Today’s Pete Plan rowing was a recovery session after yesterday’s hard distance. It was 15,000 meters done offline. No warmup. Easy music playing. First priority was a HR zone target of 60% to 75% HRmax. Second priority was to try for a rating of 22. There was no target pace… I wasn’t going to try to control the pace today but hoped it would be within the range of no faster than 2:11 and no slower than 2:25. Drag factor 135. Straps were not tightened at all. No warm down.
Looking at the pace graph afterwards, it is a lot less volatile than for the same session two days ago. Might be in large part because today I wore a sweatband and moved the towel out of reach so I wouldn’t be tempted to take one hand off the handle while reaching for a towel and mopping sweat.
The little downward spikes in heart rate each occurred when I burped. Heart rate must be sensitive to internal pressure.
Today was Pete Plan day for hard distance. The chosen distance was 6K. Before making the choice I looked at ranked sessions and 6K was one of the softer ones. The one in this season’s rankings was a pace of 2:01.7, which seemed way too wide a spread from the recent 5K pace of 1:56 point something. So I chose 6K and a target pace of 1:59.
Just like with the recent 5K, HR was below LTHR the entire distance so obviously I was a lazybones. But there’s no prize for embracing pain. The most recent time I determined my LTHR was April of this year and the method of measuring it is mentioned in this-> blog post <- which is at the previous location of this blog. LTHR is one of the things that is printed on a paper stuck to the bottom of the PM3, as you can see in the photo below.
Other stuff: There was a 2500m warmup, drag factor was 135 and there was a 2500m warm down. I wore a sweatband so wouldn’t need to reach for the towel on nearby chair but absentmindedly reached for it 4 or 5 times anyway during the last half, when I could feel sweat tickling down through my beard. Music during warm up & warm down: Of Monsters and Men, shuffled, albums “Beneath The Skin” and “My Head Is An Animal”. The words don’t make sense, like most verses written for the sake of music, but I like the voices and music for slow and/or unfocused rowing. Icelandic. Music during the 6K: a special, custom playlist of female vocalists-with-no-name singing fast-rhythm versions of various songs.
Warm Up Finish Screenwarm up reportwarm up chartsHard 6K Finish ScreenHard 6K Report. The Avg Pace column is rounded off to the nearest whole second.Hard 6K charts. The 5 downward spikes in pace are the 5 times I reached for a towel and mopped my beard.warmdown finishwarmdown reportwarmdown graphs.Watched tv and channel-surfed a few times while warming down.
Though I prefer to row online in the company of other people when possible, today’s session was not done online because I’ve noticed that the 15K isn’t very popular as an online session for very many others to join, even if it is scheduled a day or more in advance. It’s not one of the standard distances for ranking is probably one reason, among many others that it is not popular.
But the main reason for not rowing it online was that I wanted to allow myself to sleep in longer than usual, if the body felt so inclined. Therefore I didn’t know for sure when I’d be getting out of bed. Therefore I didn’t schedule an online session due to uncertainty of what time I’d be ready to start.
I didn’t sleep in. But that was okay. Instead of virtual human company while rowing online, I listened to music and it worked out well.
For this 15K recovery session there were three target zones set on RowPro. The most important one was to keep heart rate somewhere in the range from 60% to 75% maximum. As long as HR was in range, the next most important target was to keep rating equal to or very near 22. And the lowest priority target was to keep pace at about 2:11 or anything slower.
Another “review note” regarding RowPro 5 for the Mac that I’ve noticed is: It’s session report results disregard tenths of a second in pace. It seems to round any figure for pace off to the nearest second instead of to the nearest 1/10 of a second. The actual average pace for today’s 15K was 2:10.4 but RowPro 5 for the Mac reports it as 2:10.
RowPro for Windows is a bit more precise and it always shows the pace results to the nearest 1/10, which would be my preference.
Today’s plan was to do the first 3 intervals at the pace of my season best 10K, 2:01.7 and then do the last one a lot faster. DF was 135. No warmup. Five minutes plus another 2,500 meters warm down.
The resulting average pace for all four 2Ks was 1:59.5 and that will be the target pace for the first three intervals in this session, next cycle.
The game plan was scribbled on the Post-It attached to the bottom of the PM34x2K finish screenThe rest between each interval was supposed to be 5 minutes exactly, but I set it to 4 minutes and 50 seconds, to allow 10 seconds for the C2 to stop spinning before beginning each successive 2K.
Today’s session was scheduled online, more than two hours in advance, but nobody else joined this time. It was a steady-state 15K recovery session. The target pace was supposed to be 2:11 with a target rating of 22. But I forgot about the targets until somewhere between 500 and 1,000 meters.
I adjusted the rating to focus on 22 SPM but something was not cooperating. I had a hard time keeping the rating at 22 and an even harder time keeping the pace at 2:11. So for more than the first half of the 15K, I just struggled and wrestled with keeping the rating as near as possible to 22 and let the pace be what it would be. I think the longest string of strokes which were each 22 was eight, before the rating varied above or below 22.
