Maintaining good form

Today I did four laps of the April strength circuit and paddled for 130 minutes.  Joe and I stayed in the harbor and did a workout of four eight-minute buildup tempo pieces, with four-minute recovery intervals.

One thing I always strive for in all my workouts is to maintain good form even as I get deep into the workout.  Even if I have to back off the intensity a little because of fatigue late in a workout, I try to continue taking the best strokes I can.  If I do have to ease up, I'll do so by pulling on the paddle a little less while keeping the stroke rate the same.

A "hard" easy day

Today I paddled in the harbor for 35 minutes with the same friend Martha and I paddled with last Monday.

She's one of a few friends Martha and I have encouraged to come paddle with us on the riverfront.  With most such friends, I have to paddle almost uncomfortably slow just so they can keep up.  That's not because I'm some world class talent, but simply because these people are novice paddlers who often have very little athletic background.  So even my easy pace is a little too fast for them.

Not so with this girl today.  Strong and not afraid to push herself, she stayed right there with me and even pushed the pace a little.  I was paddling pretty easy--I wasn't breathing hard or anything--but I was taking good solid strokes and not intentionally "waiting up" for her.  She really wants to get back in shape after her pregnancy, and I'm looking forward to accompanying her on some of that journey.

Monday Photo Feature

This Thursday, the U.S. Team Trials for whitewater slalom racing begins at Charlotte, North Carolina.  The event will determine the U.S. national team for World Cup competition in June, and is also an important step for athletes hoping to make the Olympic team.  Only one boat in each of the four Olympic classes--men's single canoe, men's double canoe, women's kayak, and men's kayak--will be allowed to compete in the Games, and the athletes' World Cup performances will be the final factor in deciding who gets to paddle up to the starting gate in London.

Twelve years ago, I participated in the Olympic selection process myself.  Back then, the three-day team trials, held on the Ocoee River near Ducktown, Tennessee, was the only step in the Olympic team selection--if you won your class, you were going to the Olympics.  So the event was in fact the Olympic Trials and had all the fanfare and drama you might expect to go along with that.

Here I am racing on the first day of the 2000 Olympic Trials, competing in men's single canoe (C-1).  I was basically a wide-eyed bumpkin among the confident, debonair, globetrotting stars of U.S. slalom, the nerdy kid stammering as he tries to ask the homecoming queen for a date.  Nobody expected me to challenge for a spot on the team, and I didn't provide any surprises.

But I was there, adding my six runs to the books.  Here's a photo to prove it.


Photo by Harrison Shull.

More pep in my step

Today I did four laps of the April strength circuit and paddled for 100 minutes.  Feeling more energetic today, I pushed the pace for a good chunk of the session.

Paddlin' sunshine

Today I paddled for 90 minutes.  I was still feeling tired, both from Thursday's workout and from a really lousy, frustrating day yesterday.  I won't bore you with the details of that, but I will say that I kept the intensity moderate today.

Outfitting the tandem kayak, Part 6: The seat backs

Sorry to keep you waiting... I hope my technical difficulties are over for a while.  Thanks to Pickle IT for getting my laptop up and running again.

Now that the bulkheads are in place, I turn my attention to the seats.

Touring kayaks typically have some sort of backrests on their seats like the one in Martha's solo kayak pictured at right.  Our tandem kayak came with no such backrests.  I tend to live with such things--I'm a racer, after all, and racers train to sit up straight in their boats--but Martha doesn't like it at all.  And she's right, for a long day of touring is different from the two-hour-or-less races that I mostly do, and it's nice to have some back support in that situation.  So I am going to see what sort of backrests I can fabricate.

My first challenge is to find some sort of a mold.  I have several of these Rubbermaid garbage cans in and around my shop, and it has occurred to me that they are about the right radius for a seat-back.  And the plastic these things are made of won't bond with epoxy resin, so I can lay something up directly on it.

The lamination includes three layers of fiberglass with two layers of Kevlar interspersed.  My technique is to lay the cloth down a layer at a time, pour a small pool of resin on it...

