Category: Kayaking

Can’t win, shouldn’t even try.

Early on in my attempts to become a kayak racer, I encountered some elbow pain and got very discouraged. But after a while it settled down to a level that I could manage by taking way more Alieve (Naproxen Sodium) than any doctor would recommend. (Yeah, my kidneys will probably explode some year, but unlike chronic joint pain, doctors know how to treat that.)

I’ve been paddling a hell of a lot, and so far I’ve had no increase in elbow pain over last year – if anything I’m taking less Alieve than before.

But I’ve been paddling the same paddle, a Basca VIII-max, since I first learned how to paddle a wing paddle. It’s a good paddle, but very large. I’ve lately been wondering if there might be some advantages to a smaller blade. One thing about the VIII-max is that it’s so long it doesn’t get “buried” entirely in the water at the catch, but gets progressively more blade in the water as the stroke progresses. I consider that’s probably a good thing for my joints, but experienced paddlers like Dan and Jim keep nagging me about it. So I borrowed a Basca IV clone (I think it’s a Danny Broadhurst, but it doesn’t have any identifying marks on it) from Dan, and I paddled it yesterday for about 15 km. Jim kept telling me my catch looked very strong.

Today my elbows are sorer than they’ve ever been, and my shoulders are in agony. I’ve never had shoulder problems before. This is not a good thing – so far in my life, every time I’ve developed a new joint pain it has not gone away or even abated, ever. Starting with knee pain 35 fucking years ago. Every pain only gets worse. So I view a new joint pain with some alarm.

Needless to say, I won’t be paddling the IV again. I just hope that my shoulders forgive me when I go back to my nice gentle catch with the VIII-max. Mean time, I’m taking an unplanned day off of paddling, and gobbling the Alieve and Tylenol.

The first cut is the deepest

That’s not how I expected or hoped for my first kayak race of the season to go.

Dan and Jim told me about this little race in Canandaigua this weekend. It wasn’t on the NYMCRA calendar and it was very loosely organized. The web site barely mentioned the flat water part of the race, and I was getting contradictory information on where it was supposed to start. But heck, it was only 10k and I’d been itching to see how all the work I’d done this spring was preparing me.

On race day, Dan and Paul D decided not to race for various reasons. Dan still went with me, but he was going to do a downriver paddle on the part of the river below the slalom course where the flat water course ended. So basically that left Jim, me, and Julia as the class of the race. There were a couple of C2s and a C1 that looked like they knew what they were doing, but I knew we were going to be faster than canoes. So my goal was to stay with Jim as long as I could, and not blow up and keep ahead of Julia.

The start was pretty dicey – about 20 metres after the start there was a two tunnel bridge, and a couple of idiots in a raft were blocking one of the two tunnels, so we had to sprint for it. Julia, being much lighter than me, actually got there ahead of me, but afterwards I buried myself to try to pass her and catch Jim. Also there was a submerged log very early on that my rudder hit for fortunately it didn’t twist it like logs sometimes do.

Things went according to plan. For the bit where I’d worked hard to catch Jim and for about a kilometer afterwards, my heart rate was up around 171, which is the highest I’ve ever seen it. But after I caught his wake and he slowed down a bit, I recovered to the mid 150s with occasional trips up to the mid 160s when obstacles in the river made me lose his wake and I’d have to fight my way back to it. Julia and everybody else were out of sight behind us and I was able to concentrate on keeping on Jim’s wake and going hard but not too hard, averaging just a bit faster than 5 minutes per kilometer. And that took us to about the 7 kilometer mark.

At about the 7 km mark the water got rougher. Not actually white water, but lots of standing waves and twists and turns and narrow parts of the river. I lost Jim’s wake because I was spending too much time bracing instead of paddling, while his boat that was made for those types of conditions just powered on through.

At about the 7.5 or 8 km mark, there was a narrow bit where my rudder hit a submerged log and I dumped. Fortunately there was a flat part of the bank there and I was able to very quickly get out, get the water out of the boat, and get paddling again. But the water was really cold and I was shivering by the time I got in.

And not 10 metres later I got a sweeper branch in the gut, and I dumped again. This time I was using a gigantic log, about 3 times the length of my boat, to try to get out when it suddenly came lose and started heading downstream. So I had to let it go by and then get onto shore. The shore wasn’t quite as conducive to getting back in, and I’d spent a bit longer in the water, so I was pretty cold. And Julia came by as I was finally sorted out and getting back in again.

