Day 29: The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death

Day 29, this will be a shorter epistle than yesterdays long, somewhat emotive plea, to try to walk through the middle ground, which is much like “the valley of the shadow of death” where we should “fear no evil” even, and especially, if someone has a different opinion.

Anyway, I’m in a build phase, in that I’m trying to put some more muscle on. Good grief what a difficult thing this is to do as you get older. Gaining muscle mass requires progressive overload but progressive overload results in fatigue and the need for recovery. Recovery takes much longer the older you get so training sometimes must be delayed because you aren’t recovered, which means your training volume goes down, which means reduced time under tension that week, which means less gains. Talk about a downward spiral. Life would be so much easier if we all just sat on the couch and munched on Tim Tams.

The upshot of all that is that additional “just exercise” on top of training seems to generate more fatigue and muscle soreness than it should. But, I might just be remembering wrong. Now I think of it, back when I was backcountry skiing four days a week AND doing Crossfit AND climbing on my indoor wall, muscle soreness was simply a part of life. My brain may be getting as weak as my body.

Speaking of which, endurance activities can be so good for teaching the brain that the body can persist. Yesterdays, hard thing (day 29) was paddling down the coast doing some rock gardening and, hopefully, getting into Malua Bay cave. Heading south from our home bay, we went into every small gauntlet and around every small rock feature that we could. At Malua Bay, we found the cave and I got a reasonable distance in but the tide was really high and I was bashing my paddle on the roof and feeling in danger of bashing my head as well. There was probably less than a boat length left to back into the cave. The photos don’t seem to show it but when the kayak surged up with each wave, I had to duck my head.

On the way back, we detoured via Black Rock. I was feeling weary before the detour but I was remembering big: when I was always up for one more ski run or to climb up one more ridge line, so despite thinking it would be nice just to get home for a very late lunch, we went out to Black Rock. It was as calm as I’ve ever seen the ocean on the west side, I could have reached out and touched the rock.

The first obligatory post-paddle roll was shaky, I was on my third try and doing a pawlatta roll by the time I got up but the impetus not to bail out and deal with the re-enter and roll was strong. The following few were much better as, in a funny way, relaxing and not rushing, results in an easier and quicker roll.