Drag factor was 123 – I usually had been keeping it at about 135, so maybe that was part of the problem.
Today’s Pete Plan rowing session was a speed pyramid. The first 4 intervals up through the 1,000 meter were done with a pace target of 1:56.5. The following 750m, 500m and final 250m were each done at a faster pace than the previous interval. The rest after each interval was an amount of time equal to 90 seconds times the interval distance’s multiple of 250.
The average pace for all 7 intervals was 1:54.6 and that will be used as the pace target for the first 4 of these intervals in three weeks, when this speed pyramid is repeated.
The pace plan was on the Post-It below the PM.RowPro finish screen for today’s speed pyramidSpeed pyramid session report
Today was supposed to be a Pete Plan scheduled day of rest from rowing. So I rested. But I also logged some rowing meters, so as to make one last day’s contribution to the team’s results for this year’s Fall Team Challenge.
I refrained from rowing by exercising extreme restraint on the C2.
It takes a LOT MORE TIME to row any particular number of meters if a person is resting, than if the person is not resting.
The session was set up as 15K, with a target heart rate just 20 to 30 BPM above resting heart rate. The DF was set as low as it would go, which turned out to be 63. I watched a movie and the rowing meters were accomplished by holding the handle on the C2 while moving back and forth sort of absent-mindedly on the rail.
This did not count as a workout, since my heart would have had a higher rate if I’d been strolling with Diane in the park. It was about the same rate as if I’d been strolling alone in the park. (My heart beats faster if I stroll with Diane, because of the effect she has on me.)
Today’s Pete Plan session was done online in the company of two other rowers, located in Denmark and Germany.
The plan for today was a steady distance of from 8 to 15K. I chose 15.
Rating limits were to be from 22 to 25. I aimed for 22.
DF is always rower’s choice. Today it was 135.
The pace was supposed to be at least 10 seconds slower than endurance interval sessions and so I targeted a pace of 2:11.
Pete Plan doesn’t say anything about HR zone, but I targeted HR anywhere between at least 60% to no more than 75% HRmax. The highest it reached was 73%.
Today’s rowing session in the Pete Plan was supposed to be any distance of at least 5K or more done at a “hard” effort level. The only guidelines I’ve found that Pete provides for the “hard distance” are guidelines which give you a lot of room for interpretation, which makes sense because everyone is different and the Pete Plan is not a personalized plan.
So… today’s choice of what to do was a 5K. The target pace I chose was 1:57.6/500m. The reason I chose that target pace is because I recently did a 5K at that pace and it was comfortable without getting into any painful exertion, so I thought it should be perfectly ok to target that pace again and then sprint a little faster during the last few hundred meters. It worked out well and was pleasantly invigorating.
If anyone who is experienced in serious, competitive rowing notices and bristles at or objects to the words “comfortable” and “pleasant(ly)” in this context, I should explain that I’ve never reached for the truly competitive experience of “embracing the pain.” I’ll leave that to those who are trying to squeeze every last drop out of the tank during world championship races etc and be content to enjoy watching them race, when possible and trying to imagine what they are putting themselves through.
There was a 2K warm up finished about 5 minutes before the 5K and a 3K warm down, for a total of 10K today.
What else? Oh yes – DF was 135.
warm up finish screenwarm up reportwarm up charts5K finish screen5K report5K chartswarm down finish screenwarm down reportwarm down charts
Today would have been a good day to go sailing in blue waters because it was Columbus Day. But I’d rather row. Indoors. On an erg. Why on an erg? For the same reason people choose to climb Mt Everest: because its there.
Today’s rowing session was scheduled online because it was a simple, straightforward non-interval session. Nobody else joined but that is probably mostly because I didn’t post it online until an hour before start time and there were already other, shorter sessions scheduled at that same time.
The Pete Plan session designated for today was to be a Steady State session of from 8 to 15K. I stated my reasons for choosing 15K the day before yesterday. But there was a difference between what I did today and the day before yesterday. Same rating range of from 22 to 25. Same pacing of “at least 10 seconds per 500 meters slower” than my endurance interval sessions. But this time, instead of aiming for a pace target, I aimed for a HR target of between 60% to no more than 75% HR max, which is something suggested by one of the guys in the C2 Pete Plan forum which seems very reasonable and sensible in context because if my HR had been 75% HRmax, that would still be about 30 BPM lower than my most recent measure of Lactate Threshold HR.
Other session info: DF was 135.
RowPro finish screen 15K Steady State recovery session.RowPro session reportRowPro session charts. The vertical lines in HR on the bottom chart are where software shows zero heart rate each time the monitor display of HR went blank. If it gets worse, I’ll open the heart strap and replace the battery, but I like to make the battery last as long as possible, until it totally refuses to display heart rate.