This time I resolved not to rush it, but I started paddling and realized my rudder was way off straight. It wasn’t easy to tell, because my feet had gone completely numb and I wasn’t sure if I was even pushing the tiller bar. I had to crash into shore again, get out with my feet in the cold water, and straighten the rudder. As I was doing so, the first of the C2s, a couple of women that Jim and I had met paddling on Red Creek a week or so ago, came by.

I set off again, and I’m not sure how much further I got. This time another submerged log got me, but after the log was very deep water. This time the current was so strong it ripped off my aqua shoes and took my camelback. I had to swim hard to make the shore, and when I got there the bank was so steep and so overgrown I couldn’t get my boat out to get the water out. I ever tried to break out the rear bulkhead to make it easier to dump the water, but to no avail. After a while, while the other C2 and the C1 came by, I realized I was going to have to go back into the water to dump out the boat. I wasn’t relishing that. I actually sat down on the bank for a while to warm up. When I stopped shivering, I went in and dumped most of the water out of the boat. During that time a guy came by in a squirt boat, so I realized that not only had I lost, but there was no way I was going to even finish in the top 3 kayaks. But then I had the problem of how to get back into the boat. I pushed and pulled the boat to get it into a position where I could stand up to my waist in water, and then sort of put one leg in, brace with the paddle and get the other leg in. It worked, after a fashion, but two guys in a fat, wide fishing kayak who were yelling at each other came by while I was doing so. At least I was able to pass them.

The finish didn’t come fast enough to me, but when the water wasn’t too wavy I managed to put on a bit of speed. At the finish, Dan and Jim and Julia took charge of my boat and paddle, and one of the volunteers gave me a t-shirt so I had something dry to change into. As I mentioned I didn’t have any foot protection at this point, so I kind of limped back to my car, and Jim and Julia brought me a hot dog and a bottle of water while I warmed up.

Jim and Dan went off on another down-river paddle, and I was supposed to pick them up in half an hour or so. So I was sitting there, taking pictures of all my scratches for my Facebook page when I suddenly realized that while all I could see where superficial scratches, there was an actual “puddle” (or a conglomeration of drops, if you want to be less melodramatic, and I don’t) of blood sitting there on the sill of the car door where I’d had my feet. I look at my left foot, no problems, look at my right and just about pass out from the sight of this huge flap of flesh there. I hobbled over to the first aid ambulance, and they say “you need stitches and a tetanus shot”. Before I could say “but my car is unlocked, my wallet is in it, and somebody has to pick up Dan and Jim”, they had me in the gurney and on my way to the hospital. So now I’m trying to figure out how to contact Julia to lock up my car, secure my kayak, and go pick up Jim and Dan, and also let Vicki know what’s happening. So I’m texting Vicki like mad, but I don’t have Julia’s cell phone number. I texted Stephen, since he works with her and probably knows her number, but he’s out of town and he never got back to me. I asked Vicki to post something on Julia’s husband’s facebook wall, because that’s the only way I know to get in touch with them.

As I was being admitted into the hospital, Dan phones me up to ask where the hell I was. I explained the situation, and he and Jim said they’d take care of things for me. And sure enough, while I was getting stitched up Jim and Julia come into my room and Julia starts taking pictures. Jim suggested that Julia send one of the more gruesome pictures to Vicki. But not only had they come to visit me, they’d also brought my car and my kayak and picked up all my stuff.

Obviously I’m home now. I’ve got 5 stitches in my foot, and I’m cautioned not to wear shoes very much for the next week or so. I’m sore and tired, and the numbness is starting to wear off on the cut. And I’ve got to figure out how to get Julia to send me copies of those pictures. But I did have 7/10ths of a great first race.

I’m a machine.

Today Scott Stenberg organized a long training paddle – 18.5 miles downriver on the Seneca River. He’d invited a lot of local paddlers, but when I showed up this morning it was just Scott, his paddling partner Tom, and I. Tom and Scott were there with a kevlar Jensen C-2 canoe, and I was there in the Thunderbolt that Scott had given me. Two Rochester guys showed up with a black carbon fibre C-2 pro-boat, but they took one look at the put-in, declared it too muddy, and said that they were going to join their friends at a fishing access point about a mile downstream and we could pick them up as we passed. Except when we got there, there was no sign of them – so we just continued on. Scott suggested that they probably decided to go somewhere else that they like to paddle. There was some suggestion that pro-boaters just aren’t the same as stock boaters, but I don’t recall who said it. Or maybe the divide is between kevlar canoes and carbon fibre canoes, I don’t recall. I’ve made disparaging remarks in this blog about the unfriendliness of much of the Forge Racing team, and they’re pro-boaters in carbon fibre canoes, so draw your own conclusions.

