Another great paddling session

It was just me and Anton this morning, and damn it was cold. We started off heading towards the lake with the hope that by the time we got to the part where the sun normally blinds us for ages, it would have risen higher in the sky and wouldn't be such a problem. It worked.


Anton had the idea of doing some increased efforts, so we played around with different speeds and heart rates . It seems I can paddle comfortably at 170bpm, at my 'natural' paddling speed and effort. And we increased it to around 190pbm for a while.


I had a bit of trouble with my neck and back...not pain, but they were very tight and fatigued, probably after my great paddle yesterday. But a quick stop and a few stretches seemed to alleviate it. Paddling back down towards the bridge, my neck and shoulders felt really tight and fatigued again, so I stopped again to stretch, and again it worked. Cool!

I decided that I wanted to do an effort/time trial from the bridge back to the boat ramp. So as I neared the start I said to Anton "I want to do an effort...what's the time?" He said 44min and we were off. I eased into it, but gradually increased my speed until I was going as fast as I could (without falling in). I pushed it even harder for the last 400m and knew I was going fast. I felt strong and knew I was going to beat my last time. As we got to the boat ramp, I felt sick and had nothing left and said to Anton, "What time did we do?" to which he replied "It's 52min 20 sec". I was initially dissapointed because I thought we'd gone over the 8 min, but quickly realised that he'd just looked at the minutes at the start and not the seconds. So basically we could have done any time from 7:19 to 8:20. He didn't realise that I meant to time me. My fault really, I should have been more specific in my instructions. Damn!

I thought I could work it out on my heart rate monitor, by looking at the time my heart rate increased and then slowed again...but my watch had run out of memory and hadn't recorded it. Double Damn! I reckon I did a personal best (under 7:50), and the odds are that I did, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Anway, we finished off and did a heap of sprints and starts. Anton beat me in every one, but I got better each time and by the end was going great. I'm really happy with how I'm paddling the K1 at the moment. So all in all, it was an excellent training session and I achieved a lot.