Yukon Ho!

Been a tough 5 days. The Sunday long paddle really upset my week and I felt I only really recovered on Wednesday evening. I tried to do a hard weights session on Monday and my body just said no. Did some cardio but I just didn’t let my body recover. I just sat out Wednesday morning after Tuesday was a bit of a waste too.

Went for a paddle on Wednesday evening, which felt great.  But was about 40 minutes short of the session I should have paddled because I lost the group and thought they had gone back in. Thursday was a good weights session but this morning again it felt like someone had pulled the energy plug.

I have a session with a trainer on Tuesday and I’m hoping he can help me balance the weights, cardio and water sessions better so I can train at a consistent rate.

Tonight’s session should be fun as the weather is so much warmer. Lessons this week.

• Train to the schedule, when it says 1 hour on the water do an hour on the water. Working too long one day, means subsequent days get out of sync.
• I need my schedule to be rigid, changes upset my discipline.
• “I’m tired”  is not a valid excuse to not go to the gym.  It will not happen next week.
• Pete also gets grumpy when he’s physically tired (very pleased at this, as I thought it was only me)
• I have to sort out my food.  Late nites mean I just don’t have time for an evening meal.  I’m going to have to make up Pasta for Tuesday and Wednesday nite.

Pete: Our new blades arrived this weekend. They’re VERY shiny. I took some photos of our delight on our first paddle with them; please see below photos to induce kit envy in certain club secretarys (Ed, if you’re reading…).

The blades are a real departure from our club South African blades in the following ways:

1) They’ve got a really nice blade shape. We need to get used to this, but when we do I can feel how smooth and solid the catch of these blades is. It feels like you’re pulling fluidly throughout the stroke, and it helps to make the trunk rotation through the stroke smoother (and more intuitive).

2) They’re a lot more solid. This means there’s not so much “flutter” (a juddering that you get through the blade when there is spring in it). This is common with Fibreglass or thin blades, but ours are 100% carbon, and have a really solid design.

3) They have a split that really feels solid when locked together. The Lendal split system means that you can put them together, tighten them up and they’ll be without any flex or rattle. I’m glad we managed to get this sorted by the folks at Streamlyte; they don’t sell the split systems and more and it makes a big difference to the feel of the blade.

Our blades do have some downsides, notably their weight. As we need to fly with the blades we need to have split blades that we can get on handluggage. Unfortunately, that means adding considerable weight. As it’s the one thing we’re going to be whirling around at head-height for the entire race it’s hardly ideal to have to make the compromise, but I think it’s probably for the best; I don’t want to get to Whitehorse and find my blades have been “baggage-handlered”.

We first used our blades on Saturday night. I really want to get my technique sorted at this stage, and the sprint sessions were an ideal chance to do so. Increasingly I’m finding that the muscles that are sore after a session are my abs, lats and legs. It’s a really good sign, and I think it means that our schedule probably has enough in-boat training to make sure our form is progressing as we train. I’d like to have more time in the boat, but with three sessions a week I think we’ll have a reasonable ammount (if not the ideal).

On Sunday we had a stiff lesson from the tide on the Thames. We’ve definitely not got to the stage where we can read them, and several silly suggestions from yours truly had us going downstream to Westminster on our supposed 90minute paddle. Arriving back almost 3 hours later, we had both “Bonked”. Runners call this “hitting the wall”, and the root cause is the body running out of fuel. Having worked through our blood sugar, and running on a mixture of fat and body tissue (muscle), our bodies were feeding back to us just how uncomfortable they were with the run by the time we got back. We’d taken a small ammount of water, but no food; on such a long paddle this was a massive error.

I’ve run marathons before, and I knew (as did Toons) when we were hitting the wall. What had seemed easy work earlier suddenly became hugely, soul-destroyingly difficult. We had the added psychological barrier of the tide working against us; every paddle took us only inches up the shoreline, even though our muscles were screaming out with discomfort at the effort.

Toons used every bit of his river-running cunning, however, and I dug in for the long-haul back. We eddied out behind bridges for rest, hugged the riverbank for areas of shallow (and slower moving) water, and managed to make it back.