...and then use a piece of minicell like a squeegee, spreading the resin out until it has been absorbed by the cloth.  I keep adding resin a small bit at a time until the cloth is fully saturated.

Here's the backrest lamination after it has been fully wetted-out.  I'll trim off the rough edges after the resin has hardened and I've popped the piece off its garbage-can mold.

If you look back at the picture of Martha's kayak seat above, you'll see a piece of 6-mm rope running behind the backrest.  This rope controls the "recline" of the backrest; it attaches to a cleat up under the cockpit rim.  The tandem boat is already equipped with such cleats, so all I need to do is include some sort of passage for a rope on the backs of these backrests I'm making.  I cut a piece of plastic tubing, hold it where I want it with a clamp, and attach it to the back of the backrest with pieces of Kevlar.

And here it is... a seat back!  I'll be gluing the piece of blue foam onto it.  The foam is cut just a hair larger than the laminate to prevent any sharp edges from digging in.

I pondered several ways of attaching the seat back to the existing seat, but in the end I just stitched it on with some 4-mm rope.  It'll be a while yet before this boat is back on the water, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for seat-back success.

Recovery day

Today I went down to the river and paddled easy in the harbor for 40 minutes.  I think a session like this is the best way to recover from a hard workout like I did yesterday.  It's better than doing nothing at all, because by paddling I'm getting some blood flowing in all the relevant muscles, cleaning out any lactic acid that might be lingering there and facilitating the repair of damaged tissue.

April showers

Today I did three laps of the April strength circuit and paddled for 100 minutes.

I spent the first fifty minutes paddling from Harbortown Marina up to the mouth of the Wolf River.  Then I did a "pyramid" workout: pieces of 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, and 1 minute, with 2 minutes recovery between pieces.  I did the first four pieces on the flatwater in the bottom mile of the Wolf.  The 5-minute piece took me back out onto the Mississippi, where I did the 4-minute and 3 minute pieces as well.  I was back in the harbor for the last two pieces.

Today was a beautiful day in a different way from what we've had: I paddled the first half hour or so in a light rain; up on the Wolf, there was a thin mist hanging over the water.  By the time I was heading back down the Mississippi, the southwestern sky was clearing.  When I reached the harbor and turned back north, the northern sky was still as dark as oil shale.  Very interesting.  Some of the prettiest moments of paddling I've ever had have occurred on these days of so-called "inclement weather."

The beat goes on

Today I did three laps of the April strength circuit and paddled for 100 minutes.  It was another perfect day for paddling... I'm almost getting tired of saying that.

Outfitting the tandem kayak: Please stand by

This morning I did a very easy 40-minute paddle in the harbor.  Martha and I went down there and paddled with a friend of ours who has been mostly out of her boat while going through a pregnancy and getting the hang of motherhood.  She's ready to start paddling again, and Martha and I are delighted to have her back on the water and we hope to meet her each Monday for a while.

For those of you who are following the outfitting project, the reason I haven't posted an update in a few days is that I'm experiencing some technical difficulty: some photos I had planned to post are saved on my laptop's hard drive, and that hard drive has decided to crash.  My Training Blog by Elmore takes its commitment to its readers very seriously, and I assure you that a top expert is working to resolve the problem.  I hope to have a new post up soon.

Monday Photo Feature

This is me getting back in my boat after taking a break on Egmont Key, near the mouth of Tampa Bay, in 2010.  Here in Memphis we just had our warmest March ever, making me wonder if I'll ever have to go to Florida to flee cold weather anymore.

No fooling

Another month has arrived, and with it a new strength circuit:

Military press: 8 reps with a pair of 20-lb. dumbbells, then 5 reps with a pair of 25-lb. dumbbells
Torso twists with medicine ball: 10 reps each direction
Pullups: 6 reps
Leg raises while hanging from pullup bar: 10 reps
Bicep curls: 8 reps with 20-lb. dumbbells

I'm starting with three laps of this circuit, and I can already tell this one is quite a bit more taxing than last month's.  Could be bringin' the pain once I get up into five and six laps later this month.

