Santa came in January

Well, my Vanquish K1 has arrived.  The nice man from KAS Transport came through Memphis last night.

I'm having a very busy day in my workshop, so it remains to be seen whether I put it in the water today.  If not, I'll take it down to the harbor tomorrow morning.  I'm sure I'll have to spend some time making adjustments to get the boat trim and get the rudder working the way I like it.  And then the first few sessions will probably be spent trying to keep the thing upright.

No whining, even on crummy days

This morning I did two sets of the January strength routine and then paddled my boat for 70 minutes.

There had been a very mild ice storm here yesterday, which is to say that while it put a coat of ice on almost everything, it did not affect the streets and did not bring down tree branches and stuff like that.  When I got down to the marina the temperature display in my car's dashboard said it was 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so whatever thaw took place today had only just begun.  After surviving an extremely dicey walk down an icy ramp, I struggled to untie the ropes that secured my boat to its rack and to undo the zipper and fastex buckles on my boat's cover.

The rest of the session was simple enough, though it felt like sort of a chore on this cold, dreary, cheerless day.

Since I'm sitting here fighting off waves of self-pity, it's a good time to point you toward a new post on Ron Lugbill's blog about being a good sport.  He talks about the things we all think about, such as not whining about poor officiating and not congratulating the people who beat you, but he also mentions more general things like not forgetting the huge variety of people who help you along your way and maintaining good relationships with fellow competitors.  Good advice for athletes in any sport.  Read the post here.

Another blog to look at

Ron Lugbill, a member of the U.S. national team in whitewater slalom in the 1970s and early 1980s, has a blog I've just found out about.  Take a look at it here.

Ron is the less-famous of the two Lugbill brothers: his brother Jon was a five-time world champion in the C1 class.  I've never met Ron myself--he had long since retired from competition by the time I started racing slalom in the 1990s--but I admire him based on my second-hand experience with him, such as reading articles he's written and talking to racers he's coached.  I think he's a lawyer these days, but does some freelance coaching and, as one can tell from reading his blog, spends a lot of time thinking about the sport.

Of course, the racing I'm doing these days is not slalom, so there's a lot of stuff on Lugbill's blog that doesn't really apply to my training.  But there's a lot of stuff that does.  It'll take me a while to read through all his back-posts and ponder what it all means for me.  One thing that's already caught my attention is his assertion that one should work on speed and power throughout the year; I've always done most of my speed work in the couple of months before the biggest races.  He also talks about how best to incorporate strength training into a paddler's regime.

I learned of the blog when somebody linked to it on the Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends page on Face Book.  Go "like" that page if you're looking for more paddling stuff to chew on.

Monday photo feature

Just a neat photo, that's all.  Southeast Mississippi in the summer of 2010.

My boat and I get together in all kinds of weather

I've got several days to catch up on here, days highlighted by severe swings in the weather.

Friday was flat-out beautiful--sunny and reaching 68 degrees by the afternoon.  After doing two sets of the January strength routine that morning, I decided it was too nice a day to drive down to the river, and rode my bike.  I paddled for 70 minutes amid quite a few floating logs that had been flushed out of the Wolf River by the heavy rain we'd had Wednesday and early Thursday.

The warm temperatures remained through yesterday, but the sun didn't.  We got about a quarter-inch of rain during the day, and then overnight last night it started pouring.  It continued to rain hard this morning as I did another two sets of the January strength routine.  And it was distinctly colder outside.  There would be no bike ride to the river today.

One thing I can say about that Go Pro camera that Martha gave me for my birthday last August: it gets me out in my boat on days like today when a person could be forgiven for staying home.  I'm on sort of a personal mission to shoot footage of the Mississippi River in all kinds of weather, and opportunity knocked today.

I planned to paddle for 70 minutes, and that's exactly what I did.  The cold, wet conditions prompted me to push the pace even though I knew that wouldn't make the time pass by any faster.

The rain continued past lunchtime.  I'm actually glad to see it considering the severe drought our region, like most of the rest of North America, has had.  We need a lot more days like this to pull us out of it.

