Category: Activities

My Stack Floweth Over

I spend most of the time that I’m waiting for things to happen (compiles, application start ups, etc) reading and answering questions on StackOverflow, the best site for programming related questions bar none. One of the things that makes StackOverflow so good is their “reputation” system (although I keep calling it “XP” just to see if anybody will start copying me). You get XP when other users vote up your questions or answers, and when you “level up” to certain levels you are trusted to do various book-keeping tasks on the site like editing other people’s posts or closing them. There are also various badges you can get (or “Achievements” ) when you accomplish various things like getting a certain amount of up-votes on an answer. It’s a great system, and I don’t just say that because I am in the top 15 for XP. But one of the things they do is limit the amount of XP you can get in a single day. And overnight, some of my older answers got a whole bunch of up-votes, so I started off the day with nearly my limit, and I’ve now hit my limit for the day. Which means that for the rest of the day, I’ll be answering questions out of the goodness of my heart (and a design to show-off) rather than for XP.

This also means that I might have to actually be productive at work today. Sigh.

Another evening on the KayakPro ergometer

My kayak training schedule lately has been generally

  • Tuesday evenings at the RIT gym either with or without Dan doing stretches, core strengthening, and weights
  • Thursday evenings at Dan’s doing stretches, core strengthening and the ergometer
  • Sunday afternoons at Dan’s, either doing the same as Thursday or (not since Thanksgiving weekend) paddling with others.

Dan told me that he was busy Thursday, so we decided to switch around and do the Thursday workout today and I can do the RIT gym without him on Thursday.

In some ways, what Dan and I have been doing is we tore down my old stroke and built up a new one with better technique. But that means that I’m using muscles I’ve never been using before, so I get tired long before I would have at the end of the season. The initial core exercises tire me a bit, which is good because it means I’ll have those muscles built up to help me balance in the boat, and to develop a better torso twist. But the real test is on the ergometer.

In the past, Dan has had me doing 10 good strokes, concentrating on good technique, then putting down the “paddle” and doing some stretches, then doing 10 more good strokes, etc. In the last couple of sessions, I’ve stretched out some and had some longer sessions of a few minutes at a time. Today it was a real stretch-out session – after a 2 minute warm up, I did two or three sessions of 5 minutes and one of 3 minutes. My left shoulder and arm were quite tired and sore, because I’m keeping my left arm higher than I used to – new muscles getting used for the first time. And I was trying to adjust my stroke on the machine to have less jarring so it would be more like my paddle, but that meant that I still had a bit of a tug on the ropes when the “paddle” was in the “out of the water” position.

I’m really curious to discover how sore my elbows are going to be on Thursday morning. For the last couple of weeks the pain in my elbows, especially on my left elbow, has been really bad. Almost to the point where I’m wondering if I need to stop some or all of the new exercise regime. I hope I can discover if it’s the ergometer or the gym that’s doing it.

Using the Speedstroke kayak ergometer

As part of my new kayak racing fitness training, I’ve been doing some sessions with Dan on his Kayak ergometer, a kayaking equivalent of a stationary bike or a rowing machine. It’s a great training tool, but it’s not perfect.

It uses a fiywheel like a rowing machine. The first couple of times I used it, I used a fairly gentle “catch”, which means that when you lift up the paddle shaft as it passes your knee, there was still resistance, which obviously wouldn’t happen in a real boat because the paddle would be out of the water and moving through the air. Last night I discovered that if I really hammer the catch, you actually get the flywheel up to speed early on, which means it stops resisting if you slow down a tiny bit after lifting. That felt a bit more realistic to me, but was hard on my elbows and they were sore at the end. One of the reasons I loved the paddle I bought, a Bacsa VIII-max, is that is is long and narrow which gentles out the catch a bit. I’ve got to figure out a way to gentling out the catch on the Speedstroke.

Dan refers to the Speedstroke as “the most important boat you’ll ever own”. Seeing as how it’s just about the only way to work on your fitness and technique for 1/3rd of the year in this part of the world, I can totally understand why he says that. Too bad it costs as much as a good racing boat.

