Training for a big trip often turns out to be a balancing act, particularly as you get older. You need to train enough to accomplish the trip without crippling fatigue or injury, but you don’t want to train so much that you succumb to injury, fatigue or both before the trip starts. Additionally, resistance training – the holy grail of healthy aging – has to continue to be part of your regular training regime, and appropriate resistance training requires more recovery than aerobic efforts. Health guru’s who blather about “recovering harder” are simply blathering. Recovery can be assisted through good quality protein and sleep but in the end, recovery takes time.
The problem is, we often only discover in retrospect if we’ve trained enough for the trip. If the trip turns out to be pleasantly easy and fits nicely into your own personal adventure zone, you’ve trained enough. If every day you are thrashed beyond your limits and so scared you can’t spit, your training was nowhere near adequate.
Whether it’s good luck, good management or a bit of both, I’ve managed to train about the right amount for most of the trips I’ve done in the last couple of decades, and uncooperative weather and/or conditions notwithstanding, most of my trips have fallen into my own personal adventure zone and have been successful. Which does not mean I haven’t had spectacular failures. Life without failures would be drab indeed as we would never push beyond our current limits.
Knowing yourself helps. If technical climbing with a big pack is going to feature on the trip, you better gets lots of experience doing just that. Perhaps surf landings are required or paddling in strong winds and rough conditions. Again, lots of surf landings and doing most of your training in adverse conditions is required. Paddling on lakes and rivers simply does not prepare a paddler for the ocean, and clipping bolts on sunny days at the local 10 metre crag is similarly ineffective training for load carrying over mixed mountain terrain.
Marathon training plans typically include one long run of around 20 miles (32 kilometres) so that the runner has the mental advantage of knowing that the distance is achievable. After all, the mind is primary. I think training for long paddle trips should be similarly structured. If the trip requires a 50 kilometre day, make sure that you hit 50 kilometres at least once during your training period. Preferably multiple times. After all, a trip is much harder than a marathon. Some trips require days and even weeks of marathon type distances stacked up without the aid stations, hot showers and comfortable beds that are a feature of a one time marathon event.
After 34 kilometres on Thursday, I went out on Saturday to do my default 20 kilometres. I would try to keep up a faster pace – something I did not succeed at – and paddle into the wind for 10 kilometres before turning around. I was alone as Doug’s training schedule did not coincide with mine. The day was a mixed success. My Garmin watch, with the current GPS settings seems to be always about 10% off, so I did 22 kilometres before the watch ticked over to 20 kilometres. My big problem was the endemic Blue Bottles. They were everywhere and huge. When I started, the seas were flat enough that I could see the buggars and paddle a zig-zagging course between them, but once the wind came up, the chop with the residual swell from the southerly blow, made it impossible to see the creatures before they were wrapped around my paddle and in danger of whipping across my face. When we were training for our Bass Strait crossing I got savagely stung by a big Blue Bottle and it was quite painful. Not something I am keen on repeating.
I was on my way out to the Tollgate Islands from Black Rock when the fourth of a series of Blue Bottles wrapped itself around my paddle and I only just managed to dodge a face shot. The side of the boat was wrapped in sticky tentacles and a big whopper of a Blue Bottle was adherent to my paddle leash. I unclipped the leash and dragged it behind me into Wimbie Beach where I managed to remove all the bits of stinging tentacles from my leash, my boat, and my (luckily) long sleeve shirt. For some reason, inshore and north of Wimbie Beach, the Blue Bottles were not so numerous so I paddled back and forth between my home bay and Snapper Island until I had wracked up the requisite kilometres. The wind was up, so at least half the laps were into the wind. This morning, the beach was littering with the cadavers of Blue Bottles so hopefully the invasion is over.
The week in review: Three strength sessions including one with climbing wall training, one climbing day, three paddle days for 69 kilometres, two easy cycle days of 24 kilometres, five core training days and a measly 14 kilometres with 430 metres elevation gain on foot.
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