Category: Revelation

Tonight was the first BayCreek time trial. Last year, I went to a bunch of them, and was turning in times around 24.5-26 minutes all year until the first time I got to borrow Frank’s Necky Looksha II, on the very last one of the season, when I set my personal best of 22.87 (they time in minutes and hundredths). The Looksha now belongs to me, and I’ve been paddling the hell out if it all last fall and this spring, so I expected to do a bit better. My goal for the year was to beat 20 minutes, since last year I watched Paul D try like hell to break 20 minutes and come up short time after time. I figure over short distances, I can probably compare myself to him, although he’s got a lot more endurance than me and will pull away after a couple of miles.

I started out about a minute behind a guy in a C-1 who last year I’d started behind and nearly kept up with him for the first half mile into the bay, only to watch him disappear into the distance on the way back. This time I was pretty sure I was catching up to him, and still catching him on the way back. I was trying hard to keep my speed over 6 mph, because obviously a 6m mph average time equals 20 minutes for 2 miles, and the bay is deeper and therefore a bit faster than the creek. It was a struggle on the way out, because although the bay was pretty still, there was a tiny bit of a breeze in my face and it was slowing me down. After the turn, a boat wake hit from the side and it was throwing me off a bit, but my speed was still pretty good.

I hit the split time at 9.40! Hey, I thought, as long as I don’t slow down too much, I might get pretty close to 20 minutes. I wanted to believe I could beat it, but I didn’t want to count on it. Soon after the split time, there was a swan in the middle of the creek. I yelled at it, and swerved a little bit left. Unfortunately, he swerved in the same direction, and I hit him. It slowed me down, and he tried to attack me, but I poured on the speed and got out of there before he could reach me.

I got to the last buoy turn and I was almost on the C-1. He had an interesting way of making the turn – he put his foot in the water and dragged it while he did a sweep on the other side. It gave him a small turning radius, but it slowed him down terribly. Now I was well and truly on his wash. I rode it for a while, and tried to make my move and pass him, but as soon as I got out of his wash it was much harder to paddle. So I tucked back in and tried not to hit his stern too often. I tried again, same result. Finally, with about 300 metres to go, I decided it was time to give it everything I could and pass him. It was a real maximum effort, but I was going just a hair under 7 mph as I crossed the line.

The final time? 19.08!!! OMGWTFBBQ!! That’s a 3.79 minute (3 minutes and 47 seconds) improvement over my previous best. Not only did I beat Paul D, but I was within a few seconds of Bill on his surf ski!

Now Dan says I have to set my sights on breaking 18 minutes. Yeah, right. I believe that as much as I believed him when he said I was going to break 19 minutes tonight. Oh wait.

Today I went out to do a long slow paddle following Dan’s advice, and I did it. I went 10 miles in 1:52:56, and my average pulse was 126 bpm. Compare to last week when I did a “race pace” 8 miles in 1:22:20 with an average pulse of 139. I was actually watching my heart rate monitor and every time it showed more than 130 bpm, I slowed down the stroke rate and concentrated on getting more glide. There were a couple of times where the heart rate monitor started giving weird numbers – suddenly going up to over 200 bpm and staying there. So the average was probably actually a bit lower.

There was a fairly strong breeze in my face on the way up, and I was averaging about 4.4 mph. I thought I was doing a great job of keeping my speed down. I decided to turn around at the 4.5 mile point because my elbows were starting to hurt a bit and because I really really had to pee. But when I turned around my speed immediately went up to around 6.8 mph, so I decided it was more a case of the wind and current than my own self discipline.

The brisk pace back (and the lots of glide) meant that I felt fine when I got back (and my bladder was surviving), and so I did a diversion upstream on the canal to increase the total distance. I was just about to turn around when I saw a guy out paddling coming towards me who was obviously a fitness paddler, so I kept paddling until we passed, turned around, and gave him a brief sales pitch for the BayCreek Time Trials. It was probably a good thing I went that little bit further, because the GPS beeped for “Lap 10” just as I passed the dock for GWC.

