Doing the 'Clean and Jerk'
Today's paddle went OK ish. I set off early to try to miss the rush that I knew would be on the water on a bright, sunny and warm spring Sunday morning. Unfortunately they had still beaten me to to it and were already out there as I had to pull over to let two sets of paddlers go past, four abreast doing 90 mph reps on the long straights. A couple of houseboats completed the mayhem on the water, all slowing me up on the outbound leg.
It was a bit of a different story on the way back as on two occasions I could see houseboats and paddlers coming the other way and I raced them to get to the bottlenecks caused by the bridges between us, rather than give way and lose more time. On making it to the finish I had the surprise that I had, overall, made a reasonable time of 1:14 which is a about my average on a good day.
It had been a toss-up whether I did the five mile and a jog afterwards just to treat the legs as well as the arms, or the seven and a half miles up to Walsham and call it a day. By the time I'd negotiated my way around all the other Sunday canal users I was ready to settle for the mixed combo so I set off on the jog after changing into trainers in the car park and loading the boat. Spurred on by my good result on the last run I'd determined that if I was going to run I'd give it an eyeballs out effort just to keep the winning streak going.
It was hard and I was struggling all the way, but I was able to cut the short slow section in the middle at the turn around where I usually flag, and continued to push as hard as I could all the way back. Against all the odds I managed to clip a further fifty seconds off the last times effort. I was quite pleased with that and rewarded myself with a beer while I soaked in the bath when I got back.
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