Speed, and the lack of it

On Thursday I repeated the New Haw to Pyrford trip yet again. It started off a bit erratically and I had to keep the pace on the low side, as I've now started to find that the paddle is taking a dive occasionally at the end of the stroke and snatching back inwards as I think that I'm tending to take the stroke too far behind me. That resulted in a very slow first mile, but after that I got in the groove and made a passable fist of the rest of it. The penultimate mile was the fastest at 14:01 being only two seconds slower than my previous best.

These five mile runs are coming in at fairly consistent times now, mostly between 1:14 and 1:16, but which is still terribly slow at an average speed of only around 4mph. I need to be getting a minimum of 5mph to be reasonably competitive which means getting the time for that particular run down to under an hour. With that in mind I've cobbled together a training aid which is a simple elastic strap with a couple of balls threaded on which hang under the boat (stop sniggering at the back there), to create a greater drag and therefore effort to get it to move. Like most training aids, it's great when you stop.

I've also made up a Bungee strap which I've fixed up at a post on the shed at the bottom of the garden, so that I can simply mimic the pull stroke against the resistance of the elastic, one hand at a time. At the moment I'm only doing 50 repetitions on each arm to get used to it, as it's surprisingly harder than the other simulator that I cobbled together last year. I've also asked the club to let me have some time on their Ergo paddling machine, which they've agreed to, but I've got to get a key for access to the clubhouse yet. Really there's no substitute for time on the water but hopefully these things might make enough difference to get up to speed.