We worked a lot of torso twist. It made me realize that one of the things really holding me back from getting good twist is this gigantic pad of unstretchable fat on my stomach. I really need to work on getting rid of that. Too bad diet food tastes so unappetizing. I keep hoping that I can paddle enough to burn off enough calories that I can live on sugar and fat.

Yeah, you don’t want to dare me that

I’ve written earlier about how I have flown so little this year that I’m seriously considering going “inactive” in the club? Well, on top of that, I’ve been Secretary for the club for most of the time I’ve been a member – I think it started soon after I created a web site for the club on my own. I suck at it. I’m not organized enough, and I don’t like doing it. I got free of it once, but the person who took it on quit after a year or two and dumped it back on me.

And the club communications are now totally dysfunctional. There is a “officers” mailing list for officers and board members to communicate, but the current president of the club, and a couple of others, totally refuse to use it. Instead, they send email to long lists of CCs, which means that you personally have no control over what email address you receive the message, or in what format. It also means that sometimes you find out that a conversation is going on because sometime in the middle of it somebody stops hitting “Reply All” and uses their own address list. One extremely annoying example of this happened when the club officers and BOD were discussing selling the Lance (which I knew about) but didn’t include me in most of a long thread about some of the details in spite of the fact that I was one of three members of the club who used the Lance, I was one of two officers who used the Lance, and the detail they were discussing had to do with on-line advertising. Anyway, the President last year said “I can see why people would want the email list, but I’ll continue to use my own list”, and subscribed. But sometime between then and now he’s unsubscribed again (which I didn’t know). Meanwhile, he’s stubbornly using his alias list (which includes people who haven’t been officers in 4 or 5 years and who don’t live in the US any more), and I’m stubbornly using the mailing list.

So last night (it’s now 3:30am and I haven’t been able to sleep all night because I’m so riled up about this) he sent me an email basically saying “communicate with me my way, or we’ll replace you as secretary”, and talking about how he didn’t want to be president but it was thrust upon him because nobody else would take it. I responded with an ecstatic “YES, PLEASE DO” and explained how I didn’t want to be secretary, have had it thrust upon me twice, and have been doing it for about 10 years total of my 15 years in the club.

I guess I’ll have to wait to see if I’ve called his bluff or whether I’m really going to be free of this horrible task. Maybe I’ll spend some time converting the club web site to Joomla so I can hand off more of that to others in the club.

Many are cold, few are frozen

At 10:00 o’clock this morning, I was sitting at my computer watching it snow. It was supposed to get up to 37°F today, but it was hovering around 30 and snowing pretty hard. I hunted down my cell phone and discovered that Dan had left a message on it – the canal by his house was frozen, so instead of meeting at his place at the usual 12:30, he was going to paddle at the Genesee Waterway Center (GWC) at 1pm, and he wanted to know if I was coming. Of course I’m coming. I quickly phoned him back.

When I showed up at GWC, the others weren’t there yet. It was bitter cold and the wind was blowing straight down the river. I added a t-shirt and windbreaker to my polartherm and wore my PFD, which I haven’t been wearing on the canal. The river is deep and wide, and if I went in there I couldn’t be out in seconds like I could in the canal. Unfortunately I haven’t worn the PFD over all that clothing in a while, and while it felt fine on land when I tried paddling it restricted my ability to breathe. It’s amazing how tired you feel when you can’t breathe.

Second to arrive was Jim Mallory, and then Dan. While Jim and I were getting in our kayaks, Steve showed up. So far I think Steve is the only other person as crazy as me about showing up no matter what the weather. While Dan and Steve were getting ready is when I discovered the problem with the PFD, and took steps to loosen it up. Once that was taken care of, it wasn’t so bad – both in terms of being able to paddle well, and also being comfortable with the temperature.

Having the four of us was great. Dan stayed with me and worked on my technique, while Steve couldn’t possibly outrun former Olympian Jim Mallory. Jim’s technique is every bit as good as Dan’s, if not better, and he’s a professor at NTID, so he can teach as well.

I had a very satisfying work out. The only problem is that once I finished, the sweat condensed and cooled down, my hands were no longer protected by my pogies, and it was *cold*. Colder than I’ve been since last winter. I got my kayak up on my roof rack as quickly as I could and headed home. But I’m sure glad I went.