Compare and Adjust Accordingly or Become Like Stale Gross White Bread

How are your results from this year's races compared to last year or last month or last week?

Do you see faster times than last year? What were the conditions like?

Is your training bringing about what you hoped for? If not, what is the problem?

This season has been awfully frantic for me so I have not felt very confident in my training. The weather took FOREVER to break out of an icy spring and allow summer to take hold, therefore warming up the lake enough to lose the full wetsuit. As stated before I was not the toughest guy able to suck it up enough to paddle in the chilly weather. I opted for much more cross training than maybe I should have. I wondered how this would affect my paddling.

When I did finally get my new board off the Fed Ex truck and finally had access to the lake I decided not to train with a GPS. I was scared; too scared to find out that I spent too much money going narrower and realizing that staying on a 12-6 might not have been the best idea I've ever had in life. (I'll re-address that whole issue later!) My mom has always said to me, "just get out there and paddle." That is exactly what I decided to do.

Last Saturday was a 7 mile race at Lake Max. The MHL felt pretty good under my feet even with a lot of jet ski and wakeboard boat chop sending confused seas over the outer half of the race course. I did fall once and that was at the calmest part of the race course near the shore doing a sloppy buoy turn. Pretty much a chopper move it was but the rest of the race felt fine...not great, just fine. The late starting time really messed up my routine so I had no idea how well I performed if I performed well at all. Here, performance has nothing to do with the podium; it has everything to do with how I did on the MHL compared to how I did on the DEAN. The DEAN was a fun board to paddle. The shape was so stable that 100% stroke power felt amazing every time. I could adjust my body to put every muscle proper stroke technique demanded into action and barely wobble. On the MHL I have to think about every nuance involved in twisting, rotating, setting the blade, pulling the hips to the paddle shaft, transferring weight from side to side, stepping back bending the knees, maintaining a triangle while trying to turn the board, and a bunch of other stuff. On the DEAN it was GO GO GO, on the MHL it is more of a detailed process that requires me to be more engaged in what I am doing at every moment and more focused as well. This weekend I decided to compare some notes to evaluate how my training has progressed, if at all.

Lake Max was 7 miles; the Cold Stroke Classic was 7 miles. During recovery day on Sunday I compared the conditions of both races over and over in my head checking the RESULTS page online every 5 seconds to see what my time was. When I looked at my watch after Lake Max I figured the times were close and I was okay with that because the conditions at Lake Max were much choppier than the Cold Stroke Classic. When the Lake Max times were finally posted I was a happy man.
Cold Stroke Classic: 1:23:25 - Lake Max Challenge 1:19:04 (Both were advertised as 7 mile races but I am sure there are some factors and variables that keep the races from being exactly similar but there is probably enough to work with for some sort of accurate assessment.) {Lake Max was much choppier compared to the flat glass, even with various currents at times, of the Cold Stroke so I am not worried about any distance discrepancy. Also, same paddle for both, different boards though and one extra layer for Cold Stroke.}

What makes me very happy is the fact that I have stepped up my workouts in the last two weeks. I am paddling more but I am also adding several other routines to get stronger and leaner. There have been some great TRX workouts I have mixed with uphill sprints, medicine ball circuits, and a great jump rope circuit that is absolutely kicking my butt. Varying my routine seems to be paying off. Just paddling is NOT going to help me improve. Of course I need to paddle; I need to paddle a whole lot but to greatly improve I need to do more than just paddle. I don't want the 14s to disappear so far into the horizon. I don't want to be so far down on the results list at the big races when competing against the boys from sunnier climates that people never see my name because they get tired of turning the pages over. I have adjusted in order to improve. Now I just have to maintain the right balance so there is no over training and my body has time to recover and rebuild.

Twitter has been very handy in checking out what some other paddlers are doing. Slater Trout is very kind to tweet tidbits from his cross training sessions. The manchild gets after it pretty good doing hikes, beach sprints, stair runs, and Paddle Fit sessions and the dividends seem to be paying off according to some results I've seen.

Check yourself and compare notes from various races and see what you can maybe do to improve endurance and strength. At Lake Max I set my watch to interval times to try and see if I could keep a frenetic pace throughout and I failed. I could not keep up with the plan so I went to Plan B which was: "just paddle." It worked because my training is helping me improve I just need to stay consistent and adjust so I can, hopefully, continue to improve.

I will start posting some cross training workouts and results from races that follow for evaluation. Feel free to join in!!