Canoeing?

Before winter I joined a local canoeing club, but canoeing is a lot harder than you might expect. Staying in the boat is quite a challenge for a beginner, especially in a K1 (single man canoe). A K2 is much easier to balance in but my paddling partner was studying for exams like the ENTIRE winter and I'm not very partial to cold water, so I gave it up for winter.

Yesterday, however was a wicked day to start again, weather wise, and the exams were over. So we went out for a little paddle and found that our arms had turned back into useless rubber bands, we went for about 40 minutes and did about 3km. Today I feel like some evil torture master tied me to rack and stretched my arms REAL good.

So should I be canoeing as well? I think if I can maintain both running and canoeing I should have a well rounded exercise program, and I think starting it again after 4 months of running it will be good, at the moment it is less of a cardio workout than a muscle conditioning exercise. It should help strengthen my core muscles, which in turn should help my running. To be able to canoe for cardio is going to take some time, when I stopped in April, I was quite comfy paddling about 4km, hopefully I'll stick to it through summer and be good enough to continue through next winter too. It's always been something I've wanted to be able to do. I'll be canoeing on Tuesdays and Saturdays probably, so I will add those to my exercise stats, probably from next week