The 6 a.m. workout paddle with TH went GREAT.
I was on my surfski, he was on his Epic Endurance 18 - pretty well matched again. We paddled for a good hour and a half, starting at Pier 63, paddling up to just south of the cruise ship terminals in the Hell's Kitchen area, then heading south to the Downtown Boathouse. I asked to head south and then north again as the route took us across the New York Waterways ferry terminal at W. 34th street, and even by 7 a.m. you'll be having to work out crossing the paths of multiple ferries, and you absolutely need to know that you are not going to fall off your boat, and right now I'm at the point with my surfski where I'm generally fine, but the chaotic waves of 4 ferry wakes crossing each other would be just the ticket to make me fall off at just the wrong moment - so I just saved myself the stress by asking to head south.
Overall mileage covered - 4 nautical miles. The short course for the race on Sunday is exactly that long. We did keep a good pace throughout although with a break at the north end and another at the south end, which I won't be getting in the race.
The run was excellent in that my steadiness improved dramatically & I was able to start paying more attention to my stroke. We had perfect conditions for building up the balance in that we started out into almost flat calm water, although ebbing strongly, then as the ferry traffic picked up, things got choppier. As we paddled, I gradually found my focus going from being very much on my boat and the looks of the various waves around me to being on a general point in the distance, reading wakes and boat traffic with peripheral vision, relaxing and responding to conditions as they arrived instead of the more stressful approach of looking hard at each approaching wake or turbulent area & plotting what I needed to do to stay on my boat.
All great stuff. We got back to the pier right at 8, TH rolled a couple of times, I did a practice capsize & remount with my surfski - getting back on a surfski is a very specific skill & like any skill, you have to practice it in controlled circumstances if you hope to do it when you need to.
I left the pier in such a good mood that even the way New York can smell when it's garbage day and it's 100 degrees outside (p.U!) couldn't bring me down. TH and I planned a repeat for Wednesday morning. I figured Wednesday morning, then maybe a longer after-work run on Thursday and a break on Friday would have me as ready for the Sandy Hook-er (no, that's the name of the race, really, with a hyphen added to avoid icky Google searchers) as my limited prep time would allow. Woo hoo.
The one thing I wasn't thrilled about was that I'd noticed that my stamina wasn't up to snuff. Racing the thunderstorm home with the guys on Saturday, I'd felt great - paddling strongly all the way, lots of energy, enjoying the race - this morning, I was getting bursts of good speed, but I couldn't seem to sustain them, I'd just run out of steam.
Also I had a little bit of an upset tummy.
I wrote this off to the fact that it was morning, it was full-on wing-paddle racing stroke on my surfski instead of just a really high-angled high-speed touring stroke in my steady Romany, so I was using muscles in ways that were a bit different than the way they get accustomed to working doing the moderately long tours I favor in the winter, and also that I'd actually gotten to my train station BEFORE the hot bagel store had finished their first batch of bagels and settled for a couple of extremely corn-syrupy soft trail-mix Granola Bars for breakfast instead of a hearty fresh-baked bagel with lox spread.
I was sleepy during the day, but a half-hour nap at lunchtime set me up nicely for most of the afternoon.
Then, very abruptly around 5:00, I hit a wall. Suddenly I started feeling feverish, and all my energy was just gone - exactly what had been happening during my paddle, only on a much more definite & inarguable scale.
By 5:45 I told the boss I had to go home. A check on the thermometer when I got here confirmed what I thought was the case - I've got a fever of 100.2 degrees. And in a heat wave, too, isn't that nice.
Y'know...being sick when you are a totally single person who lives alone SUCKS. You want anything, you have to get up and fix it yourself. Jeeze - you can get somebody to do just about anything for money in New York City - I wonder if anyone runs a business where they send out nice sweet nurturing-type people to coddle singletons with the flu. I wouldn't need much - just a nice cold glass of ginger beer (my neighborhood's very West Indian and I find the Jamaican ginger beer to be infinitely superior to generic ginger ale) with orange juice every now and then - maybe a little ice cream or cottage cheese with pineapple. Rent-a-Mom, the service could be called. "Mom" doesn't even really need to be a mom - just a really sweet, patient person who will put up with a little whining and bring you cold things on trays and keep the dishes clean instead of having them stack up in the sink because you're too haven't got the energy to wash them. Y'know? Somebody should do this if nobody already has. Oh dear, I'm making myself cry thinking about how nice that would be. Guess I'm a pretty sick puppy. Sick puppies shouldn't blog, sick puppies should be in bed. See, if I had a rent-a-mom here he or she would tell me that and make me turn off my my computer and brush my teeth and go to bed - and then they'd bring me a big glass of ice water. Sniff.
Somehow I just KNOW this is happening because I want to go in a surfski race on Saturday & every time I go in a surfski race, something weird happens to screw me up.
Oh well. Best laid plans and all that. At least this time the gremlins didn't wait until race day to mess with me.
I just hope I can make it to work tomorrow - tons to do (oh, yeah, we'll be "celebrating" our 2-month anniversary of not having anyone in the business manager position...sigh) - but work or no, tomorrow is not going to feature the planned surfski time.
Must put my feverish self to bed now.
Thhhbbt.
I
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