Ludicrous Speed!

 Here are my stats on my run yesterday.

Name:		Track 014
Date:		Jul 15, 2013 10:33 am
Map: (valid until Jan 11, 2014)		View on Map
Distance:		9.17 miles
Elapsed Time:		2:14:13
Avg Speed:		4.1 mph
Max Speed:		6.6 mph
Avg Pace:		14' 38" per mile
Min Altitude:		0 ft
Max Altitude:		0 ft
Start Time:		2013-07-15T14:33:19Z
Start Location:
	Latitude:	41º 17' 06" N
	Longitude:	73º 55' 55" W
End Location:
	Latitude:	41º 17' 05" N
	Longitude:	73º 55' 56" W

I use MotionX, which is a pretty good GPS tracking program. I launch it on my iPhone then tuck the phone into a waterproof pouch. The program has a speaking component, so every five minutes it speaks my time, distance and speed. It's pretty cool except for the fact that it sucks the battery life from my iPhone big time. The battery life on the phone already kind of sucks, so MotionX will kill my battery in about three hours.

Now you'll notice I achieved a top speed of 6.6 miles per hour. That's insanely fast for a paddleboard. At that moment I had the current, tide and a breeze behind me. The funny thing was at the time, I didn't even realize I was going that fast. I was paddling past the Indian Point nuclear power plant and was so concerned about not paddling into its no-go zone that I wasn't aware of the speed.

Normally on my runs I go upstream to the Bear Mountain Bridge, but the tide was going out and about to change, so I decided to head downstream until the tide changed, then head back up with the tide. It didn't quite work out that way. When the tide changes, the river doesn't automatically change direction. That takes an hour or so, so I was going a lot slower upstream for a while.

I wonder if I wasn't getting a little heat exhaustion towards the end. I was drinking a lot in the 90ºF+ temperature, but toward the end I was getting a little crampy and sloppy. A couple more dips in the river might have been a good idea.