More continental drainage 101

Well, it's pouring down rain here in Memphis today, and that might get up one's hopes for a major rise in the Mississippi, until one looks at today's national weather map:

As the map shows, the heaviest precipitation is south (i.e., downstream) of Memphis, where it will have no effect on our part of the big river.

There is, according to this map, some rain falling in the Ohio Valley, along the state line between Kentucky and Indiana and between Kentucky and Illinois.  That will send some water our way.  And I believe the rain showing up along the Kansas-Nebraska border is falling in the Missouri River watershed, so we'll eventually be paddling on that water.  It'll add some much-needed flow to the section of the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo as well.

One interesting wrinkle in the Mississippi's watershed is southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas.  Rain that falls in that region does not affect the Mississippi at Memphis.  The region is part of the St. Francis River watershed, and the St. Francis flows almost as far south as Helena, Arkansas--well downstream of Memphis--before it joins the Mississippi.

Well, that's enough lecture for today.  Perhaps I will continue this lesson in a later post.

Training session and ASHOF update

Yesterday morning I did two sets of the January strength routine.  I've gotten over most of the soreness, but I still can't believe how much the core exercises hurt, especially ones with the exercise ball.

Then I went down to the river, where misty precipitation increased into a hard, steady drizzle during my paddling session.  I think the river is exceptionally beautiful in this sort of weather.  And the temperature was higher than it had been in recent days--I think it was in the upper 50s when I was down there--so I was reasonably comfortable.  I didn't wear pogies, and that's always a bonus in January.

In the last several years my friend Phil Capel, a fellow paddler and the director of the Arkansas River Canoe and Kayak Race at Little Rock each June, has been speaking with voting members of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame regarding the candidacy of Mike Herbert that I talked about in my last post.  Phil tells me that there are some 300 potential inductees on their list right now, meaning that anybody hoping to be inducted could have to wait some years yet.  Right now he's trying to get some assurance that Mike is on that list.

And at the moment that's the main thing I'd like to be sure of, too: that the voters are aware that Mike exists and that he's getting the same consideration as candidates who perhaps have a higher public profile.  I've never received a reply to any correspondence I have ever sent to ASHOF, so right now I have no idea whether anybody is listening or not.

For now, what I would like is to know who the voting members are so that I might send them a polite letter in support of Mike's candidacy and encourage others to do the same.  I'll share what I find out here.

Just what I need: another project...

Yesterday the daily newspaper here in Memphis ran an item in its sports section announcing the 2013 induction class for the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

Several years ago it occurred to me that my friend Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas, had not been inducted into the ASHOF, so I composed a letter to the Hall's powers that were, hoping to convince them that Mike is every bit as outstanding as the men and women already inducted and therefore should be considered for induction himself.

I never got any sort of response to my query, and eventually I got busy with other things.  Whether any influential person ever laid eyes on my letter, I have no idea; all I know is that now, in 2013, Mike still has not been inducted into the Hall.

So I am giving it another go.  This morning I sent an e-mail to Mr. Ray Tucker, the ASHOF executive director.  This effort alone will probably not do the trick, and in the coming days I hope to track down contact info for members of the ASHOF board, and perhaps bestow some paper snail-mail upon them.

If anybody reading this would like to join in this effort, please do.  I welcome any advice on how I can get the ear of the actual decision-makers in this process.

The rest of this post consists of the e-mail I sent to Mr. Tucker.



To the board of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame:

I wish to congratulate the eight new inductees in the Class of 2013, and I commend your selection committee for choosing such an exemplary group.  These eight men and women represent a standard of achievement that all Arkansans can be proud of.

It is my privilege to be acquainted with another outstanding Arkansan and I urge you to consider him for future induction into the Hall.

