This morning, Paul D, Bill F, Jim M and I met for a paddle around the bay. At Jim’s suggestion we rode his wake and experimented with getting used to our various heart rate zones.
First during our warm up we paddled with our hands very low, which feels very unnatural, in order to warm up our “obliques”, muscles in the lower part of our torso. The idea is to build up some more muscles down there and learn to use the ones that are there already.
Then we paddled about 30 minutes trying to keep our heart rate between 120 and 130, which is the fully aerobic “zone 1”. The speed ends up being around what I still consider my “10 mile pace”, although I think I can probably do a bit faster in a race situation – I think it’s supposed to be the pace you can keep up for hours and hours, although for me it’s probably more like 2 hours max. As Jim says, you start off a race with a certain number of poker chips, and the idea is to spend your last one as you cross the line, not before and not leaving any behind. And also not to spend the chips when you don’t need to, unless you gain a race benefit from doing so – the example he gave was hammering ahead in “suck water” to cause the person behind you to lose your wake, and have to expend energy to get back on. So you spend two chips in order to force him to spend five. This pace is supposed to be the one that doesn’t cost you any chips.
[youtube -Qafv_lP0Io]After that set, we tried 15 minutes keeping our heart rates between 130 and 140, which is “zone 2” or “aerobic base”, which is more like a realistic race. You can see from the video that we keep yelling out our heart rates because Jim has to adjust his speed to get us into that zone. In this part and the following part, I noticed that Bill’s heart rate was higher than mine, in spite of the fact that he’s in a fast light surf ski and I’m in my big heavy boat. He’s normally a much faster paddler than me, so maybe his heart rate zones are higher than mine, or maybe I was just doing a better job of using Jim’s wake. But the point of this speed is that you’re building up your heart muscle.
After that, we did 7 minutes keeping our heart rates between 140 and 150, which is “zone 3”, which gets to the anaerobic threshold. That was tough, especially since the boat wakes had started to kick up and we were really getting thrown around. It was hard staying in Jim’s wake and also really hard to get back into it if you drop. I’m just thankful that I didn’t decide to try the Thunderbolt because of those waves.
After that, Paul D left and the rest of us went out to look at the lake, but the waves weren’t anything very exciting. A large fish surfaced next to my boat and seemed to gulp air. It was at least as big as my Basca VIII-max paddle blade, if not bigger. I have no idea what it was, but it was definitely not salmonoid.
After the paddle, Jim asked me what my plan is for the rest of the year. I hadn’t really thought beyond the Long Lake race at the end of this month, but I told him that I figured after Long Lake I’d concentrate on trying to learn to paddle my Thunderbolt, and then after the paddling season just try like hell not to lose all this fitness I’ve built up this season so I don’t start off gasping after 2 miles like I was this spring.
Update: Jim sent me a correction to how I’d characterized the various zones. I’m still not sure I entirely understand the differences – all I know is that “zone 1” is what I can do for a few hours, and “zone 3” is something I can only do for a few minutes.