Author: Paul Tomblin

The saddest sentence

I took Widget to the vet yesterday for a physical, and I mentioned the problems he’s been having with his right ear, and how upset he gets when I try to look at it. Early on, she asked me if I’d brought a stool sample, and when I said no, she said they’d give me a cup and I could drop it back after Widget produced one.

Afterwards, she took him into the back room and I could hear him yelping in distress. She came back and described how they’d cleaned out the infection in his ear and put in some gel. Then she said something that still makes me sad:

He produced a stool sample while we were working on his ear.

Poor little guy.

The Poseidon Adventure

Today the team met for some light training on the lake. The winds were coming from the south, and so there was almost no waves on the lake except for a gentle regular swell coming from the north west. Unlike several members of the team, and Dan, that’s my favourite time to be out there, when there is nothing to challenge you. It’s been pretty nippy today with temps in the low to mid 60s, and of course the lake water is still very cold, so I made a last minute decision to wear my wet suit, and thank goodness I did.

After a bit, we ended up on the other side of the boat channel and jetty from the beach we’d launched at. We were in the middle of some race tactics work when I was making a circle around and concentrating on looking at the radius point of the turn instead of watching the other boats, while Bill, who was also making a circle around and not watching out for other boats, crashed into me. I attempted a brace but didn’t react quick enough and my boat went right over dumping me in the cold water. Most of my stuff stayed in the boat, except my half skirt which came out when I did – I managed to snag it with my foot just as it was drifting down out of reach. My PFD, which was a bit lose so I could breath, came up around my head which was unfortunate. Initially the cold was enough to make you gasp, but after a few seconds I was actually feeling fairly comfortable in the water.

But I have enough trouble getting into and out of my boat in optimum situations like Dan’s dock or the boat ramp. Even with two boats docked up against mine and guys helping me on both sides, I was unable to get back into my boat and fell out again when I tried. So I ended up clinging to the front of Mike’s boat as he paddled me into shore. The water felt extremely cold against the back of my neck and head. But when I got close enough to shore to stand up, I didn’t feel cold. I wasn’t entirely sure if that would continue, or if I would chill off quickly, so I wanted to get moving again. I tried to dump and pump out water, and get back into the boat, but I was rushing because I felt that I needed to get paddling again before the chill hit me. That was bad, because I ended up doing a bad launch and falling out again into the water. Then Mike and Paul D came to help me get in by holding onto my boat, but again I rushed and didn’t do it right, and fell in again. Mike and Paul had both said that they were going to wait for me to get in and paddle with me back to the beach were we’d launched to make sure I was ok, but at this point Dan came along and took over. He told Mike and Paul to go off and do some training exercise, and made me go sit down on the beach while he took care of dumping out my boat again and getting it ready. Initially I was worried that sitting down in the air would cause me to chill off, but there was almost no wind down low and I didn’t feel too bad. The short rest was actually a very good thing, because I managed to catch my breath and calm down a bit. Up until this time I hadn’t realized that I was acting a bit panicky. This time when I got back in I did it right and didn’t try to rush.

I paddled off, expecting Dan to come with me, but he didn’t for some reason. As I rounded the jetty to head back to the beach where we’d launched, I discovered that my rudder was all jammed up with sand from the beach, and between that and the residual water in the bottom of the boat, I was having some trouble staying upright and off the rocks at the end of the jetty. By this time I was out of view of any of the rest of the paddlers, and I was really annoyed that Dan hadn’t come with me as he’d promised. I felt like I could easily have dumped there and nobody would have seen me for a long time – maybe long enough to get hypothermic and drown. But I managed to get it to shore fairly close to where I wanted to be, and went back to the car to change. I went back to the boat and recovered all my equipment, and by this time I could hear Dan yelling at somebody on the other side of the jetty.

Everything worked out fine this time, and once again we had a great old time afterwards drinking beer and telling stories. That is really the best part about being part of the team.