Mike Herbert of Rogers is one of the greatest athletes ever to compete for the United States in the sport of flatwater sprint kayaking.  He made his first Olympic team in 1988 and became the first American ever to make the final of the 500-meter single kayak event.  In that final, he fell just inches shy of winning the bronze medal.  You can watch the television footage of that final race in Seoul, South Korea, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95iuP4jnonM&feature=relmfu


During the next two years Mike won three world championships medals, a rare feat for U.S. paddlers in this European-dominated sport.  Then, in 1991, Mike won the 1000 meters at the Pan American Games in Havana, making such an impression on Fidel Castro that the Cuban dictator saluted the U.S. flag during the medal ceremony:

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-05/sports/sp-183_1_gold-medal


In 1992, Sports Illustrated ran this feature of Mike in its Olympic preview issue prior to the Games in Barcelona:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1004021/index.htm


The following is a summary of Mike Herbert's athletic career:

Michael Adam Herbert
Sport: Flatwater sprint kayak
Born September 30, 1960, Belleville, Illinois
Residence since early teens: Rogers, Arkansas
Current address: 8865 Galleon Drive, Rogers, AR 72756; k1herbert@msn.com

     Mike Herbert began racing canoes as a teenager with his father, Bob.  The two quickly became the tandem to beat on the circuit in northern Arkansas, where marathon canoe racing is popular on rivers like the Arkansas, the Black, the Buffalo, the Current, the Eleven Point, the Mulberry, and the White.
     After watching the 1984 Olympic kayak races on TV, Herbert switched over to kayak and set the goal of becoming an Olympian himself.  He found himself on the water in Seoul for the 1988 Games, in which he missed winning the bronze in the 500-meter single kayak event by mere hundredths of a second.
     The next several years were remarkably successful, as Herbert won a bronze medal at the 1989 world championships, two silver medals at the 1990 world championships, and a gold medal at the 1991 Pan American Games.  Precious few Americans have won world championships medals in this European-dominated sport, and Herbert's three medals from the worlds make him the second-most decorated U.S. flatwater kayaker ever, behind the legendary Olympic champion Greg Barton.
     Though his international career is behind him, Mike Herbert continues to be active in the sport, attending the national championships of marathon canoeing most years and renewing his friendly rivalry with Greg Barton each year at the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race at Memphis.
     Mike Herbert's achievements on the international level and his continuing enthusiasm for his sport on the regional and national levels present an overwhelming case for his induction into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.


Olympic results
1988 Olympics, Seoul, South Korea: 4th, single kayak 500 meters
1992 Olympics, Barcelona, Spain: 9th, 4-man kayak 1000 meters
1996 Olympics, Atlanta, USA: 8th (semifinal), single kayak 500 meters

World Championships results
1989 World Championships, Plovdiv, Bulgaria: Bronze Medal, single kayak 500 meters
1990 World Championships, Poznan, Poland: Silver Medal, single kayak 500 meters
1990 World Championships, Poznan, Poland: Silver Medal, double kayak 500 meters

Other international results
1987 Pan American Games, Indianapolis, USA: Gold Medal, double kayak 500 meters
1987 Pan American Games, Indianapolis, USA: Gold Medal, 4-man kayak 1000 meters
1991 Pan American Games, Havana, Cuba: Gold Medal, single kayak 1000 meters


About flatwater sprint kayaking:
     The format of this sport is similar to that of swimming: racers are placed in lanes on a lake or other calm body of water, and propel their boats forward as fast as possible.  At the Olympics, world championships, and most other international events, paddlers compete over distances of 200 meters, 500 meters, and 1000 meters.
     The national governing body for canoe and kayak racing is USA Canoe-Kayak: www.usack.org.
     The international governing body is the International Canoe Federation: www.canoeicf.org.

Monday photo feature

Epiphany marked the end of Christmas yesterday.  Joe Royer took this photo during a yuletide river outing a couple of years ago, and it's as good a way as any to say goodbye to this holiday season and get on with a new year.

Adapting to some new stuff

This morning I did two sets of my new strength routine for the month of January.  All the exercises are harder than they look in the videos, especially the core exercises.  My lower abdominals have been very sore since I did the new exercises on Friday, so today's workout brought the pain.

After that I went down to the river and paddled for 70 minutes.  I had a mission: on Friday I saw a flock of migrating pelicans over near the Arkansas side above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, but I was pressed for time and didn't get far enough up there for a good luck.  So today I brought along my Go Pro camera and planned to go up there and spend as much quality time with the pelicans as they would allow.

