The main concept behind "training" of any sort is that damage accumulates when work occurs, and adaptation happens during recovery. There's a well-established process at this point for optimizing our adaptation mechanism to quickly achieve substantial gains, particularly in younger people, but it works for everyone. Arriving at the next [...]
Something went in a shoulder during what should have been a recovery paddle. Not a hard session, not a race, just an hour on flat water at a pace that required nothing in particular. The work earlier in the week had been heavier, and none of it had produced a [...]
Somewhere in the second hour, the adjustments stop clearing. Not all at once, and not in a way that announces itself. A brief effort to close a small gap, the kind of effort you've made fifty times already, and then the effort is over but the cost isn't. Ten strokes [...]
Performance in the ocean is not limited by how hard you can push in a moment, but by how long you can continue working without the cost of that effort quietly accumulating beneath you. At the start of a race or a long session, things tend to feel settled. The [...]
Performance in the ocean is not defined by how things look when everything is working. It is defined by how long they continue to work as conditions change. When performance falls apart in an ocean race, it rarely feels gradual. It feels like receding surf. One moment the boat is [...]
