h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Orcus

Yeah I've done it again. No faster though.


****** Garmin! No hiding from that reality.

Deke

On: Guru's and their Wisdom

I suppose that every activity has its Gurus, and kayaking has its fair share. The acknowledged Guru for the DW race is Brian Greenaway and his small book on the subject is the accepted bible on the subject. His qualifications are impeccable as he has been involved with the race since 1964. He was the first paddler to complete the race in under 17 hours, and the first Veteran to win the race outright as well as twice winning the mixed and team classes. His book gives a history of the evolution of the race and spells out the basic requirements for would-be entrants to the race. Although the book focuses more on the overnight, non-stop event, much of the advice it contains is still good for the four-day event as well.

You might think that advice on taking part in a long distance event would concentrate on a lot of long distance practices runs, but in fact he advocates Interval training which is consistent with practices in in both running and cycling and no doubt any other sport that requires you to cover ground fast. Intervals put the focus on splitting your outings into a regular number of hard efforts to maintain a higher speed than you would normally, with shorter breaks between those efforts. But this approach also pre-supposes that you can already cover a distance which is long enough to encompass all those intervals.

What is becoming painfully obvious, and is confirmed in all its utter misery by examining the read-outs from my Garmin, is that at the moment I possess neither speed nor endurance. So, effectively I’m having to take the Guru’s advice but work on both aspects together. With that in mind I've put together a beginner’s starter level, interval session that I hope to encompass in my two-mile stretch from New Haw, to alternate short sharp hurty outings with the existing long, slow pleasure trips.

This part of the canal is just over a mile long and is dead straight. From either end you can see the cars passing over the bridges which are situated at the far ends of the straight, so it’s quite good for working on speed in a straight line without having to worry about negotiating bends at the same time. Along with this I’m intending to increase the distance of the pleasure trips to a longer duration,and I've set about measuring out suitable distances between locks to try to extend the length of at least one of the trips each week.

The first of those outings at the start of the week took the usual run from New Haw with a warm up for the first half mile then putting in a rather more strenuous effort for a minute then a rest in the form of more relaxed paddling for another minute. I was half way through the strenuous bit when I paddled through the end of the course, but carried on to complete the minute's effort before turning around. It seemed to go quite well and I managed to complete a number of repetitions before calling it a day. Despite the increased pace during the intervals, the overall time was still longer that it would normally have taken if I had just cruised all the way.

Two days later I was out again with my son and we paddled from the boat-house to Pyrford lock, this time with both of us at a steady pace partly because he was nursing a strain in a shoulder muscle. The return mileage was just on three miles, but it was a pleasant trip with time to look at the scenery and we had time to re-acquaint ourselves with the Kingfisher that again accompanied us for a hundred yards or so as it flitted in and out of the bushes and skimmed the water in front of us, no more than a few yards ahead.

At the end of the week I attempted my longest trip to date. Starting off from New Haw I set off at a steady pace and progressed up to Pyrford in the usual way. This time though I did my first portage around the lock and into territory that I haven‘t been through before. Just after Pyrford the canal takes a sharp(ish) right hand bend and becomes much more exposed as the trees and undergrowth at each side thins out. Here the wind was beginning to gust up and was sideways across the water, which is always unpleasant and makes for erratic paddling. But soon the views beyond the reeds and through the trees were quite pleasant and distracting from the hard work pushing against the flow.

The next obstacle upstream from Pyrford is Walsham Gates, a set of floodgates across the Navigation about a mile further on. I hadn’t intended to go as far as that, only to add on another mile to my previous overall longest trip. So I pulled up against the bank to take on water and have a break before setting off back. The bank here was a bit run down and I’d pulled up against a tree stump that I was hugging while I pulled at the water bottle that I’d brought along, and contemplating the view and what looked like a rat hole at water level in the roots of the stump. I was just thinking ’That’s a rat hole’ when something wet and cold poked me in the back of the neck giving me an involuntary jump, as I dropped the paddle and clutched at the tree-stump.

On looking around I found myself looking directly up into the face of the soppiest looking mutt I’ve ever seen from water level. It was, I think, a puppy, but a very large puppy with a lolling tongue, a cold, pointy nose and two beady little eyes looking out from a mass of fur that gave it the look of Big-Bird from ‘Sesame Street‘. It was obviously very pleased to see me and clearly it had never found anything in the water before that was quite so impressive. It’s owners, who were shouting something at it, and of which it wasn’t taking a blind bit of notice, were about fifty yards behind but closing the gap between us. Meanwhile, I tried to make friends by chucking it under the chin, at which point it tried to get in the boat with me. So we ended up with the dog straddled between ship and shore and the owners trying to drag it back without dunking it in the water.

