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.
1 comment:
if you could throw to begin with :)
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