I think I kept good technique the whole time (although my paddle banged into the boat a few more times as I got tired), and I don’t think my speed (corrected for current and wind) was much worse at the end than it was at the beginning. It was definitely a milestone to be proud of.

Yesterday, Dan told me that I’ve been doing my training wrong all my life. All my life, I’ve always started doing a good pace, and building up the distance until I could do that pace for the sort of distance I wanted to race, and adding in some shorter interval, speed play and strength work outs for speed. For running, that pace was around 8 mph, and I started out doing a mile or so and worked up to regularly running 8 to 12 miles at that pace, in preparation for 6-8 km long orienteering races. For skiing, it was around 18-20 km/hr, and I was regularly doing 40 or 50 km at that pace, in preparation for 15 or 30 km races (I was quite a bit slower for the Canadian Ski Marathon, but it was 168 km in two days over quite rugged terrain). And for kayaking, it seems like 6 mph is that pace, and I’ve built up to doing 8 miles at that speed, trying to build up to longer than the 10 miles of a normal race.

But Dan says what I should be doing is going slower for longer distances, and doing more interval work outs at much faster than race pace, and basically do race distances at race speeds almost never. And he appears to have the research papers to back it up. I guess I’ll try it his way and see how it goes. Maybe I won’t have the same problem I had for skiing and orienteering, where I really didn’t have any ability to go faster for shorter races – I basically had one pace and that was it.

On Sunday, Vicki and I went for a paddle with the Huggers.

But first, I went for a long fast paddle to get the “need for speed” out of my system. I did 5 miles, and while I started out slowly for the first half mile, by the 0.7 mile point I was definitely up to race pace. I just can’t get the hang of this “warm up” business – never have. Going up stream, I was maintaining a pretty good 5.8 mph or so – although the last half mile before the turn-around was up above 6.0 mph. When I turned around, I was making better than 6.5 mph. The fourth mile was an average pace of 6.6 mph and the fifth mile was an average pace of 6.5 mph. Even including the slow first mile, that meant that my five mile total time (49:41) was faster than the speed (50:14) when I did a 5 mile time trial a mere 21 days ago.

But more importantly, doing a big work out mere minutes before going for a fun paddle did have the desired effect – I could enjoy a nice leisurely paddle with Vicki and the others without any need to speed ahead or run rings around people or any of the annoying things I do when I still have the need for speed. And we had a great time picking our way up and back Red Creek, this tiny and wild little stream in the middle of Rochester.

Today I went for an even longer paddle – 8 miles. I was going to go up the river again, but there was a bit of a breeze going down the river and I didn’t fancy fighting a head wind on the way home. But fortunately the Genesee Waterway Center gives you a choice – the river intersects the canal right there, and the breeze was blowing straight up the canal. So I went down the canal. It wasn’t an extremely pleasant paddle – the canal parallels highways and industrial land almost the whole way. Although I did see a Great Blue Heron and some ducks. Once again, I didn’t manage a proper warm up. Looking at the speed graph in Garmin Training Center, it looks like I once again only warmed up for half a mile or so. For the first 3 miles or so, I felt no fatigue, no soreness, the only sensations were a slight pull from the bandage on the sores on my back and the relentlessness of my own stroke.

On the way back, I was a little disappointed that the tail wind didn’t improve my speed that much, or at all really. My third mile had an average speed of 6.0 mph, and my downwind miles had average speeds of 6.1, 6.0, 6.1 and 5.9 mph. I don’t know if I was slowing down, or the wind was abating, but I definitely felt that there was a current going against me. But that doesn’t matter so much. What does matter is that I kept my pace up, and besides a few pauses to grab a drink, I didn’t have to stop at all. And afterwards, I was tired, and I was ready to stop, but I didn’t feel like I had to stop.

Eight miles, 81 minutes. I am *so* ready for the Tupper Lake 9 Miler. Only 11 days to go.