Then I went down to the river and paddled for 100 minutes.  After a 25-minute warmup, I did four 8-minute tempo pieces with 4-minute recovery periods.  In each piece, I spent the first several minutes building up to anaerobic threshold and stayed there for the remainder.  Throughout, I tried to remain aware of all the technical things I've been working on while paddling easier: keeping the boat quiet (not bobbing up and down or rolling left and right), immersing the blade fully on every stroke, sitting up straight.

It all added up to a pretty exhausting day.  Fortunately, it was the latest in a string of incredibly beautiful days we've been having.  It's been sunny and warm, the harbor has been smooth as glass, and there's been just enough of a breeze to keep me pleasantly cool.

Snake & surf

Today I paddled for 95 minutes.

When I got down to the dock there was a humongous snake sunning itself there.  Snakes at our dock are nothing new, and I've mostly learned not to let them bother me.  Some people are convinced they're water moccasins, but I've come around to the opinion that they're non-poisonous water snakes.  I'm no snake expert, however, and I could be utterly wrong.  In any case, I've never seen one behaving aggressively, and I just try to watch where I'm stepping and not catch one by surprise.

My intention was to paddle pretty easy today, ahead of a higher-intensity session tomorrow.  I paddled out of the harbor and down toward the trio of old bridges south of downtown Memphis.  When I got down there, I saw a towboat pushing a fuel barge upriver.  I am quite familiar with this towboat, which is based just below the old bridges.  It almost always produces a wake that is very good for surfing.  So I headed up the Arkansas bank, pushing the pace so I could get ahead of the towboat and then paddle out to it.  Yes, I know I was planning to paddle easy today, but, well...

"Training plan, schmaining plan," I thought.  "I wanna go surfing!"

By the time I got up to the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, I was far enough ahead of the towboat that I could ferry out to the middle of the river in time to catch its wash.  Ten or fifteen minutes of sweet surfing ensued.

Once the good waves had petered out, I headed back to the harbor and paddled easier for forty minutes or so before returning to the dock.  I think I'll be fine for tomorrow.

Outfitting the tandem kayak, Part 5: Bulkheads continued

Here is the bow bulkhead after I have laminated it in a layer of fiberglass.  The next step is to put the bulkheads in place, get them as "square"  (perpendicular to the boat's long axis) as possible, and start glassing them in place.  I start on one side of each bulkhead, attaching it to the inside of the boat with strips of fiberglass all the way around its edges.  Then I move to the other side and fill the gaps between the plywood and the inner surface of the boat with epoxy resin thickened with wood dust to the consistency of putty.  Finally, I lay strips of fiberglass around the edges of the bulkhead on that second side.






Here is the stern bulkhead after it has been glassed in on one side.  I will fill the biggest gaps, like the one visible at the bottom of the photo, with thickened epoxy from the other side.  Once that has hardened, I can do the fiberglass work on the other side.

This work involves positioning the boat one way, laying in some fiberglass and resin, letting it harden, and then positioning the boat another way.  This way, I have gravity working for me at all times.  Most of the time I'm able to work pretty comfortably, as in the photo at right, where I've got the boat suspended at such a height that I can stand up straight and work inside it.

However, there are a few moments when an uncomfortable working position can't be avoided.  The hardest place to reach is the aft side of the bow bulkhead, because the bulkhead has to be placed up beyond the bow paddler's foot pegs.  The photo at left shows me during what is probably the least pleasant part of this entire project.




At this point I should mention a property of epoxy resin that will be relevant throughout this project.  Resin takes several days to become fully cured.  After it has hardened but before it has fully cured, it is said to be "green."  When fresh resin is applied to green resin, the two resins will form a chemical bond.  But fully-cured resin will not bond chemically with fresh resin, and so it must be sanded so that a mechanical bond will be established between the new resin and the old.  (Remember when we used to patch bicycle tires as kids, and we had to scuff up the area around the leak so the patch would stick?)