Eventually everything was sorted and I reversed direction and headed back, portaging in earnest for the second time in a day at Pyrford, and eventually staggered back to base with an overall elapsed time of two hours, twenty-one minutes, and just under a quarter mile shy of seven miles. That translates to an overall speed of three miles-per-hour and a paddling speed of just four miles-per-hour.

Which is still much too slow and not far enough. Clearly many more intervals are needed.

(wipes tears of mirth from eyes)
Oh thank you again Deke thank you thank you I needed that! And hey, you're just keeping on keeping on and improving so much and it looks like its becoming fun yes?

Hi Clare

Thanks for your comments.

To be honest it doesn't feel very much like fun at the moment. Though it does have its moments when I spot some of the wildlife like the Heron or the Kingfisher that quite make my day. Otherwise... ???

It was all a whole lot easier during the summer, but right now it's just a grind that isn't showing much of a result.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with *****y Herons. Local ones have devoured more fish from my garden pond than I can shake a stick at. So although I can love to watch the way they fly they have no place in my back yard. In fact one was stalking around on the lawn this morning, but he's out of luck what with two inches of ice on the pond. It takes the edge off liking them when I have to keep the pond netted just to keep the fish in one place.

with those herons.

So how is the big wintery freeze affecting you?

Can't say I'm getting much cycling done at the moment.
A big Audax event was cancelled on Saturday and the one I'm signed up for is this coming Saturday starting just down the hill from Caerphilly - the mountain road of which is currently cut off from traffic due to fresh snow
Still - it's forecast to be 4-5 degrees friday and 8-10 degrees on Saturday itself. Hope springs eternal/clutching at straw?

I feel your pain. Trying to keep the momentum going when the weather won't play ball is just plain hard work.

I had thought your ride was last weekend, but if it's this coming one I'd think you would be in with a good chance of it going ahead. The forecast for the coming week (in my neck of the woods anyway), isn't too bad and I would think the roads may well be clear enough of ice by then. (Fingers crossed)

Around here, the snow arrived exactly on the forecasted time of Friday morning and still seems to have taken everyone by surprise. I'd managed to get a couple of paddles in during the week, but only had time for short ones. The long one I had slated for Friday wasn't possible due to the conditions being a bit worse than I wanted to risk for a long time out and there wasn't really any point in doing just another short one.

It snowed again all day Sunday, and the temperature was below freezing, which was the only other day I had free. I was thinking of doing it today but I just didn't feel much like taking to a freezing cold canal by the time I'd finished with a dentist's appointment, and he'd finished with my (root)canal.

Anyway I’ll just continue to play catch-up.

Good luck with your ride.

Hi Dmitri
I haven't seen the Heron lately. It's probably due to the foxes that are skulking around at the moment

Deke

I hope the heron is hiding, then.

And don't tell MVP. She already thinks the buzzards in her neighbourhood are going to mistake her for a rabbit.

Cheers Deke

Well the weather is supposed to warm up but not until Friday - and after another big dump of the white stuff last night it's deeper now than it was on Friday (remember the red warnings - that was us )

So, yes it might be gone in time, but we may have to fight flooding instead. I remain worried but with straws being clutched.

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Deke

On: Targets.

At last, after about four weeks of the river Thames having been flagged with red warning boards, along its complete length, flood levels are beginning to drop and the red warnings are giving way to the amber cautionary ones. The upshot of this is that my activities have been limited to the Wey Navigation, a generally much more stable climate, to practice in. To some extent this has been beneficial insofar as it has allowed me to get a fairly regular practice routine going despite having to get clobbered up like Scott of the Antarctic against near freezing and windy conditions for even the most modest of runs.

Currently I have got to a point where after the usual two mile stretch, instead of experiencing almost complete exhaustion, it's left me feeling that I could do more. My longest run has been just over six miles, but this is still a long way short of the target of ten miles I set myself to be completed by the end of last month. That target has now slipped away to the end of this current month.

The water flow on the Thames was prodigious throughout the month, consequently all of the improvers sessions during December were eventually cancelled and no further ones have as yet been put in place for this year, so there‘s no real prospect of any accompanied sessions out there at the moment, or in the near future. Nevertheless I’ve been keeping a log of the outings that I’ve made, together with an estimated mileage which at the moment stands at a grand total of eighty miles. Unfortunately only half a dozen of those sessions, amounting to about twenty miles have been on the Thames. With any luck I may be able to get out on the river a bit more often in the near future though, even if I've got to go it alone.

