Pushing Your Limits

Pushing Your Limits





Today marked my 100th paddle of the season, a milestone that arrived sooner than anticipated. While this number holds no inherent significance, it represents a seasonal goal I set for myself. For a more detailedbackstory, feel free to check out last year’s blog post.

The highlight of today’s session was not the number, but how I absolutely smashed it. I mean I truly had a breakthrough paddle, possibly my best performance to date.

From the moment my paddle touched the water, I felt an undeniable connection with the river. If you’ve spent time near or on a body of water, you’ll understand how it can resonate with your soul. Water symbolizes life, connection, and renewal. It nourishes, cleanses, and sustains us, weaving its way through our communities and lives.

Here’s the thing, I always find it hard to reach maximum heart rate paddling, partly because I’m new to serious training. Let me nerd out a bit and explain what this means. Heart rate monitors give athletes insight into their bodies response to training. It is the most accurate, and readily available physiologic feedback used to optimize training. Your heart rate represents training intensity; the higher the heart rate the harder you are working. Your maximum heart rate is the greatest number of beats per minute your heart can pump and can be used to determine training targets and progress. Endurance athletes focus on their lactic threshold, and heart rate can be cross-matched with this value. The higher your threshold the fitter the athlete.  

Getting enough in season training is difficult on the Red River of the North, in Manitoba Canada, because we have a very short paddling season. This is only my 4th year of dedicated SUP training, so the real reason I can’t reach maximum heart rate is I lack the fitness and skill in the earlier part of the season, and it’s not until summers end that I’m both able to work maximally and stay upright on my standup paddle board.

Today’s paddle was extraordinary from the start. My heart rate was unusually low during warm-up and I moved at a speed that made me question the accuracy of my paddling computer.

Normally I’m very precise and cautious. Normally I have a plan and follow it as closely as possible, but today wasn’t normal. Something came unhinged like a door that’s broken off and swings wildly at an odd angle. When I had wobbly legs, when I felt like vomiting, when I was half blind with sweat and fatigue, and my throat was raw and I could taste blood, I truly just wanted to go harder. I felt overwhelming joy pushing every ounce of effort into each paddle stroke, and I would have laughed and screamed had I the strength. When I peeked at my heart rate it was over threshold! I had to double take. “Whoa! I would have backed off last year. I would have slowed down last week.

“Fuck It! Let’s see what you’ve got old man!”

Some guy yelled at me from his doc “nice pace!”. A kayaker waved and shouted encouragement “giver!” I grunted in response and used the support to ramp up my effort. At the end, when I neared utter exhaustion, and was surely going to fall, I dug in for the final push to the imaginary finish line unwilling to settle for anything less than complete failure or breaking through my self-imposed limits. I attacked motorboat wakes and launched over the police boat’s tsunami sized waves as it careened by with its sirens blaring for a dramatic and triumphant finish.

There are times when you need to test your metal. Maybe this is a midlife guy thing, but I don’t think so. If you ask me, it’s essentially about shaking it up. If we become too comfortable, we fail to progress and feel stale or impotent. Pushing your limits is about passion and rediscovering not so much who we are, but who we still have the potential to be.

There you have it, the 100th paddle in my training log and the best session of the year. Let’s see what else this season has in store!"

 

~Dave

 

 


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