Rants and Revelations

I’m not going to paddle “The 90” (the Adirondak Canoe Classic, 90 miles over 3 days). I’ve made it a goal to do it next year. So this year, I’m trying to wheedle my way into Doug and Mike’s “pit crews”. The pit crew (traditionally their wives) meets them at various portages to provide them with refills for their camelbaks and energy gels and bars. Since the four of them are going up in Doug’s truck, having me come up on my own car means that if one of the paddlers blows up or has problems, the pit crews can split up and one of them can move on to the next portage while the other one waits.

Another thought I had is that I can bring my kayak and go out on the course. Initially I was thinking I could go out before or after the racers come through, but I decided to ask the organizer (Brian) if it would be possible to for me to use my kayak to film parts of the race (especially the start) and possibly even resupply the racers in parts of the course that don’t have convenient portages. I promised to be careful not to get into anybody’s way or provide direct aide to anybody. His response to my email was generally positive and he suggested I phone him tomorrow to discuss the details.

My plan today was to see whether the Thunderbolt or the ski would be faster for the Fairport race coming up. The Thunderbolt is a little longer, a little narrower, a few pounds lighter, so I assume it’s a bit faster on the straights, but it turns like a tank. The ski turns very quickly, and would probably allow me to handle wakes and waves better. Since the race has three turns in 7.5 miles, the ability to turn might be critical.

What I decided to do was to paddle 1 mile downstream, do the turn at Turk Hill Bridge, and paddle 1 mile upstream, and do this in both boats to see which is faster. I was originally going to do the experiment at the upstream turn at the pylons, but that’s further away from where I parked so I would have had to paddle a lot longer on what is supposed to be a “periodization” easy week. If I knew how to get my boats to the boat house that the rowers use, that might be possible.

I did the Thunderbolt first. A boat came by and produced an extremely huge wake on the way down, but that wasn’t too big a problem. I tried to keep my heart rate under 160, although once or twice it crept up – the GPS reports my maximum heart rate on the first mile was 162. As expected, I had to slow right down for the turn. But I quickly accelerated again. But about half way up, I realized that my speed had been dropping – if you look at the graph it’s dropping steadily between 1.3 miles and 1.6 miles. I started concentrating on making a very hard catch and a quick exit, and my speed immediately jumped from 5.9 mph to 6.9, and stayed above 6.3 the entire rest of the way.

Second time was the ski. Again, tried to keep my heart rate below 160 and not work any harder than I did the first time. No boat wakes to contend with, but as expected I was ten seconds slower after a mile. I kept my speed up much better in the turn. But more importantly, I didn’t let my speed drop off and my technique deteriorate on the way up, so at the end I was only 7 seconds slower.

So here’s the problem. I didn’t go as fast as I could in the Thunderbolt, because I let my speed drop and my technique deteriorate. And I didn’t go as fast as I could in the ski, because I have my large rudder on it. I don’t actually know if the speed advantage of having the smaller rudder (and less drag) on the ski would be countered by the worse turning performance. So now I’m going to have to repeat the experiment again, maybe twice.

The workout for the day was “Easy Distance” – I was to try to keep my heart rate under 135 and just go, but every mile do 30 seconds really hard. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, and it was raining, so I decided to go upstream for mile, then downstream for two miles, and just keep doing that as long as I could or until it started thundering – I’d always be within a mile of the dock, so it would be able to stop at just about any time.

I ended up doing 8 miles. But after I passed the dock and was spinning around to dock up again, I noticed something – my PFD (life jacket) was floating jammed up against the upstream edge of the dock. I have no idea when the bungee net that holds it down on the back of my boat popped off – it could have been when I first started, or it could have been at the end, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m damn lucky that I didn’t do my usual up and back and lose it up at the furthest point and then have to go back, or that it didn’t miss the dock and go floating downstream and get lost in bushes somewhere. Especially since my car key was in the pocket of it. And the pocket wasn’t totally zipped up, so I was also lucky it didn’t fall out.