there's no stress relief like a surf wave

This afternoon, I didn't feel like getting in my boat. My job is intense and demanding right now, and I considered spending the day getting ahead. But I know that balancing my life with time in my boat makes me more focused and productive. Plus it was a gorgeous fall day. Around 5pm, I put my boat on the car and drove to the river.

For a workout that I wasn't super excited about, it was one of the best experiences I've had on the water in a long time. The river was just over 17 feet on the Jeff City gauge -- high enough to top all the wing dikes -- which makes for some strong current and interesting features. Big boils and swirling eddies form in corners of the river that are normally calm. It's fun to play with water that actually plays back.

I normally paddle upstream along the north shore, and then sprint back down the middle of the channel at the end of my workout. With the dikes only a few feet under water, the attainments over them were challenging. After several floods this fall, however, the tops of the dikes are not at all even. The resulting irregular water helps me climb up more easily (there are spots to sneak through).

Paddling on much lower water earlier this week, I watched an Army Corp of Engineers boat rebuilding the third dike up from the Jeff City bridge. Unlike the others, it's now a tall, uniform wall of rocks. When I got up to it tonight, the difference was obvious. There was a clear, uniform horizon line extending out into the main current of the river. With the river dropping an good 2+ feet as it passed over the dike, there was no way I was going to get up over this one. But below it: a perfect surf wave.

Surfing on a river is the same principle as surfing on the ocean -- but with waves that never run into the shore, you can sit on them indefinitely if you get your balance right. In the fast current, it took me a while to find the sweet spot. But once I did - oh, this was the perfect wave for a slalom boat. Long and glassy. Carving back and forth with my hips, paddle relaxed in the air, it felt like I could sit on the wave forever.

There is nothing more relaxing the sitting on the upstream face of a wave with fast current rushing the other direction underneath you, and to be stable and balanced. It is magic. It was heaven. It was just what I needed. I stayed on the wave until sunset. Then I raced back down the main channel, feeling more relaxed and centered than I've been in a long time.

I snapped the picture with my phone as I drove back over the bridge.

Discovered new trails! (and already an injury)

One of my favorite things in Mid Mo so far are 13.5 miles of great trails about 10 minutes from my house. They can be steep, twisting, and rocky. I may not have mountains, but at least I can find some refuge climbing steep hills along pine groves and creeks.

Pavement bores me. Treadmills are just pointless. I lift at my local YMCA, but I don't understand the dozens of folks who are plodding along on the rows of treadmills burning a mere few hundred calories an hour while staring at the cieling-mounted TVs. Better than vegging on the couch, I guess, but seriously. I want to RUN, and collapse into my couch dripping and shaking after an hour pushing for a personal best with the domed sky above me and no one in sight.

Anyway, trails have their disadvantages. Especially in fall, when roots and rocks are disguised by leaves... no match for a weak right ankle. Ouch. Roll & pop.

At least I have a paper shredder under my desk that can double as elevation when I R.I.C.E. I am going to try and stay off the trails for a week.

We'll see if I can take it...

No gates? Time to get creative.

So it looks and feels like I am training again.  I still exist in a perpetual state of no resources, no coaching, and no training partners -- but with good river access I have been getting on the water regularly.  I am getting damn good at going really fast in a straight line.  Yeah, that held my attention span for about 3 workouts.  Now I'm bored.  I need gates.
 
So, until I can find a place to hang gates, I have been playing with tennis balls.  One of my favorite workouts of all time was on the Wolf River in Tennessee, where I freed a basketball, soccer ball, and a red playground ball that were stuck in some tree branches.  I spent the next hour floating down the river with them -- liting my bow over one, sprinting to the next and pivoting my stern underneath it.  Onside, offside.  Rotate to watch my stern go under the ball over my left shoulder.  On to the next.  It was a blast.
 
So I took inspiration from that workout, and packed a mesh bag of old tennis balls with me to my dusk workout on the Missouri.  Throwing them as hard as I could (which is more difficult from a boat, my throws were pretty bad), I set a "course" of tennis balls on the moving river.  (7 may have been over ambitious, I occasionally had to race around to rescue defectors).  I spent the next 30 minutes, until it was too dark to see even the neon yellow, making up courses between the balls and sprinting from one to the next.
 
It was humbling.  My weaknesses are obvious when I have objects to turn around.  Paddling through offset gates, turning back to the right after a tight offside turn, with my paddle on the cross, is difficult for me.  I want to run the boat and keep up my speed.  Something to work on.
 
On a positive note, I have had 5 workouts in the past 48 hours (lifting weights, 4m trail run, 1 hr paddle on river, 4m trail run, 2 hr pool session).  The momentum feels good.
 
 

back in the saddle again

It has been just over six months since I have posted here. Six months, wow.

For me, perfect can often be the enemy of good. If I can't give something 110%, I drop it completely and focus on the things in my life which are the priority. For the last six months, slalom has been on the back burner and my blog has grown stale.

My career has become my focus, both for financial and personal reasons. I'm 25. I don't have a trust fund. I want to go places, not just spin my wheels. It was time for me to get serious. The year 2007, my best attempt as a REI-bike-wrench-paddle-bum, was a blast; truly one of the best years of my life. But I had some growing up to do.

So now, I am wearing heels and working 60 hour weeks. I avoided my boat all summer. I really wasn't sure how much I wanted to paddle or what my relationship to the sport should be. I both missed it desperately and contemplated trucking all my gear to GAF and making a couple grand selling my spray skirts, PFDs, paddles and boats. But I couldn't do it. My heart in still in my C1 and I still have a burning, intense desire to train as an athlete.

In Jeff City, I live blocks from the Missouri River. There is a boat ramp less than 5 minutes from my house. I have been getting out every weekend for the past few weeks, feeling her out again. It feels great. I am coming at the sport with a totally different mindset now -- and where before I struggled to know what to do, how to connect my movement, now I am relaxed. I have been more aware of small things like the outfitting changes that could improve my performance -- currently, I seem to be better able to figure this stuff out on my own.

For now, I am just having fun and getting reacquainted. My standard workout is to paddle to a high-paced music mix: steady tempo during the verses, full throttle during the chorus, and a break on the first verse of every new song. If I stick with it, that will get boring fast, and I will need to invent games, hang gates, or explore other local rivers.

If I prioritize this again, it will mean travel. Which I am now better able to afford -- but it means not visiting friends and family on the long weekends and holidays b/c I'd rather be in a training camp somewhere. Last year, as much as I loved the sport, I didn't connect w/ others enough for it to be a total social-life replacement. Can I juggle all these things? Work? Training? Visiting friends and family?

Choices. Lots of choices.

Either way, I feel fortunate that I have the choices in front of me to make.