Right from the beginning, my plan was to paddle slowly and try to ride wake, but Scott and Tom were pretty determined to ride my wake, and so I ended up leading. The first couple of miles were through a very wide-open part of the Montezuma Refuge, and the wind was very strong from the left. I tried to get close to the left bank to stay out of the wind, but it didn’t really work. There was a lot of wildlife around, especially great blue herons and a pair of bufflehead ducks.

After the wide-open part, we got into some wooded flood plain, but the wind was now straight in our faces instead of from the side. Scott kept saying that “after the turn” there would be a good tail wind. Still lots of wildlife around, including a soaring bird that I think was a turkey vulture, but I didn’t get a great look at it. I was paddling beside Scott and Tom, and managed to have some conversation with Scott. Tom is the stern paddler, so his contribution to the conversation mostly was calling “HUT” every 5 paddle strokes or so.

As we paddled along, I noticed my heart rate was getting lower and lower. I wasn’t really watching my speed because of the strong headwind, and because I was trying to take it easy. At about the 8.5 mile mark the wind shifted to behind us, and Scott suggested to me that since my boat was faster I should go on without them. I was a bit worried about this, because this is by far the longest paddle I’ve taken in my life, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone. But I gave it a bit more speed to bring my heart rate up into the middle of zone 1, and after a short time I couldn’t even hear Tom’s “HUT” calls. Scott had told me that there were 5 more bridges, and they were “fairly” evenly spaced. Not that I needed the landmarks, since I had my GPS, but it was good to have another marker.

With nobody around to distract me, I was spending all my time worrying. Was I going to finish, what would I do if I couldn’t, was I going to dump, what would I do if I did, should I stop to pull my shirt down below the back strap so it would stop tearing up my back, was my calf muscle going to cramp up, etc. Not good. So I kept reminding myself that I was a machine, that I was going to paddle the same stroke now that I was paddling 1 hour ago, 2 hours ago, 3 hours ago, and I wasn’t going to feel pain or fatigue. But I kept counting down the miles. I took a few sips from my water bag (with energy drink) every time my calves started twitching, and that seemed to help.

At about the half way point, a kevlar C-2 came roaring out from the bank towards me. I thought they’d come from a camp that was there, but I found out afterwards they’d actually come from where were were intending to finish. They asked me how many boats were coming, and I told them it was just me and Scott and Tom. They could see Scott and Tom behind me, and they went back to meet up with them, and I guess they paddled all the way back with them.

The first three of the five bridges went by in about 3.5 miles. Then there was a four mile gap to the fourth. Scott and I have a different standard for “fairly evenly spaced”, I guess.

At about the 17 mile point, I was still a machine, but I seemed to have a bit of light headedness. I stopped and took a lot of energy drink, and that seemed to help a bit. But I was so glad to see that last bridge. I got out, and was actually a bit surprised to find that I had the strength to pick up my boat and carry it up to the parking area. Scott’s dad (or father in law, I kind of forget what he said) was waiting with hot soup and crackers. That was the best tasting soup ever. And Tom’s car was there with a set of kayak cradles as well as lots of straps, so we were able to load up both boats and truck on back to the put-in.

I’m am sooooo tired. But I’m so glad I went. That was quite a challenge. But if I want to do the 90 Miler some day, this is the sort of training miles I need to put in.

Year to date total: 184 miles
Last 30 days: 135 miles

Up the creek, alone

By the way, if you’re reading this through a feed (including LiveJournal and Facebook), or if you have Javascript turned off, you’re missing a really cool Garmin Connect “badge” showing the map and stats for the paddle.

Doug had said he was going to paddle the bay at 5:15. I decided at the last minute to go see if I could meet up with him, but he wasn’t there. Dave said that Ken and Paul D were up the creek, so I set off upstream to see if I could find them. I encountered the Forge Racing people (who were actually a lot more friendly than normal, about 3 out of 8 of them actually said hello (counting Jason, who always says hello, but then again he’s normally a kayaker but he trains with Forge because they’re intense and dedicated)). And there were lots of people in the dog park, including a woman whose dog decided not to bother chasing a ball that was too far out in the stream so I rescued it for her. And there were a few recreational kayakers and canoers out, as well as a bunch of geese, one very pissed off swan, and lots of kingfishers and red wing black birds.

I didn’t go very hard, because paddling hard in that shallow water really hurts my elbows. But I feel like it was a good workout and I had fun.