Endurance

[ukgm]

Does it become too much like work when it is so analytical, Cruisin?  I envy your ability to book so much time on the water.  I'd simply 'count ducks', see who's fixing up their property, compose a song (you - not me), 'get in the zone', etc.  I'd leave the 'barometric pressure of my colon' for the inside a gym where everybody is counting something.  It sounds like you already arrived at a great place.

Jim

"glide profile of a tennis ball'  ...excellent RTG

Well, at the end of the day, if you ain't racing, don't worry about it. If you want to perform, then do.

[RideTheGlide]

Without knowing a paddlers goals or training plan, its just an educated guess or observation but if the duration isn't being carefully progressed or the intensity, carefully manipulated, you're not going to increase your physiological endurance once you get used to it (after circa 6-12 weeks depending on your background). In other words, if the duration or the average pace is staying the same for most of the year (as you describe  above), it's unlikely a paddlers endurance is really being improved, merely maintained. Granted, this is starting to branch away from the threads OP. I personally find it impossible to use distance as the water and weather state where i train changes so much through winter to summer (due to tide and flow), it would hide or distort any improvements if I relied on it alone.

I probably should have noted that when I said my long paddles were 6-14 miles, that the 10+ mile paddles came later in the season, so I was working on increasing the time I could endure and not messing with pace. Part of that was due to board I was using - my cheap little iSUP. On flat water, the kicker kept the nose up and the wetted surface was pretty much a rectangle. It took fairly substantial increases in paddling power/pace to get an incremental increase in average speed. I will be pushing it this year on my new board.