As part of the quest for a bit of speed over and above the rather low four miles-per-hour cruising speed that I manage at the moment, I put in last week a short interval session which was paddling for a minute quite strongly, followed by a rest period of a minute, repeated ten times. This went quite well except for the last three or four intervals which started to become rather erratic and unstable, a sure sign that I was tiring. The conditions were pretty miserable with a light rain from a dead, leaden sky. It was cold too but worse was forecast for the end of the week.

I didn’t have too much spare time for the rest of the week and the forecast was for heavy snow and freezing conditions to arrive on the Friday morning. In order to get in some time on the water before the promised weather clamped down I managed to get out early at the crack of birdfart and did another, almost totally unnecessary, two miler over the usual course. This time though, I just set off as fast as possible and did the course as a time trial to see how quick I could do it, and if I was showing any sort of improvement. My usual time over that distance is something in the order of twenty minutes each way with whatever rest may be needed at the turnaround. This time the Garmin gave a record of the time expended as 38:07 minutes including the turnaround which calculates as a paddle speed of 4.2 mph.

The weather arrived as forecast exactly on time on Friday morning, and seems to have taken everyone by surprise despite having been forecast for the better part of a week. Friday was the day I’d originally planned a long trip, and I was quite prepared to give it a go if the conditions were manageable. Of course it snowed all day and the temperature didn’t manage to crawl above zero, so rather than risk a dunking in very cold water, miles from home I decided to hold off. Saturday turned out to be a sunny but cold day, but I didn’t have the time that day. It snowed big time again all Sunday, much the same as the Friday, so again that was written off.

All in all it’s been a largely unproductive week. My previously stated targets of a comfortably maintained five mph paddling speed through thirty miles in ten hours is still a long way off yet.

Ha well, some signs of improvement there which is still good.
I know I've been moaning myself but to keep it in perspective - it has only been six days since the big blizzards hit - and it going to be all melted by the weekend. Albeit with some flooding accompanying it suppose. I'm pretty much definitely going to do my audax (Dr Foster's Winter Warmer it's called - the gps file for it is somewhere out there on the internet if anyone's interested) on Saturday. Will be wet but I can cope with that - it was the white out that was worrying - that's not just unpleasant it has very high potential for causing hospitalisation.

200 K eh. Well it's looking good at the moment. Most of the ice around here is disappearing fast. The forecast for tomorrow is a balmy 7 deg C in fact.

Good luck

Thanks It's still pretty deep in snow here at least around my end - but the main roads are clear and ice free now - and you can use them for the vast majority of it if you want to.
I'm all a tiz trying to make sure I don't forget something vital when I leave the house now.
Back in December I forgot to take bonk rations (i.e. food) with me - that won't be a good move tomorrow! Need to remember tools, spare inner tubes, spare tyre, repair patches, pump,lock, money, mapping stuff, pen/pencil, drinks... the list is quite long.

Also trying to decide whether I should drive up to the start or not. It's probably another 7-8 miles (each way) on top of what is already a long ride - but it seems rather silly to drive up and pay to park the car when I don't have to. But... how knackered will I be at the end?... will I be up for the cycle home after all that? Decisions decisions.

On: Resignation

Back in early December, just as the general weather was showing signs of improvement after a considerable period of adverse conditions, I opined in this blog, that in order to get up to speed to take on the DW challenge the weather was going to have to play ball by remaining calm and allow a reasonable period of time before chucking anything else by way of rain snow ice or wind at me. No sooner had I written that thought than the UK took on the mantle of rain capital of the world. This month, things were just beginning to improve to the point where the Thames was discarding the last of its red caution boards when it snowed, and froze for more than a week. As the snow finally melted last week and heavy rain cleared away the last of it, the warning boards were back up again after just two days as the accumulated melt-water and rain slid straight into the canals and rivers around the country.

Meanwhile I've been using the more sheltered parts of the Wey Navigation to keep some sort of practice sessions going, even to the extent of going out while warnings of high flow rates prevail. In fact, I had worked up to an overall paddling distance of almost seven miles, which I thought would be a good stepping off point for longer trips. I had hoped that the general weather would become a bit more settled and I would be able to get out onto the Thames more regularly to get practice with the more erratic ebb and flow there. I had also arranged for my son to drop me off at the other end of the Wey near Guildford at the end of the month, and then to paddle back about ten miles to New Haw. This would have achieved my first goal of a ten-mile paddle, albeit a month late but nevertheless a reasonable achievement within the scheme of things.

