Category: Rant

I’m worried

The first race of the season is in two days, and I have to admit I’m worried. On the surface, I probably shouldn’t be – I’ve put in a ton of training this season. According to Garmin Connect, I’ve done 335.3km in my Thunderbolt, 75.3km in the V12, and 16.7km in my favourite boat, the V10 Sport Ultra.

But one of the things that worries me is that I’ve done most of that training cruising along with a heart rate around 120 or so. Even in interval training, I’ve almost never exceeded 150 bpm. In races in the past, I’ve *averaged* over 150 bpm. How will I be able to keep my heart rate over 160bpm for 90+ minutes if I’ve never had it that high for even 8 minutes? Does that mean I should shoot for a lower heart rate this time? What heart rate should I shoot for?

Another thing that worries me is that my shoulder started to hurt a week or two ago, and it hasn’t been getting any better. And yes, it’s the same shoulder that’s had two surgeries, each of which cost me a year off paddling and then another year of trying to recover my form (basically no races between Sept 2010 and Sept 2013). I’ve been trying to take it a bit easier this week and stretch more and take something for the pain, and it’s a little better, but what if I completely blow it at this race? What if I blow it so bad I have to stop racing? What if I don’t blow it, but it never recovers completely? Will I have incentive to keep fit and paddle with my friends if I can’t race?

Another thing that worries me is that I never sleep well before a race, and due to scheduling problems we’re probably not even going to get to the place we’re sleeping that night until after my usual bed time. Knowing me, the slight shortening of my sleep time will be minuscule compared to how much sleep I’ll lose obsessing over my lack of sleep. One of the first books I read about competitive cross country skiing said that lack of sleep before a race is normal, and the trick is to make sure your muscles aren’t tired by holding very still when you can’t sleep, so you’ll show up at the start with a fried brain but rested muscles with is better than fried muscles and fried brain. I’m not sure if that is really what the author intended, or if making you hold still instead of tossing and turning is just a good strategy to make you fall asleep. But I’ve tried to practice it whenever I race.

I’m going to race my Thunderbolt this weekend. The Thunderbolt is old, it’s beat up to shit, and I just had to put a big strip of fiberglass under the seat because the seat was wearing through the outer skin. And it looks like this is the second time it’s been patched there. The foam “beams” that are supposed to keep the back from flexing too much are broken. Also one of the screws that holds in the seat wears a hole in my hip. I’m much rather use my V10 Sport for this race, but it has some shallow water so an overstern rudder is a bit of a plus, and it has a portage – last year I slipped on the muddy hillside and dropped my boat. If I’d been carrying my V10 Sport instead of the Thunderbolt, I probably would have put a hole in it. That Thunderbolt is a tank. I’d love to buy a new one (and Roger Gocking has a new one for sale that he’s barely paddled) but since I basically stop paddling it after this race every year, I can’t really justify it to myself. Actually I’m kind of hoping that I’ll get good enough at paddling the V12 that I can use it next year, because it’s got an overstern rudder and it’s Performance layup so it’s more robust than the V10 Sport’s Ultra layup.

I guess my strategy this race will be to go out at a more moderate pace than usual, monitor both my heart rate and the condition of my shoulder, and if I feel up to it, increase the pace after a while. And hope that nothing horrible happens.

Damn DMARC

So a couple of weeks or months ago, I noticed something odd with the mailing lists I run. People on Yahoo and AOL claimed that they were missing messages, and Gmail was stuffing mailing list messages from people on Yahoo or AOL into the Spam folder, even though I’d received literally hundreds of messages from those people on those mailing lists in the past.

After investigating, it turns out that both Yahoo and AOL had turned on an anti-spam feature called “DMARC”. Basically what it meant if a message came with a From line saying it was from either of those, but not coming from an approved mail sender, they were asking the rest of the net to treat it as spam. Gmail honored the DMARC request by putting it in the Spam folder, but Yahoo and AOL and some other ISPs were just bouncing the messages or throwing them away.

This DMARC was obviously a huge problem for mailing lists, because what they do is they accept an email from a person, and then send out the message to all the members of the mailing list, and most of them use the person’s email address in the From line of the mailing list message. This breaks under DMARC, because if my mailing list server recieved an email from joe.blow@yahoo and sends out a message to the mailing list members with a From: joe.blow@yahoo, then all those mail servers that implement DMARC are going to see that I’m not designated by yahoo as a valid sender of yahoo email, and they’re going to drop it.