The resin in the original boat is of course fully cured.  Therefore, I must sand the areas inside the boat where the bulkheads will be installed.  Meanwhile, once I start the installation job, I want to get it completed before any of the new resin has fully cured so I don't have to do any more sanding.

March going out like a lamb

Today I did six laps of the March strength circuit and paddled for 150 minutes.  Joe and I paddled up to the mouth of the Wolf, and then up the Wolf a couple of miles to a railroad bridge, before turning around and going back to the marina.  The entire round trip, starting and finishing at our dock, is about 12 miles.

We've had some spectacular weather this week: warm, sunny, calm.  And there are worse places to spend it than on the lower Wolf River.  In its bottom few miles before it empties into the Mississippi River, the Wolf runs in its original meandering riverbed (it has been largely channelized farther upstream), and it's an exceptionally pretty place to paddle on a beautiful sunny day.

Outfitting the tandem kayak, Part 4: The bulkheads

Okay, enough small talk.  Time to start doing some actual work.

Bulkheads are walls that seal off chambers in the bow and stern of a boat.  They are a safety feature, as they prevent the boat from filling entirely with water in the event of a capsize.  When combined with hatches in the deck, they allow for storage space for camping gear.

When installing the bulkheads, or doing any other work inside a boat, it's nice to have as much access to the inside as possible.  So the next step for me is to go ahead and cut the holes for the hatches.

Here is the boat without hatches:

Since I will be making my own hatch covers, the shape of the hatches is entirely up to me.  I know I want the hatches to be as big as possible; I own a couple of large dry bags and on previous trips I have really had to cram them hard to get them stored in boats with smaller hatches.  So I have designed the stern hatch good and big, while the bow hatch, though smaller, is still a good size for easy access.  On a piece of paper, I drew a half-trapezoid, and then traced around margarine lids to round off the vertices.  Then I used the pattern to trace the shape onto the deck of the boat, flipping it over so the hatch will be nice and symmetrical with respect to the boat's long axis.  The bow hatch pattern is pictured at right.

Once the hatches were laid out, it was time to cut.  It takes some real confidence in what you're doing to take an electric reciprocating saw to a beautiful boat.

 And here is the boat after the hatch holes have been cut.

Most of the bulkheads I have seen are made of minicell, but I was looking for a way to avoid the use of minicell here because it's hard to make a minicell bulkhead truly watertight.  I called up Doug Bushnell, the man who made this boat, to ask for advice.  He told me to use any piece of one-eighth-inch plywood, making sure it's well coated in epoxy to make it waterproof.  Since I have no shortage of plywood scraps lying around, this was no problem.  At left is the plywood for the stern hatch.  I kept cutting and test-fitting until it fit the cross-section of the boat aft of the stern.  My bandsaw was very helpful in this process; lacking a bandsaw, I would have used the reciprocating jigsaw and rasps.

Mr. Bushnell pointed out that I did not want the plywood to fit snugly inside the boat, because it would wear a ridge onto the outside of the deck and hull.  I'm very glad he told me that, because I would have driven myself crazy trying to create a perfect fit.  Here is the plywood in place, with some gaps visible.  The gaps will be filled in with thickened epoxy.

Here is the plywood for the bow bulkhead, also with gaps in places.

I'll tell you some more in my next post.

Pleasant paddling

Today I did six laps of the March strength circuit and paddled for 115 minutes.  The weather was gorgeous, and I was paddling with my friend Joe, so there was no reason not to get a couple of extra miles in.

Monday Photo Feature

This past weekend the Brooks Museum of Art here in Memphis showed several films by the late Canadian naturalist, canoeist, artist, and filmmaker Bill Mason.  The scenes of tandem canoeists playing in whitewater reminded me of the canoeing I did at summer camp in North Carolina in the 1980s.  Above, Donnie Kohler and I peel out below Bull Sluice on the Chattooga River near Clayton, Georgia.  Photo by Todd Tyler.

