MR340 training day

Got in 4.5 hours of great MR340 kayak training on the Cuivre River this weekend.  We picked an out of the way falling down bridge for our put-in spot, even had the truck in four wheel drive getting to the place....sometimes just getting kayaks into the water is a challenge.  Check out the slideshow at the link below:

Slideshow

Photo Friday

YUM! Honey Stinger

Paddle Day

ROCK Racing had a paddle day planned for 4/23,  taking the Cuivre River to a takeout at Dardenne Creek on the Mississippi.  Unfortunatly the weather had another idea.  A solid week of rain/wind/hail and even tornadoes flooded all the roads leading to the takeout spot. 

So we had to activate plan B. Which was an upstream paddle on the Cuivre from Old Monroe to the State Park.  National Weather Service had all  kinds of dire warnings for us, like this one:
 
THE FLOOD WARNING CONTINUES FOR THE CUIVRE RIVER AT OLD MONROE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. * AT 7 AM SATURDAY THE STAGE WAS 26.0 FEET. * FLOOD STAGE IS 24.0 FEET. * FORECAST... THE RIVER WILL RISE TO NEAR 28.5 FEET TOMORROW AFTERNOON. * IMPACT... AT 28.1 FEET... DYER ROAD UPSTREAM FROM THE GAGE BEGINS FLOODING JUST DOWNSTREAM OF THE NEW HIGHWAY 79 BRIDGE. * IMPACT... AT 27.0 FEET... RIGHT BANK OVERFLOWS.

One of our paddlers Aaron, was flying in from Dallas.  Lambert Airport got hit by a tornado last night and was completly closed to air traffic.  Aaron got sent back to Dallas, after spending the night in KC.  That had to suck.
I turned the news on for a few minutes before Patrick arrived and heard all kinds of doom and gloom, thunderstorms coming all day long.  The news people will have fun trying to scare people with this for days.

Patrick showed up, we loaded the adventure van, and drove to the river.  We got there and looked at the water rushing past at what looked like 10 mph, and knew we'd never make the 25 miles to the State Park.  But we figured we would at least get in a good workout, even if we had to give up on our mileage goal.
Patrick paddles a 14ft Old Town Nantucket, mine is a 17ft Perception Eclipse.  Both of us use camelbaks strapped on the top deck for gear, food, and water.  Here are the 'yaks ready to be loaded with gear:

We weren't in the water 15 minutes before it started to rain.  Rain is fine as long as the lightning stays away.

The biggest challenge was dodging the piles of logs washing downriver.  We were steering from one side of the river to the other almost constantly dodging:

We did score a good toy:

Anyone who reads this blog knows I like taking pictures of strange things we spot in the woods.  So here's an old school bus parked in a field.  Its gotta be old, look at the curved back end on it:

Not long after the bus Patrick asked if I seen the lightning.  I didn't.  But only a few padlde strokes later it was unmistakable.  We got caught by a fast moving thunderstorm.  They say the worst place to be in a lightning storm is on the water, so we pulled up in a creek and pulled on rain gear to wait it out.  The wind picked up and rain poured.  Thunder and lightning all around.

When the thunder stopped we decided to call it a day and head back to the put-in spot before we got caught by another thunderstorm.  As soon as we cut back in to the current, it was amazing, after all that upstream paddling, we were finally going FAST.  With the wind and current pushing, we barely had to paddle.

It took a little while until we got back in cellphone range so I called Lori to bring the adventure van for a pick-up.  Of course it quit raining about the same time we got out of the water.  As we were loading gear both of us were saying how great the Stohlquist PFD's worked out.  Hardly even noticed I was wearing it.

So we got in a three hour paddle.  Much shorter than we had originally planned, but better than nothing.

Cuivre River Training Run

We are only 7 weeks away from the Chubb 50K and the training runs are multiplying in distance.  Chuck’s training seems to be going really well, he is sticking to his plan and making all his distance runs without a hitch.  At least that is what it looks like from my viewpoint.  He says that he has rough days, but I have never noticed him struggling like I seem to be.  My last two long training runs went all wrong and I was beginning to panic, wondering how I let my so called friends talk me into signing up for a 50K.  What kind of friend guilts you into running a 50K, I just want to know who these people are, beware of those friends with the type A runner personalities.