Sadly, when I got up to where they had been, they were gone.

Oh well.  At least my paddling session was good.  I was feeling it in my muscles from the strength workout, and I concentrated hard to make sure my stroke form didn't get sloppy.

It had been overcast and gloomy when I started paddling, but by the time I returned to the dock it had turned into a beautiful blue-sky sunny day.  I drove home with the happy feeling of having done some good work for the morning.

New strength routine

I paddled this morning for 60 minutes.  It was cold, but the bright sunshine and calm conditions made it an ideal day to paddle.

In the early part of the year, when the competitions are still months in the future, I sort of plan my training month to month.  Here we are in a new month, so it's time to begin a new phase.

For paddling, that means turning up the volume a little.  Last month I was getting down to the river twice a week, and I'll be making it three times a week this month.  I'll lengthen my sessions a bit, too: I've been paddling for an hour each time, but in the next couple of weeks I'll be stretching that out to 80 or 90 minutes.

It's on the strength-building front that I really adopted the habit of monthly routines.  I got the idea some fifteen years ago when I read The Barton Mold, William T. Endicott's case study of world and Olympic champion Greg Barton.  Here's an excerpt from the book that I posted last February, when I was addressing this same topic.  (The Barton Mold is available in PDF format on the International Canoe Federation website, here.  This excerpt is from the section entitled "How Barton trains.")

Barton takes two or three exercises from each of [his categories of lifting exercises] and makes up a routine consisting of 10-12 exercises, which he continues for three or four weeks. He then creates a new routine. Some exercises would stay in the routine, but a number would be different.

I do this is because I think it helps to get over plateaus. I'll change to another
exercise that works the same muscle, but maybe from a little different angle.
As soon as I start the new exercise, I can make improvements right away.
But pretty soon I reach a plateau. Then maybe I'll go back to the old one and
find that, sure, maybe I've lost a bit initially, but not much. And then after
a week or two, I've actually surpassed where I was. It's a way of tricking your
mind and body into improving beyond what it felt was a barrier.

For the last few weeks I've been focusing on my core.  As I move forward I plan to continue some core exercises but also incorporate some other stuff.  The strength routine I have made up for the month of January draws, once again, from the videos I have cited in recent posts that star Jingjing Li and Daniele Molmenti.  Both are Olympians in whitewater slalom, and Molmenti won the gold medal in men's kayak at the Games in London last summer.

Here is my routine for January.  The exercises are difficult to describe and I don't know what any of them is called, so I'll refer to the time at which they occur in either the Jingjing Li video or the Daniele Molmenti video:

1.  Rubber band exercise at 5:42 of the D.M. video
2.  Exercise ball exercise at 2:55 of the J.L. video
3.  Rubber band exercises (hand paddling?) at 6:56 and 7:10 of the D.M. video
4.  Core exercises at 4:40 and 5:03 of the D.M. video
5.  Rubber band exercises at 8:42 and 9:30 of the D.M video
6.  Exercise ball exercise at 3:10 of the J.L. video

I did a very light version of this routine this afternoon, mostly just trying to familiarize myself with all these different movements.

Seasonably cold

It must be January.  A pale sun didn't provide much warmth this morning as I went down to the river.  Once on the water, I found my rudder was frozen and I had to work the pedals gently for several minutes until the lines came free.

But I was dressed for the cold, and once I got moving I was reasonably comfortable.  A north breeze was blowing, but not the sort of screaming gale that makes me want to ditch my boat and hop the next one-way flight to the equator.  And the temperature had risen above the freezing point by the time I got back to the dock: the water that had dripped onto my deck and my pogies was in its liquid state.

Monday photo feature

Richard Savoie of Bayou Des Allemands, Louisiana, competes in the 2011 Battle on the Bayou race at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  I think Robbie Capel took the photo.  The fourth annual installment of this event is scheduled for March 2, and as of right now, it looks to be my season opener.  So I've got two months to get into some degree of race fitness.