The developers of the Mailman mailing list software were quick to offer some solutions. First they issued 2.1.16, which had a quick and dirty work-around, and then they rolled out 2.1.18, which had what I think is a much better solution. But my problem is that my mailing list server is pure Debian Stable, and I want to only install packages, not get into the hassle of installing things from source and then having to monitor if things are updated. So I waited for 2.1.18 to get backported to Debian Stable (which uses 2.1.15). I put in request tickets to get it backported. They never did. Instead, they made it a package in Debian Testing, which is less stable.

So I did some googling and discovered something called “apt pinning” that would allow me to install some Debian Testing packages on my Debian Stable system. I tried it, and it wanted to drag in a new version of python, which wanted to drag in a new version of libc, and so on. That’s just stupid – the minimum required python for 2.1.18 is exactly the same as the minimum required python for 2.1.15. Whoever set up the .deb was a little over zealous in the requirements section.

I did not particularly want to drag in unstable versions of the very core libraries of a Linux system for no reason, so my next possibility was to install it from source. That was more complicated than it should have been, but relatively painless. First I tried following the instructions that Bill Bradford pointed me at. Unfortunately, immediately it told me that “Distutils is not available or is incomplete for /usr/bin/python” and “be sure to install the -devel package”. Well, unfortunately there isn’t a “python-devel” package. I looked at the script that configure was using to determine what it was looking for, and the problem was a missing Python.h in /usr/include/python2.7/. A bit of searching, and I discovered that this was installed by a package called “python2.7-dev” – so close, but so far from the “python-devel” I had been searching for. After that, I discovered I had to install the “make” program (like I said, this was a pure server system and I hadn’t been building software on it before) and I did my “make install”. Mail seemed to flow, but I couldn’t access the web interface. Bill suggested running the “check_perms -f”, which found and fixed 26 permissions problems, but still things weren’t working. I compared the perms on a few directories between this installation and my last backup, and discovered that neither the installation program nor check_perms had noticed that the cgi-scripts in the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman directory were setgid “root” instead of setgid “list”. I fixed that, and everything started to work.

Now I wanted to test whether the new “dmarc_moderation_action” setting that 2.1.18 provided would actually fix the problem. So I changed the setting on one of my mailing lists, and emailed a guy on yahoo who was on the mailing list to see if he could test it for me. Unfortunately he wasn’t around, so the next morning I bit the bullet and created a yahoo mail account and added it to that list. I tried a post by this user to the list, and it did the right thing (changed the From address to the list address, but used the Yahoo’s person name part in the person name part), and testing that gmail didn’t stuff it in the Spam folder. I made sure it doesn’t do that with non-DMARC addresses like gmail. And then I made that setting change to all my lists.

Finger crossed, and hope that there aren’t too many more updates I have to apply before a 2.1.18 or later Mailman shows up in Debian Stable.

My other kayak

Last year I found this Think Legend surf ski on Craigslist. Poor guy had bought it because he wanted a fast kayak and didn’t realize there is a skill progression required. I’m almost a good enough paddler to manage it. Last year I paddled it a lot, trying to master it. But this year I’ve hardly touched it. You see, last year my other surf ski was a ancient V10 Sport in club layup, so the fact that the Legend was their cheap layup and was heavy as hell didn’t bother me. After all, it was narrower and longer than the V10 Sport so I knew if I ever mastered it I’d be faster in it. And by the end of the year I could handle it in a straight line and on flat water. I used it in a couple of races on the canal and did ok with it.

But this year I’ve had a change of plans. I got a V10 Sport in ultra layout, and it’s so light it makes the weight of the Legend seem like paddling a brick. A tippy unstable brick. Plus I’ve become really enamored of paddling on the lake, with all the waves and boat wakes and other stuff I used to hate. Plus I signed up for the Lighthouse to Lighthouse (L2L) race, my first ocean race, and I’m committed to paddling the Blackburn Challenge next year. So I’ve been all about the V10 Sport this year and neglecting the Legend.

But I did do a bit of a time trial one against the other on the canal and it appears that the Legend might be a tiny bit faster on the flat. And when I’ve hit a bit of a wake, it seems like the Legend has the potential to be really fast in the surf. If only I could keep it upright. If and when that day happens, I’m seriously thinking of getting a light high performance boat, either another Think Legend (if I can find one) or a V12 or whatever turns up on the used market.