So here I am in the cold at Cuivre River, it’s muddy and sloppy wet, there is snow on the ground and the creeks are to our knees with no way to cross and not get wet.  The plan was to run 2 laps, one lap is a two loop course, kind of a figure eight.  We parked in the middle of the loop so that we could stop for food and water every 6 miles.  This actually worked out well, because it forced me to eat, I don’t always do that as I should.  Chuck invited about 12 people to join us, but only one person, Scotty, said he could make it and he said he would be out for the second lap.  So at 8 am we took off down the trail to find that we would be running through mud, snow and water most all of the run.

At first we tried to skirt the mud and water, but after a few miles we just gave up.  When we made it to the top of the ridge, we stopped for a picture at the overlook, I was sure not to get too close to the edge, I didn’t want to go cliff diving and swimming today.

Back on the trail we would slide around in the mud for a while then we would run across the creek and have clean shoes for about 30 seconds, of course the clean shoes came at a cost, hypothermia from the knees down.  Sometimes it felt like we were running on frozen nubs instead of feet.  The problem was, there was just now way to get across the water without getting in it.

We headed up the trail along the rocky ledge, Chuck was trying to run and take video at the same time, so I ran a head of him. I was almost to the end of the rocky ledge, when my foot hit a rock and I fell and started sliding towards the river. I looked up as I was sliding down to see Chuck filming the entire fall, so I yelled “did you get that”.  Not only did he get it, but was laughing so hard, I don’t know how he stayed on his feet and to top it off, he just runs past me laughing while I try to crawl back up the hill.  He is just as clutzy as I am, so it had nothing to do with balance or agility, its gotta be his Inov8 shoes.  After I got back on my feet I could feel my knee and shin hurting, it felt warm like blood may have been running down my leg.  Later after I took my tights off, I saw the blood and my knee was starting to turn blue.  The good thing is, since I didn’t actually see the blood, I just kept running and finished the workout.

We made it back to the cars and grabbed some Honey Stinger waffles and headed back out.  We made the next loop in pretty good time, and there was deeper water to cross on this loop and more places that we could fall into the river with one wrong move.  Plus Chuck kept farting while I was running behind him, he almost gassed me a couple times.   He blames it on some Perpetuum that he's been trying out in his water bottle for these long runs.  I hope he gives up on that stuff soon.

We made it back to the cars for more water and a Honey Stinger Rocket Chocolate bars and of course to pickup Scotty for the second lap.

We now had 12 miles under our belts, and our time was slower then anticipated due to the poor trail conditions, but that didn’t stop us.   We ran the trail loop backwards this time, so it was back through the deep creeks.  Then we kept seeing what looked like donuts on the ground.  At first we thought we were just tired and were seeing donuts, since we like them so much, but with closer inspection, the donuts weren’t real, they are what we now call trail donuts.  They are not really good to eat though.  They don’t taste like chicken either.

I told Chuck I couldn’t wait to put on my Recovery Socks, they make my legs feel so good after long runs, he said that he had brought his along also to put on after the run.

I bet you are noticing that Scotty isn’t in any of the pictures.  You could almost think the he was home in bed and not out on the trial.  We all know that Scotty is no loser and he wouldn’t be home in bed when he planned to meet us for a run, he just didn’t want to be in the pictures.

Three out of four loops were completed, with one loop to go.  Chuck sucked down a Honey Stinger Ginsting and we were on our way.  

I was feeling ok, my legs were tired, but I was shuffling along, not fast, but not walking either. I was actually really happy because I had felt so bad on the two previous long runs, that I thought this was going to be the same struggle, but it wasn’t.  With one loop to go, we were starting to have time issues.  I needed to be finished by 2 pm, so we were going to have to shorten our last loop a little, so we modified the loop a bit and cut two miles off it.   We finished 22 miles in a little under 6 hours. That sounds really slow, but it was a really great run for the conditions we were running in. I felt ok, too. I know Chuck could have run faster, but he even said his feet were hurting at the end.  I went home feeling a little less panicked.  I think I could have done another 9 miles to make our run a 50K, it would not have been fast, but I’m sure I could have done it.