50 minutes yesterday and 40 minutes today--and practiced starts and high-speed paddling with some 12-stroke sprints.  I did six sprints yesterday and four today.

My last race of the season is tomorrow morning on Barnett Reservoir on the northeast side of Jackson, Mississippi.  I plan to get up in the wee hours of the morning to make the drive down there.

Monday photo feature

I'm probably no different from most folks in that I get a lot of mail from nonprofit organizations that have gotten my address one way or another.  And each year I get several calendars: at this moment there are calendars from the Ocean Conservancy, the National Parks Foundation, and the Trust for Public Land cluttering up my desk.

I don't need but one calendar, and the one I keep and use year after year is the one from American Rivers, of which I've been a member since I was in college.  I just got my 2018 American Rivers calendar this past week.  As usual, it has twelve beautiful photos of rivers all over this great nation.  Pictured above is a lovely shot of Ohio's Little Miami River.

Almost done

I did the strength routine as planned yesterday morning, and this afternoon I paddled mostly easy for 60 minutes on the incredibly low Mississippi River.  The level was six feet below zero on the Memphis gauge.

With my last race of the season coming up next weekend, I'm trying to get some rest and do some easy paddles with some short sprints.  I'm feeling some late-season weariness and I will welcome a break.

Manual labor

On Tuesday I paddled with Joe for the first time in quite a few weeks.  One or the other of us had been out of town for many Tuesdays in a row.

I did the current strength routine on Monday and Wednesday.

Yesterday I went down to the riverfront for my last hard workout before my race on October 7, and likely my last for the year.  I'd planned to go in the morning, but something came up at a rental property I own that I had to go deal with, so I had to push paddling back to the afternoon.  The "something that came up" included picking up and stacking over a hundred bricks, and once the job was done I was feeling it in my arms and lower back.

In the afternoon I did another set of four sprints in the harbor between the monorail bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  The recovery interval was five minutes, during which I paddled back to the start.  My times were 2:02, 2:00, 2:03, and 2:01.  Though I didn't manage any sub-2 clockings like I did last week, I felt better throughout the workout.  I was certainly tired by the fourth piece but I wasn't completely falling apart like I was last week.  The weather was working in my favor: last week the Fahrenheit temperature had been in the low 90s, but yesterday it was some ten degrees cooler than that.

Today I was due for some recovery from the brick-moving and the workout, so I went back downtown and did an easy 40-minute paddle.  Most weeks I do the strength routine Friday and paddle on Saturday, but tomorrow I have things to do out on the east side of town, so I decided to flip-flop those two things.