By the time we were at Putney I was shattered; I could barely string a sentence together, and responded to a snotty nosed rower with closed eyes and a grimace. I suspect Toons was a lot closer to a rather brisk retort…

I don’t intend to do that again. We need to make sure we keep ourselved in better shape than that. From now on, food is going to come in the boat whenever we go out for a long paddle. That’s not to say it was wasted training; knowing what it feels like to bonk, and knowing that you have the endurance to work through it is important. That’s still not a training session I want to do again any time soon!

 

P.S. notice the irony evident in the photos where, the weekend after writing an ode to the humble pogie, the author left them in Newbury and therefore had freezing cold hands all weekend; it took me until Junction 5 on the M4 before I had feeling in all my fingers today!

Pete: We’ve kicked into our Friday, Saturday and Sunday night paddling schedule. This works as follows:

* I leave work on Friday as soon as possible, and jump into the car (or onto the Tube) with a half-ton of kayaking gear. I get down to Putney (and swear heartily at a few Yummy but Useless Mummys driving 4×4s with the directional awareness of a pinball).

* I get to the boathouse, and sink deep into the luxurious setting of our very own clubhouse (please see inset) photo. Having pulled myself out of the deep leather sofas, I’ll get into some damp, cold kayaking gear whilst freezing my balls off in near-zero conditions.

* Toons and I will grab two very heavy plastic kayaks, and wrestle with the irritatingly difficult hatch covers for about 5 minutes. Having forced them on with hands like ice we’ll then hoist the kayaks onto our shoulders and make our way to the river. In doing so we will need to run the gauntlet of cold metal locks/container doors/gates, helping to reduce our hands to a state barely recogniseable to the rest of humanity.

* We’ll walk down the slipway to the water, and put our boats in the water. We’ll do some painful sprints, to the tunes of our waterproof ipods. We’ve set up some training aids to increase the workload we’re able to generate whilst doing our sprint sessions. Toons came up with the ingenious idea of using practice golf balls. THese have loads of holes on them, and we’ve secured a couple of these to the bottom of each boat with bungees. It may not sound like much, but shifting the bungees around to move the balls from top to bottom feels like you’ve attached the boat to the river bottom with an anchor from a cruise ship.

* We’ll push bungees, boats and golf balls up a pristine, empty section of the Thames as London buzzes and thrums around us. The feeling at this point, of stringing together a complex technique whilst the world rushes around you, is just amazing. On both Friday and Saturday evenings I rested during the periods between sprints in one of the most special places in London. I was both in the centre of the most exciting city in Europe and at the same time in a place entirely deserted apart from myself and Toons; we were the only people on the river, and I always feel immense pride and priviledge as we cut through the Thames on a freezing Friday night.

* We’ll retreat to the clubhouse/truck container and coax our now even colder hands through the cold metal locks/doors/gates and pull wet gear from our shaking, freezing limbs. We’ll walk back to Putney congratulating ourselves on a job well done and put freezing, tired muscles to rest.

I think the whole procedure probably has a root in either masochism or misadventure. Not yet sure, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out at some stage before June…

I’m a training bore. My life is dominated at the moment by training. I’m letting my friendships slip, turning down invites and ignoring everyday life. It’s a strange kind of narcissism. Even conversations with my father, revolve around training, my current speed on rowing machine and how the boat work is going.

Obviously when I meet up with Pete, we discuss food, the gym, today’s training session or future training sessions. I wake up and eat my healthy pre-gym food, go to gym, then my post gym food. Go to work, worry about what food I’m taking in during the day and then I follow it up usually by paddling in the evening.

Yesterday was my day off exercise so I spent the evening finally writing down my training schedule and making some MP3s for training.

Valentines day is a date with Pete. Even if I had a date I’m not great company as I’m usually tired, the amount of protein I’m digesting means when I’m not weeing I’m releasing more methane than a herd of Aussie Cows.

So apologies for not being about and to be honest I’m not great company as I only talk about training and usually have a corner of room to myself.

Pete: This weekend was eventful. We took a big step forwards in our planning with our session of coaching at Marsport in Reading, and also made a rather pitiful fist of training on the Sunday. Click to read more …