Category: Kayaking

Let’s get realistic here for a moment.

The fact of the matter is that my shoulder is not getting better. My pain level is actually worse than it was before my first surgery, and has not been getting any better for two years. Basically every time I do my physiotherapy exercises, which I’m supposed to do every other day, I’m in pain for 3 or 4 days afterwards so they don’t get done as often as they should.

So barring some miracle happening in the next couple of months, I’m facing either not kayaking, or kayaking in pain. Judging by the way it’s gone in the past when I’ve tried to continue a sport with pain, if I’m really lucky I’ll get maybe one year to recover my fitness, and another year to race, and then the pain will be too great to continue – if I’m unlucky I’ll wimp out of the pain in March, sell all my boats and go back to being a limpet. So I guess the realistic thing to do is to prepare myself to train and race in pain, and hope for a miracle. And the best training for training in pain is to start doing my physiotherapy exercises in spite of the pain that they cause me. Who knows, maybe they’ll actually start doing me some good?

Went for a paddle

This morning I went for a little paddle at Bay Creek in my Thunderbolt. Last week I went for a paddle at Dan’s in my surf ski, but it was too early – I had to stop paddling because my shoulder was sore. This time, I had to stop paddling because I’m a fat out of shape lump. I made about a mile, in about 15 minutes (so it took me nearly twice as long as it would have taken me when I was in shape). I didn’t actually feel any soreness except one little catch when I picked up my boat. And I’m still feeling ok now, 12 hours later. Fingers crossed that it stays that way. If I don’t have any contra-indications, I would like to try another paddle next weekend. (Yeah, I’d like to go earlier, but I’ve got to do this slowly and carefully.)

What goes up must come down

A few weeks ago I was feeling great. I was erging longer and longer distances every night, feeling good and not feeling any pain. I was up to doing 3 sets of 2000 metres, at pretty good speed and not much pause between then, and I had every expectation that I was going to increase the number of sets and distances continually. But then I started doing some extra stuff with Dan, trying to build up my core and other muscles and other things I’d need for the up coming season. But instead, I ended up overdoing it (due to the strange slowness of the way my body responds to pain, I never feel it when I’m overdoing it, only afterwards).

The next day, my shoulder was a little bit sore when I woke up, but I attempted to go paddling with the guys, but ended up falling in at the dock (due to using a different boat) and not going, but by evening my shoulder was killing me. And it kept feeling bad. I tried icing it, I tried stretching, and I tried taking more Aleve than usual. Nothing has really helped.

Yesterday I had a massage from my favourite massage therapist, and then a few hours later I tried a tiny bit of erging. By tiny bit, I mean less than a minute. I felt a tiny twinge, so I stopped. And a few hours later, it was back to feeling really bad.

My enthusiasm and optimism for next season has pretty much evaporated now.

Training on the erg

Because the weather is turning bad, I’ve been turning to the erg to do most of my training on. I’ve been doing a lot of kayaking, trying to build up the distance I could go on it. When I first started using the erg, I was disappointed that I could only seem to go a very short distance on it before my muscles got tired, like 500 metres a few days after I’d managed 4 miles (6.5km) in a kayak. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that in the boat, the wing paddle “kicks out” on its own, assisting you in getting your rear arm up in the air ready for the next stroke, whereas with the erg you have to lift it up yourself. Also in the erg there is some resistance at the rear part of the stroke where in the boat your paddle is fully out of the water and just “following through” with no resistance. (Hey, here’s an idea – why not use an electromagnet instead of a fan for resistance, then you could trigger it to remove the resistance when your paddle stroke hits the part where you’d normally have no resistance?)

Anyway, Dan said not to be discouraged, and if I could only do 500 metres to do 500 metres. So that’s what I did – I did 500 metres the first day, the next day I did 500 metres, rested until my heart rate was down under 100 bpm and did another 200 metres, and so on until I was doing 5 reps of 500 metres. Then I stepped up to 600m, doing 3x600m the first day, 3×600 plus a bit the next, 4×600 the next, and so on.

Two nights ago I did 5x700m. Last night I did my 5x700m but when I hit the end of the last 700, I just hit reset on the computer and did another 700m without stopping. It felt good to do that.

It’s a definite trend that I don’t feel as sore and tired at the end of the third and subsequent reps as I do at the first two. I’m starting to experiment to see if I can do some stretches and the like so the first two don’t feel so bad. Another thing I might try is doing a couple of short reps to warm up, then doing longer ones.

One interesting thing about this is that I’m having more trouble with the shoulder that didn’t get operated on than the one that did. On Friday I’d had a really good work-out, thought that maybe next day I could really step it up (to 1000m at a time or something like that) but I woke up the next morning feeling like I’d torn my rotator cuff. I had to take two days off erging, icing and gulping down Aleve and Tylenol (and missing out on two days where it would have been nice to get out on the boat) but by Sunday night I was fine again. Again this morning, I’m a little sore in that shoulder – not as bad as last Saturday, but still enough to worry.

My goal is to be ready in spring to race again. That means this winter I want to be able to do some very long (over 16km) LSD (long slow distance) erg sessions, and also keep my speed up through interval work and fartlek, again on the erg. I’m starting to feel like this might be possible. I’m even working on improving my technique – I never had a forward lean, mostly because my big fat gut gets in the way, but I’m working on that. I’m also trying to stop splaying out my legs and keep them down the center of the boat, but I’m having some anatomical problems with that.

Notice anything missing?

Last night somebody stole my roof rack. The Yakima rack was nearly 12 years old (except the new q-towers, which are only a few months old) but it might be worth something to somebody. The really annoying thing is the v-rack. The only people who use v-racks are kayak racers, and it’s unlikely anybody will use this – more likely they’ll sell it scrap for less than what it cost me for the ropes to tie it down.

I’ve phoned a few aluminium recyclers, but nobody has seen it yet.