As a build up to this I set off for another two-mile interval session on a rather bleak, overcast day just before the last of the ice was washed away by the first of the rain. That went quite well and I put in a slightly faster time on the outward leg, turned around without a break and returned with the flow faster than previously. This was quite encouraging, so I prepared for a step-up of another five-mile trip before setting out on the 'long' one.

The five-miler was to be the usual route to Pyrford and back. It was cold, darkish and wet, and it started badly. I don't know if it was just familiarity breeding contempt but for some reason as I pushed off in the same way as have done a hundred times before, I wobbled badly and almost lost it. As I pushed off from the lock bank with my left hand, I lurched over to the right and it was only by luck that the right-hand paddle was in the correct position to supply a support stroke and keep me upright. I can't claim that I did a proper support stroke intentionally as my left hand wasn't even on the paddle’s shaft, it was just waving in the air. But my right hand reacted and pushed the paddle into the water providing just enough correction to keep me from taking a very uncomfortable bath. I still have this recurring vision of the water’s surface only a couple of inches from my cheek and the paddle blade disappearing into the cold green murk.

Once under way though I realised that I’d forgotten to start the watch and as I needed the speed calculation I performed the unnerving manoeuvre of getting both hands together in the middle of the boat and fumbling with the buttons to get the thing going. After that I progressed onwards wobbling like a raw beginner all the way. After a half mile I got a grip, stopped shaking and things settled down a bit. It was hard going again and I was soon struggling to maintain headway. The river was on a danger alert and the flow was quite fast, although no real difference to previous sessions under the same warnings. At the end of a mile I was bushed, and knew that whatever else, I wasn’t going to make it to Pyrford.

I had pulled up on the boat clubs frontage and just sat there contemplating the situation for a while. It was at that moment that the unspoken awful realisation hit me that if I couldn’t make a five-mile paddle at this stage of the game, then there is no possibility whatsoever of doing 125 miles in just a few weeks. In fact I knew I had run out of time and I wasn’t going to make it at all. After five minutes I turned the boat around and went home.

I guess then that’s about it for the time being at least. Just too much to do and not enough left in the reserve tank to do it. Reluctantly I’m going to have to relinquish any thoughts of competing this in year’s race, as it just wouldn’t be practical. But it would be foolhardy as I haven’t yet really got to grips with conditions on the main river, let alone the tideway. Neither have I yet been able to get a support crew together which would have been necessary to get me to the start and through the race. I only have my own mistakes made early on and inexperience to blame. I can’t really blame the weather as other more experienced competitors have already clocked up 200-300 miles in practice this year. But then neither has it done me any favours.

Deke, you should not feel bad about this. Those who have chalked up more practice were more experienced so it was not so foolhardy for them to go out in the maelstroms you all have been experiencing. Yeah yeah i know they weren't maelstroms but what was and is happening is having the same result on being able to get out there innit. As a neophyte it would have been foolhardy for you to go out there when you don't have the skill Yet to pull yourself out of some jams you might have gotten into what with the big water and all. Here in the states we call folks who venture out onto white water when they don't know what they are doing... stupid.

The way I see it from here, you actually had to believe that you were going to be in that race in order to keep at it there in the beginning of your adventure. But with the inclement weather you weren't going to be able to get up to speed to be in it.

Maybe you can continue practicing, when its possible, for some self-made challenge for this summer, say... with your sons? Maybe something after a month of summer and then a biggy at the end that will get you sooo close to being ready for this race next year?

good luck here's a shamrock

Deke, you are one amazing dude. I say this as someone who couldn't even manage a canoe on the Clarion River. Where it's so shallow in the fall that the canoe gets *stuck* on top of big, flat rocks...

Also, I would like to suggest that you read this whole journal thread from the beginning, now.
I started it and it is very interesting the progressions you have gone through.

Hi again
I've come to terms with not completing what I set out to do, and my entry to the race is now officially on the back burner, at least 'till next year. I guess I just didn’t get the priorities right and made a few too many mistakes in my approach to getting up to speed. It wasn’t all the fault of the weather.

I also just want to say thanks to everyone who's read and/or commented on this thread or at The Post where it's been reprinted. Your comments have very often been the motivation for getting out on the water and I really appreciate them... Thanks!

I’m looking forward to a more pleasant summer and hopefully I’ll be able to put in a bit more practice for next year and at least get to the start line.

Deke