Outfitting the tandem kayak, Part 3: The boat and the guy who's working on it

Here's another look at the boat that I'm about to work on.  It's a Seafarer K-2, built by Doug Bushnell at his West Side Boat Shop in Lockport, New York.  This photo, in which I'm paddling in Wolf River Harbor with our friend Kendra, shows the boat without any hatches.  I'm going to install hatches, along with bulkheads, and modify the seats to make them more comfortable.






As I prepare to work with these fiber-reinforced plastics, the question comes up: how does somebody become an FRP expert?

I can't really tell you, because I am not that guy.

But over the years, I have learned a thing or two.  My education began in earnest when I started to enter whitewater slalom races, and got my first FRP race boat.  If you race on whitewater, you WILL break your boat sooner or later, so learning to patch it is a must.  The first time I had to patch a boat, I bought some resin and fiberglass mat down at the auto parts store.  The resulting patch was acceptable, but as time went on and I got to see how other racers were patching their boats, I picked up a few tricks of the trade, learning how to make patches neater, smoother, and more permanent, and also learning about better resin to use.  (Newcomers to this blog can read a post here about a patching job I did earlier this month.)

In late 1994 I got a bee in my bonnet to convert a playboat kayak into a C-1.  For some reason I chose the Lazer kayak, manufactured by the Wave Sport company of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for this project (it turned out to be a terrible choice, but that's another story).  I spoke on the phone with Chan Zwanzig, the owner of Wave Sport at the time, and he told me that because the kayak seat assembly in the Lazer is an important part of the boat's structural integrity, I would have to replace it with a Kevlar and fiberglass layup in the cockpit area.  I was a little intimidated, but he kindly coached me through the process, and he pointed me toward Sweet Composites, my most important source of materials ever since.

Here's a picture of the Kevlar-and-fiberglass layup I made inside that boat.  It's not the prettiest thing, but it held up fine and served as a solid anchor surface for the pedestal, thigh straps, and everything else a C-1 needs.  (I took this photo while I was in the process of converting the boat back into a kayak recently.  I have removed the pedestal and thigh straps.)





Over the next decade I started up a woodworking business, and found frequent uses for epoxy resin in my wood projects.  Epoxy works not only as a glue, but also as a filler, so it's a good choice for securing a loose joint.  And many of the tools and skills I use for woodworking cross over into FRP work.

I received another great learning experience several years ago when I built a Coho kayak, offered in kit form by the Pygmy company of Port Townsend, Washington.  A lady here in town had bought a Coho kit, realized she was in over her head, and was seeking a builder.  Somebody gave her my name, and there I was.  Though I had never built a boat before, the kit came with easy-to-follow instructions, and I combined that with my FRP experience to get the job done.  Pygmy boats are "stitch and glue" construction: the parts are all pre-cut to fit together precisely, and the builder simply "sews" them together with steel wire, injects resin into the seams with a syringe, removes the wires, and laminates the whole thing with a layer of fiberglass cloth saturated in resin.  The project included bulkheads and hatches, so I will be drawing directly on that experience to outfit our Seafarer tandem kayak.

And this Seafarer project will be my latest independent study in the college of fiber-reinforced plastics.  Whether I ever accumulate enough credits to earn the degree of master boatbuilder remains to be seen; but anytime I come away from an experience with new skills, that experience has been well worth the effort.  This project includes a couple of things I've never tried before, but I figure I'm a smart enough guy to figure it out, and I hope I might inspire similar confidence in somebody who reads this.

Training volume considerations

Today I did six laps of the March strength circuit and paddled my boat for 100 minutes.

I recently revisited this article addressing the question of how much training one should do.  My favorite line is this: "Training does not make you better or faster. It's the RECOVERY from training that brings improvement."

I knew rest was important before I read this article, but seeing the idea put in those words prompted me to take it more seriously.  These days I try to make sure that my rest days are as restful as possible.  For example, I schedule my strength workouts on the same days that I schedule hard workouts in the boat (which I'll be starting up very soon) so that the "off" days will be totally off.  I'm also thinking more about the role nutrition plays in recovery.