I feel like when the water warms up a bit I really need a refresher course on kayak rescues. I’ve done canoe rescues in the past, but a kayak is a lot harder to get back into, especially when you’ve got a tight cockpit like mine.

I did it!

Today I went out to do a long slow paddle following Dan’s advice, and I did it. I went 10 miles in 1:52:56, and my average pulse was 126 bpm. Compare to last week when I did a “race pace” 8 miles in 1:22:20 with an average pulse of 139. I was actually watching my heart rate monitor and every time it showed more than 130 bpm, I slowed down the stroke rate and concentrated on getting more glide. There were a couple of times where the heart rate monitor started giving weird numbers – suddenly going up to over 200 bpm and staying there. So the average was probably actually a bit lower.

There was a fairly strong breeze in my face on the way up, and I was averaging about 4.4 mph. I thought I was doing a great job of keeping my speed down. I decided to turn around at the 4.5 mile point because my elbows were starting to hurt a bit and because I really really had to pee. But when I turned around my speed immediately went up to around 6.8 mph, so I decided it was more a case of the wind and current than my own self discipline.

The brisk pace back (and the lots of glide) meant that I felt fine when I got back (and my bladder was surviving), and so I did a diversion upstream on the canal to increase the total distance. I was just about to turn around when I saw a guy out paddling coming towards me who was obviously a fitness paddler, so I kept paddling until we passed, turned around, and gave him a brief sales pitch for the BayCreek Time Trials. It was probably a good thing I went that little bit further, because the GPS beeped for “Lap 10” just as I passed the dock for GWC.

I think I kept good technique the whole time (although my paddle banged into the boat a few more times as I got tired), and I don’t think my speed (corrected for current and wind) was much worse at the end than it was at the beginning. It was definitely a milestone to be proud of.

Today’s Discovery

If you have a Core Data data model with one Entity, say “AircraftCategory” that has a “to-many” Relationship to another, say “AircraftClass”, you can access the AircraftClass objects for an AircraftCategory using an NSMutableSet. But if you Fetch an NSMutableArray of AircraftCategory, and are doing a “fast enumeration” through the AircraftCategory objects, and you happen to remove one of the AircraftClass items from the current AircraftCategory object using one of the generated accessors, the fast enumeration will see that as a modification of the NSMutableArray of AircraftCategory and throw an exception. This is in contrast to Java where you would only get an exception if you were to add or remove things from the actual Collection that you were iterating, and not from calling setter methods on the objects in the Collection.

So instead of removing the AircraftClass from the AircraftCategory, I discovered that what I have to do is remove it from Core Data directly, using
[managedObjectContext deleteObject:aircraftClass];

I haven’t tried it yet, but I wonder if this wouldn’t happen if I assigned the fetch results to an NSArray instead of an NSMutableArray?

Yesterday’s Discovery

Yesterday, Dan told me that I’ve been doing my training wrong all my life. All my life, I’ve always started doing a good pace, and building up the distance until I could do that pace for the sort of distance I wanted to race, and adding in some shorter interval, speed play and strength work outs for speed. For running, that pace was around 8 mph, and I started out doing a mile or so and worked up to regularly running 8 to 12 miles at that pace, in preparation for 6-8 km long orienteering races. For skiing, it was around 18-20 km/hr, and I was regularly doing 40 or 50 km at that pace, in preparation for 15 or 30 km races (I was quite a bit slower for the Canadian Ski Marathon, but it was 168 km in two days over quite rugged terrain). And for kayaking, it seems like 6 mph is that pace, and I’ve built up to doing 8 miles at that speed, trying to build up to longer than the 10 miles of a normal race.

But Dan says what I should be doing is going slower for longer distances, and doing more interval work outs at much faster than race pace, and basically do race distances at race speeds almost never. And he appears to have the research papers to back it up. I guess I’ll try it his way and see how it goes. Maybe I won’t have the same problem I had for skiing and orienteering, where I really didn’t have any ability to go faster for shorter races – I basically had one pace and that was it.