I’m trying to recover from the damage to my elbows and shoulders from the hard workout I did last Tuesday with the other paddle. On Thursday, I did a very easy paddle – the team were doing intervals, but I just went slowly and recovered. I did a few short bits of faster paddling, but when I did my elbows were very sore.
Because of that, I took a couple of days off. Then on Monday, I went erging after work. I figured that I could adjust the resistance and make sure I didn’t hurt my elbows any more. I did 1000 m warm up with very low resistance, 2000 m fast with moderate resistance, 2000 m fast with heavy resistance, then 1000 m warm down. Didn’t hurt much at all, which made me hopeful, but I videoed and my technique looked ok, but not great.
Today, I went out on the boat. Since this weekend’s race has a portage, one thing I was practicing was coming in hard, jumping out the boat, carrying it, jumping back in, and paddling off hard. Good practice for doing the dock, but the water was too cold to practice beach launching. It also makes for some strange looking video as I pick up the boat with the camera attached and sling it on my shoulder. I’ll spend the rest of the week doing some easy paddling and fixing up some things on my boat. Because of the set backs of the last couple of weeks I haven’t exactly prepared for this race the way I wanted to, but I have a lot more base than I did for my first race last year.