Author: Paul Tomblin

Today was a gorgeous day, brilliant sunshine and warm, but a bit of wind. Doug, Bill and I met up at Bay Creek for a paddle on the creek. The water was a bit lower than last time, but it was more open. Doug’s Burn is in the shop getting fixed, so he paddled a much tippier Jet. Or is it the other way ’round? I can never keep the KayakPro boats separate – too many 17’3″ long boats, and their web site says one is 438mm wide and the other is 438cm wide, which probably is wrong. Bill showed up with a Romany sea kayak – his wife and daughter are in the Rough Riders club, so this is his secret other life kayak. Since he normally paddles a surf ski, I can’t blame him for paddling a more stable (and more importantly, one without a leaky drain in the cockpit) boat.

Doug was paddling a strange boat and was on a low intensity week, I’ve had sniffles and sneezes for a week, and Bill hasn’t been paddling for months, so we took it easy. On the way up, a Forge Racing canoer came paddling down, and barely managed to grunt out a response to our hellos. One of us made a remark about how unfriendly the Forge Racing guys, and wondered why Jason, a kayaker and a really friendly guy, hangs out with them. And a few minutes later, Jason came by in a canoe – and unlike the first guy, he had a friendly greeting for us and a smile.

We didn’t go all that far, and we didn’t paddle that hard. But it was a beautiful day, and we were in boats and with friends. And that’s what’s important.

I went erging again. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear I didn’t bring my video camera. The last few times I’ve done a long “distance” workout, I’ve done half an hour straight, then for the last half hour I’d spend 15-20 seconds having a sip of water, paddle normally for the remainder of 9 minutes, then paddle very hard for 1 minute, repeat, then sip, paddle for the remainder of 8 minutes, and go hard for 2 minutes.

This time I tried doing the “9 minutes normal, 1 minute hard” right from the beginning. Given that I’d done a fairly hard 25 minutes on a rowing erg yesterday, that was probably a mistake. The breaks were often a bit longer than normal, because the foot brace on Stephen’s erg kept slipping, as well as having a few iPod issues. Everything was ok, but at the end I only got one minute and twenty seconds into my last hard bit when I just had this weird “I don’t want to do this any more” feeling. I wasn’t especially exhausted, and I didn’t stop because I was tired. I just didn’t want to continue any more. It’s kind of odd for me to get 59:20 into a planned 60 minute workout and stop then. You’d think that close to the end you’d just keep going.

I’m getting some major calluses forming on my right hand (the “control” hand) at the base of my middle fingers, and a bit of an open sore on my left hand on the top of my thumb. I’m not sure where that sore is coming from.

[youtube RZJNpDA9QI8]Another technique work-out at Dan’s. The highlight of this video is that there is about a half a minute at the end of Dan showing me how it’s done.

[youtube o7pA1Ac0ZLs]On Saturday I went to Stephen’s to erg, and on Wednesday I went to Doug’s to erg. I’m trying to emphasize the things that Dan and I worked on last Thursday, but it appears that I did a better job of it on Saturday and on Wednesday. Both times I paddled for half an hour non-stop, then started doing 9 minutes normal, 1 minute fast, and about a 30 second rest while I got a drink of water, and then went really hard for the last two minutes. But on Wednesday, my stroke rate was higher, my heart rate was higher, and from the video I don’t think I was rotating as well. Also, I tend to do a stroke-stroke-pause instead of a stroke-pause-stroke-pause, so I don’t know if I am, but I think I’m not pulling as hard on one side as the other. It’s too bad the erg doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting the same power on both sides – on the boat you’d know because you’d be going in circles.