I paddle the Legend one night a week – Mike and I call it “tippy boat night”. I guess after l2L I should up that to two or three times a week. Unfortunately last time I dropped it on the dock, putting a rather deep looking crack in it. It’s probably repairable, but I fear it will be a bad idea it paddle it until it’s fixed. Plus the patch will make my heavy boat even heavier. So I guess no tippy boat night until it’s fixed.

Lots and lots and lots of paddling

Remember how when I first started paddling I used to blog about every workout? These days, I don’t bother. I paddle 5 times a week, and there would just be no way to keep up with that. Also, I’m starting to pile on the miles (kilometers) in preparation for the Lighthouse To Lighthouse race in a couple of weeks. The race is 14 miles (22.5 km) and it’s on Long Island Sound, which isn’t the open ocean but it’s likely to be quite different that what I’m used to. So every weekend and some Tuesdays you’ll find me and Mike F out grinding out long paddles on Lake Ontario.

I looked at my stats, and 2010, the year before my surgery, I did 18 paddles of longer than 15 km. So far this year, I’ve done 27. All but one of my paddles over 20 km have been in the last month or so. Case in point, today we did 25 km.

Several of our paddles recently have been battling boat wakes from every direction at once, which is probably good practice but it’s no fun at all. Today we got a really early start (7:30) to try and avoid the boat wakes. We probably needn’t have bothered – the lake “turned over” early this week and the skies were overcast and grey. There was a wicked wind from the south, which is no help at all, and a low amplitude long period swell coming from the north west, which we hoped would provide a bit of help on the way back.

We set off towards the west, keeping tight into shore to avoid the south wind. It was a bit of a balancing act, trying to keep out of the slow shallow water but remain mostly in the wind shadow at shore. Sometimes it didn’t work. One advantage of staying in close was we got to see more scenery – people out walking their dogs on the beach, people taking their morning coffee on their decks, and in one place, 11 deer, including babies with their white spots, coming down to the shore to drink. We paddled a bit slower than usual, and Mike and I paddled beside each other instead of him riding my wake as is often the case. My heart rate was ticking over in the low 110s mostly, which is lower than I’d like, but to go harder would mean losing Mike’s company.

Right smack dab in the middle of the trip in each direction we had to swing away from the shelter of shore to clear the end of the break wall at the river. This is a dicey spot – you’ve got the waves and wind from the south, the swell from the north west, and all sorts of reflections of both of those. However this time, because we left early and because the conditions weren’t optimal for pleasure boats, we didn’t have the usual confusing maelstrom of boat wakes on top of it. It wasn’t too difficult, but even so my heart rate went over 130.

As usual on these paddles, I normally just keep heading out until Mike suggests we turn back. Usually he does it just after I’ve decided “ok, at the next kilometer/point/whatever, I’m going to suggest we turn back”, but it’s good for my ego to make it look like it was his idea. This time it was just seconds after my GPS beeped at the 12 km point – I was going to tough it out to 12.5 or 13, but that’s good too.

As we turned, we did our homage to Oscar Chalupski and shortened our paddles. I wanted to get a bit higher heart rate, so I increased my speed and started towing Mike in my stern wake. That worked out pretty well – with a little assistance from the north west swell at my back, I was nearly 1.5 km/hr faster than on the way out. And all was well until once again we had to leave the wind shadow of the shore to swing around the river break wall. The wind blown off shore waves were bigger, and now it seems like every sailboat at the Rochester Yacht Club is heading out to the lake. Mike lost his place on my wake and started falling behind. Now I’m faced with trying to navigate this mess, but also trying not get so far ahead that I can’t check in Mike and possibly circle back if he needs help. But I don’t want to slow down, so I quickly cross the river and head directly into the wind, then circle back to Mike as he gets about half way between the end of the break wall and shore.

After we get back in the wind shadow, it’s clear that Mike is spent. He can’t even stay on my wake anymore. I don’t want to slow down, so what I start doing is paddling ahead until my GPS beeps for another kilometer mark, then circling back around Mike. That’s literally circling – I don’t have to paddle in the reverse direction, just turn 360 degrees. And even then it usually takes me to about 400 meters or more before I catch and pass Mike. It probably would have been better for Mike, who was clearly suffering, if I’d slowed down and given him a wake he could hold, but out on the water I was only thinking of my training needs and I wanted to know I could still increase my speed at will.