The complicated business of draining the continent

Yesterday afternoon I went downtown and paddled for 60 minutes on a cold but calm day.  The river level was 10.9 feet, the highest Memphis gauge reading since last May.  Even though this level is on the low side of medium for this time of year, it felt very high, with the water covering parts of the landscape that had been high and dry for months.

The Mississippi River has been in the national news lately because its low levels have threatened the smooth flow of barge traffic, and so some readers might be surprised to hear me say the water is up here at Memphis.  But the Mississippi is a long river, and Memphis is not where the current news-making problem is.  That distinction belongs to the section between St. Louis, Missouri, and Cairo, Illinois.  Above St. Louis, the lock-and-dam system on the river is pretty reliable for keeping the river at adequate depths for commercial traffic, and at Cairo the Ohio River comes in and increases the Mississippi's flow capacity by about 200 percent.  Months of drought conditions in the watershed of the Missouri River (which reaches the Mississippi just above St. Louis), combined with frozen water in the upper reaches of the Mississippi, have resulted in a scarcity of water from St. Louis down to Cairo, where the Ohio provides relief.

Fairly often I find myself explaining the river's behavior to people in other parts of the country, and even to people right here in Memphis who just don't pay much attention to the river.

Back in 1993, when footage of the devastating floods on the upper Mississippi dominated the national news on TV, there was some wailing here in Memphis over our impending doom.  But that was all wasted breath, because below-normal flows on the Ohio that summer meant that the lower Mississippi's riverbed had plenty of room to accommodate the water coming down from the upper Midwest.

When we have had heavy rain here in the Memphis area, I sometimes hear the question "Has all this rain brought the Mississippi up?"  The answer is always no.  Local rainfall does bring up our small rivers, like the Wolf.  But even an enormous infusion of water from the Wolf is not enough to make a noticeable change in the Memphis gauge reading on the Mississippi.  Wolf River water does, however, combine with flows from other area tributaries like the Loosahatchie River and Nonconnah Creek to affect Mississippi River levels farther downstream.

The most appalling display of local ignorance of our river's ways occurred in May of 2011, when the river rose to the second-highest level ever recorded at Memphis.  Before the floodwater had even arrived here, I had a conversation with a conspiracy theorist who claimed that the government was holding back information and that anything and everything near the river was liable to be washed away at any moment.  I calmly explained that flash floods don't happen on the Mississippi and that flows are entirely predictable based on precipitation data from higher up in the watershed.  But the guy didn't seem convinced.  Then came the flood, and with it a caravan of national network news trucks, and suddenly hundreds of people who had never before given the river five seconds of thought were experts on our continent's grandest waterway.  One of the worst was Bob Nations, our local director of emergency preparedness, who might really know his stuff when it comes to tornadoes or earthquakes but clearly had no idea how the Mississippi River works.  Many other people were so thoughtful as to lecture me on why I should never, ever go near the river with a kayak at any level.  Even in the best of times I have a tendency toward misanthropy, so in the interest of personal sanity I had to close my eyes and try to shut out all the misinformation swirling around during the Great Flood of 2011.

Most of the time, thankfully, I am able to do my thing on the river without attracting much attention.  As the song goes, the Mississippi "just keeps rollin' along," through times of flood and times of drought and everything in between.  And as long as I'm able, I'll keep paddling my boat out there, getting my exercise and enjoying the natural wonders of the place.  Happy New Year.

Race schedule 2013

I've been pondering my competition schedule for this coming year.  Right now I definitely plan to do these four races, barring injury or other unforeseen  circumstance:

March 2: Fourth annual Battle on the Bayou, Old Fort Bayou, Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Starting in the Back Bay of Biloxi near the mouth of Old Fort Bayou, the course winds nine and a half miles up the bayou to the finish next to The Shed barbecue joint.

April 27: Ninth annual Bluz Cruz Marathon, Mississippi River, Vicksburg, Mississippi.  The race starts at Madison Parish Port and finishes 22 miles downriver on the Vicksburg Front.

June 1: Tenth annual Arkansas River Canoe and Kayak Race, Arkansas River, North Little Rock, Arkansas.  The five-and-a-half-mile course starts at Murray Park and heads downriver to the Interstate 30 bridge.

