The southerly has just blown in and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. It was fast paddle day today. Yes, yet another day I didn’t feel like going! Apart from a shore dump and very high tide, an easy launch off the beach, my usual one kilometre warm up and then trying to keep my pace at 8 kilometres/hour. It was a tough haul today, as indicated by Garmin’s measure of my stress (94 out of 100). Of course, I never look at my “stress” score. No-one, not even the software developers at Garmin know what a stress score is or what it means. It’s another way that the tech bros game the system to keep you engaged. My advice is, as always, don’t comply.
Anyway, you can see I didn’t quite make seven kilometres because it was such hard yards out there today. For a while, every fitness influencer on planet earth talked about the concept of recovery, frequently saying nonsensical things like “it’s not that you are training too much, it’s that you are recovering too little.” This is like watching a couple of kids on a see-saw and not grasping the very simple concept that when one kid rides the see-saw up, the other kid must go down. Sure, you can sleep and eat well, perhaps do some stretching or some yoga, but at the end of the day, training is a see-saw. If you do a lot, you will get tired, fatigued, possibly injured and the only way to recover is to do less. Lots of things in life have two complimentary levers. Training has intensity and duration. You can not increase both at the same time. If you increase intensity, you must decrease duration or you’ll blow yourself up.
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