Today all systems were still go at launch time, as they were yesterday, and the session went well. The session was a 4x2K R5:00. Target pace was 1:58.1 for the first 3 intervals and a bit faster but I did not, as Pete Marston says, go “as fast as you can go” on the last one. I held back, deliberately, so as to raise the target pace more gradually from one cycle to the next.
The resulting average pace was 1:57.5 and that will be the target pace for the first 3 intervals of this session in the next cycle. Gradual is good.
RowPro 5 (beta) for the Mac finish screen for today’s 4x2K R5:00
Today’s session was a Pete Plan recovery distance of 15K. Everything seemed normal so all systems are go, for tomorrow’s endurance intervals without a scratch like yesterday’s speed intervals.
The effort level for today’s 15K was reduced as time passed, to keep HR about the same throughout.
today’s 15K finish screen15K report. The two splits which show “0” meters for distance are a software glitch with RowPro 5 (beta) for the Mac15K charts
This cat is no doubt getting a lot more satisfaction from scratching his pyramid than I got from scratching my speed pyramid today.
Today’s rowing session was a standard Pete Plan speed pyramid, just like the ones that were done 3 and 6 weeks ago. But this one didn’t feel right, so I scratched it, after getting almost halfway through. From the halfway point on, it was a lot slower than it should have been.
The target pace for the first 3 of 7 intervals was 1:50.6 and then the last 4 were supposed to be done as fast as I could. But as I said it didn’t work out and though I did avoid a literal HD and row the entire distance, the overall average pace was so much slower than the starting target pace that when this is done again in three weeks, I’ll use the same 1:50.6 target pace for the first 3 intervals and see if I can maintain a faster pace for all four of the last intervals.
There were two warmups done because I had to interrupt things to answer an important email, after finishing the first warmup and I became cool again.
first warmup reportsecond warm up reportMessy looking finish screen for the scratched pyramid.Session report for scratched pyramid.
Today’s session almost didn’t happen. The training plan called for a “Hard Distance” of at least 5K today. I set the alarm clock to wake me in time for a moderately early morning wake-up. But sleep had been cut short the night before and I was up late with a rare long session of happy long-distance chatter, so I didn’t get to bed until a couple hours after normal bedtime.
When the alarm went off this morning, I reached out from under the blankets, turned it off and went back to sleep. It was 10 a.m. before I finally roused out of bed. Everything was discombobulated by the late morning start.
So for most of the day, I thought I’d either skip rowing or do an extra day’s worth of recovery rowing. But by late afternoon, everything seemed more or less recombobulated, so I decided to do the shortest hard distance allowed in the training plan, a 5K.
The target pace for the 5K was 1:56.1, which would match the average pace of the next guy ahead of me in the 5K rankings. The plan was to row at 1:56.1 until the last 500 meters and then pick up the pace enough to move up one spot in the 5K rankings.
But when I set up the 5K in RowPro 5 for the Mac (Beta), I discovered that pace boats can only be programmed for paces in whole numbers of seconds. I wanted a pace boat to row against, so I set up a pace boat with its pace to be 1:56 and ended up rowing the first 4,500 meters a little faster than the initial plan of 1:56.1.
The first 2,000 to 3,000 meters felt good and I had to restrain myself from rowing faster than 1:56. The pace boat helped with the restraint. After about 3,000 meters I began to feel a wee little bit of mental resistance, as though part of my mind was starting to say, “hey! this is getting a bit hard, don’t you think? You wanna call it off, maybe, and try again another day?”
But it was just a whisper-y voice, which I gently warned away from the main area of the mind, while focusing on things like how low the distance would count down to by the time the song currently playing ended and the next song began. I guessed that by that time, the distance would count down to between 1,100 and 1,200 meters. I focused on that.
I play the same music playlist for every hard rowing session and that one particular song is played many times in the playlist and is slightly less than 4 minutes long, so I had a pretty good idea of how far I could row at any given pace for its duration. The very last note ended and the next song began as the distance counted down from 1,201 to 1,200 meters. Close enough.
The last 1,200 meters took less time than the next song, because I was able to increase the pace a bit. I didn’t push too hard and avoided fading before the end. The result was a new SB and a one-place move up in the 5K rankings.
Before the 5K, there was a 15 minute warm up and another 15 minutes afterwards for warming down.
warm up finish screenwarm up reportwarm up chart5K finish screen5K report5K chartswarmdown finish screenwarm down reportwarm down chart