The circling increased my total distance – we’d turned back at almost exactly 12 km, but I finished at 24.9 km. and afterwards I still had enough energy to carry Mike’s boat back to his car for him.

Well, that could have gone worse

On Saturday I did a long easy distance workout, so for Sunday I thought I’d do something a bit higher intensity. I also didn’t have much time, so I went to Pittsford Crew boathouse which is nearer my house than any other canal put-in. (I didn’t want to do the creek because it’s too shallow and the bay involves 2km or more of shallow at the beginning and end.) I got there, paddled downstream for a few km, and discovered that there was a full-on rowing regatta going on. I should have suspected as much when I noticed that most of the Pittsford Crew floating dock was missing – I guess they floated it down to the regatta site. When the Fairport Crew has a regatta, or even a training event, sometimes they’ve got no compunction about blocking off the entire canal or telling you to stop while they spend interminable time getting a heat started, but Pittsford were much better – they marked off their two lanes, and then there was a safe lane along one side. They appeared to be racing upstream and using the safe lane for returning boats and crews to the start.

On the way downstream, I had no problem staying in the safe lane. If there hadn’t been a regatta going on I would have been further out in the middle taking advantage of the stream flow and the fewer debris, but staying safe from rowers in a good thing. So score one for the organization. It appeared they were using one of the flood gates as a start area, and there were a lot of boats milling around, but I was able to thread the needle around them with no problems. I went several km further past their start/finish before turning back.

On the way back, it was a completely different matter. I had been keeping my heart rate in the high 4s (near my max) for quite a long time and I was feeling it. And when I got to the floodgate I had to thread through some more traffic, but when I got into the “safe” lane I found three 8-rower + cox boats just sort of hanging around there, but parked with their oars completely spanning the lane. The first one, I yelled “make some room”, and in my highly stressed state it appeared that they were slow to react and giving me attitude, so I yelled something regrettable about how they don’t own the canal and they need to share, only in more forceful language. The second boat was a repeat of the first – they moved, but not fast enough for me and I said more harsh words. The third one hadn’t even started to move at all by the time I got too close so I yelled “stay where you are” and had to risk exposing my back in the racing lanes, which scares the hell out of me. (As a Canadian, I remember all too well what happened to Silken Laumann when she was hit by another boat in the run-up to the 1992 Olympics: “I looked at the leg for a few seconds and knew it was serious when my muscle was hanging at my ankle and I could see the bone”.)

Further up the canal, I encountered more boats but the safe lane was wider and I had no problems getting past them and I could nod amiably or even exchange a non-swear word or two. I was starting to feel bad about the language I’d used against those first three boats. Yeah, they shouldn’t have blocked the canal to other traffic, but they probably weren’t expecting a kayaker to be making the sort of speed I was making – we racing kayakers aren’t that numerous, and I wasn’t exactly being an ambassador.

After I got home, it kept eating at me. So after a few hours I composed an email to the organizer of the event:

I don’t know if this is the right address for this,but I hope you can get it to the right people.

Today I was doing an intensive kayak training session on the canal and I ended up going through your regatta. For the most part it went smoothly and I appreciate the marked off safe lane or return lane you had provided. However on my return leg, near the floodgate, there were three 8s mostly stationary in the water completely blocking the safe lane. I’m old enough to remember the pictures of Silken Laumann when she had her leg muscle nearly severed in a collision with another scull and so I’m quite scared of the danger of going into your racing lanes.

I’m afraid in my haste and desire to keep my heart rate within the proper zone for that part of my work out, I yelled some rather harsh things to those three boats to get them to move.

I want to apologize to all 27 of the young men and women involved. I’m sure as fellow athletes you’re aware that we’re not always at our best in the heat of high intensity, but I shouldn’t have said the things I did. Sorry.

This morning I got quite a nice response.

Hi Paul –

Thanks for your note, which did find its way to me. I’m the President of Pittsford Crew.

We didn’t hear anything.

As someone who sculls a lot in a single myself, I understand your frustration. Some of the crews out there were pretty inexperienced, as the winter weather prevented many from getting in their full season. Regardless of their inexperience, the coxswains need to be aware of other boats on the water. I’ll get something put into the race notes for next year that will emphasize this.

I don’t know if there is a user group/ mailing list for the competitive kayakers. If there was, and you gave me the contact info, we could email people a week ahead of time so they know this event is coming.

Have a great summer.

Best regards,

John

So there’s that at least.