June 15: 32nd Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee.  Known as "The fastest 5000-meter race in the world," this race draws both world-class racers and people who pull their canoes out of the backyard once a year to participate.


I'd love to work in several more if I can.  Generally, I'm looking for events that are either within a reasonable driving distance of Memphis or something that coincides with a vacation trip to a more distant area.  And I am not interested in ultra-long races (more than two hours or so).

Anyway, I'll post any updates here as they develop.

A little snow

It snowed here late Tuesday night and early yesterday morning, though not nearly as much as it did west of the river in Arkansas and Missouri.  We ended up with an inch or so here in Memphis, and the dock looked like this yesterday morning:

I paddled for an hour.  It was quite windy and busy barge traffic made things rough out on the river, so after about ten minutes of fighting that I returned to the harbor.  The sky was overcast and the damp, penetrating cold made it the sort of session I couldn't wait to be done with.  As soon as my hour was up I threw the boat back up on the rack and made a beeline for my car.

Monday photo feature

I know, the resolution is awful, but it's appropriate for the season.  I think Joe snapped this one of me on the same day as last week's photo.  Apparently there are chances of snow in the Memphis area tomorrow night, but I'll believe it when I see it.

All tired out

We're having some more December-like weather now.  The sky was dark and threatening rain all day today, but I don't think it ever actually rained except for a light drizzle as I rode my bike down to the river this morning.

I had planned to paddle for just an hour, but I found Joe and Carol Lee Royer getting ready to paddle when I arrived down at the dock, and I ended up paddling all the way up to the mouth of the Wolf with them.  At this time of year I see them only once in a while, so it was nice to catch up.

Feeling a little pressed for time, I paddled pretty hard from the mouth of the Wolf back down into the harbor.  I was feeling it all over when I got back to the dock, and the bike ride home was the final knockout punch that sent me into naptime after lunch.

Chill

The winter solstice arrived with appropriate weather.  When I went down to the river this morning it was somewhere in the low to mid forties with a brisk wind from the north.  I wore pogies today for the first time in a very long time: last winter was so mild that I don't think I wore them after February.

At least it was bright and sunny today, and I got good and warm during my hour-long paddling session.  The paddling itself is almost never that bad in cold weather; the hard part is standing on the dock before and after, getting the boat down or putting it away, and changing clothes.  I guess it's time to get used to it, as the forecast for the next week calls for more seasonable weather.

Various stuff that's going on

My back is feeling better and I'm doing my strength workouts again.  Yesterday I did three sets of Jingjing Li's exercise ball drills and today I did the other little thing I do--pushups and cinder block lifts and step-ups and stuff.

I'm still paddling twice a week right now; I've fallen into a Friday and Sunday routine.  Today was a nice day and I thought about paddling today since we have some unpleasant weather on the way.  But I didn't.  We'll see if I regret it when it's time to go to the river on Friday.  Channel 5 weatherman Dave Brown says we're going to have some serious wind tonight and tomorrow, and I hope that moves on out by Friday.

My friend Don Walls, an Arkansan who's a mighty good canoe racer both in C1 and in C2 with partner Dale Burris, has a device that's both a heart rate monitor and a GPS, and he downloads maps of where he's paddled and graphs of what his heart has done.  An example from one of his workouts is here.

Don Walls (bow) and Dale Burris en route to victory in the 2012 Aluminum Nationals on the White River near Allison, Arkansas.

I especially enjoy looking at the map feature.  While I'm certainly interested in the physiological stuff that goes on during training, I'm also interested in where a paddler goes and what he sees and experiences.  One reason I like paddling so much is that it's a sport that engages all the senses.

As for a heart rate monitor, I used one back in the late 1990s and early 2000s until the chest belt broke, and since then I've just trained by feel.  Most of the time I think I know when I'm in the aerobic zone and when I'm going lactic and stuff like that.  I know great athletes who claim that a heart rate monitor is indispensable, and maybe I'll come around to that view by and by, but for now I'm happy enough without one.