The heart strap I used, laying on the rail I rode. It is an “ancient” Polar heart strap without Bluetooth.
Today’s rowing was 10K followed by a 2K warmdown. The 10K was done with an effort level monitored and adjusted, to keep heart rate within the range of 120 to 140. The first 2500 meters served as a warmup by keeping the heart rate between 100 and 120 during that distance.
It was a heart rate train(ing) session. The difference between a heart rate training session and a session where you can see your heart rate but are not doing heart rate training, is simply that in a heart rate training session you adjust your effort to keep your heart rate within predetermined upper and lower boundaries.
The 10K was scheduled well in advance (well… about 3 hours in advance..) but only the lonely rowed this 10K.
In other words, nobody else signed up for it. A fairly frequent occurrence.
For entertainment, I tried a couple of videos but neither of them seemed at all suitable. And, when I thought about it, I didn’t want to watch anything or listen to any music, so I rowed in a silent room which was filled with the sounds of two fans and the rowing machine’s assorted sounds. It seemed entertaining enough, to focus on the effort level and heart rate biofeedback, for the entire 10,000 meters.
The above image was found on a page of the Cafe Press website. (It’s not a rowing website, they just sell shirts and stuff.)
Total distance rowed today was a little more than 8,000 meters. The main piece was 30 minutes, with a goal of staying as near as possible to 130 BPM. The 30 minute session was done online, but the other two guys who had signed up for it didn’t show up so I rowed it alone.
That heart rate target was chosen as a result of reading a passage in a book titled “The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing,” by Dr. Philip Maffetone. He writes extensively about heart rate training and recommends doing all workouts in what might be called the heart rate sweet spot. He doesn’t call it that. He calls it something like the “aerobic heart rate zone” and has a formula called The 180 Formula for calculating that HR zone.
I’m sure the formula works well for the people with whom he worked, who were mostly if not all probably 40 years old or younger. I’m guessing about the assumption I made in the previous sentence.
But when I applied the formula to myself, using what he calls an “honest assessment” the result is 124 BPM. That seems quite a bit too low. It’s definitely not “hard” rowing or even “medium” hard.
So I thought about it and modified it further, using my own method which doesn’t have a name. So I will pause the typing, and think about it…
Okay, I didn’t come up with a name for it. But my method is to modify Dr. Maffetone’s 180 Formula by using a value for age arrived at after using the 220 formula in reverse, to solve for an “age value” based on a person’s maximum heart rate or the best guess as to a person’s maximum heart rate.
The 220 formula assumes that a person’s maximum heart rate = 220-x, where x = a person’s age in years.
But the 220 formula is based on the assumption that a person is completely sedentary and that the person’s HRmax decreases by 1 BPM per year.
And though Dr. Maffetone uses 180 instead of 220 in his approach, he also assumes that a person’s maximum HR decreases every year, though his approach seems to assume that it decreases by LESS than 1 BPM per year.
The unknown amount of decrease in maximum HR every year seems to be the problem. I’ve read that if a person is “active” instead of sedentary during any years of life, that person’s maximum HR will not decrease during those years. So for every year during which I was “active” every day of the year, my maximum HR did not decrease that year. You can save me a lot of writing by thinking about that on your own.
So … if my maximum heart rate were, say, 180, then my “age” in years according to the 220 formula would be 220-180 = 40 years old and that would represent 40 years of non-sedentary life.
I don’t actually know what my maximum heart rate is. The highest I’ve seen it go was 191 and that was 8 or 10 years ago. The day before yesterday, when I rowed at a medium hard effort level for 30 minutes, it went as high as 176 before I slowed down during the last 20 seconds. I was not breathing hard, so I assume it would have gone higher, to somewhere above 180 but probably less than 191, if I had continued to sprint for all of the last 20 seconds… which would have resulted in me breathing hard and possibly even starting to “gasp” or “wheeze” for breath. (The reason I slowed down from a sprint two days ago and rowed at a very easy pace during those last 20 seconds is because I didn’t want to get to the point of needing to breathe really hard, etc)
So I used 180 as the HRmax value in the 220 formula when “solving for age” and then used the value of 40 instead of my chronological age of 71 in Dr. Maffetone’s 180 Formula, which resulted in a value of 130 for “maximum aerobic heart rate” target. If I had assumed and used 190 instead of 180 as my current HRmax, the Maffetone 180 formula result for me would have been 140.
I thought 130 was a safe and conservative value as the target and tried to adjust effort level to keep the HR graph as “flat” as possible near the value of 130 while being very happy to have an imperfect, wiggly, more or less horizontal line.
finish screen for 30 minute piecereport for 30 minute pieceRowPro graphs for 30 minute pieceOnline logbook graphs for 30 minute pieceOnline logbook graphs for warm down.
The above image was found in an article on the Ithaca College website. The image was chosen because of the name of the boat, which you can see in white letters painted on the boat and located between the coxswain and the stroke rower.
Today’s indoor rowing goal was to simply act upon the resolution to do more than 10K. First, there was a 10 minute warmup, followed by 30 minutes online with two others and finished with a 4K warm down.
All totaled, the distance rowed amounted to around 12K.
Finish screen of the main 30 minute online piece30 minute reportRowpro’s graphs of the 30 minute sessionConcept 2 online logbook’s graphs of the 30 minute sessionConcept 2 online logbook’s graphs of the warmupConcept 2 online logbook’s graphs of the extended warmdown. 4K was chosen for the warmdown, to bring total distance to above the day’s minimum goal.Summary of today’s rowing
Happy accomplishment of rowing resolutions to you.
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of three online sessions of 30 minutes each, followed by a warm down. There was only one warm down session and it was after the third of the three 30 minute sessions. That 3rd of 3 was the only one that needed a warm down. The first two 30 minute sessions were done at a very easy pace.
Today’s title was chosen after I noticed a comment made in the online rowing chat room, by one of the other rowers. I didn’t immediately see the comment, because as soon as the session was over, I typed the words “gotta warm down immediately, bye all”, clicked “Send”, snapped a screenshot and clicked the “Finish” button to exit. I know from recent experience that when I get the heart rate up very much with a sprint of any sort, I have to keep rowing in an immediate warm down or the heart will get wacky and either start beating too fast or go into skipping mode.
So I warmed down immediately and everything has been fine with the ticker.
But later, when I looked at the screenshot that was snapped just before I clicked the Finish button to exit the online session, I noticed that another rower had noticed how I’d sprinted a bit, near the finish. His words, “monster finish john” made me feel good, so I will try to remember to thank him for it the next time we’re online in the same session.
I started the final sprint when I noticed that the countdown screen showed around “40” and my brain had forgotten that the countdown for this session was time, not meters. So I increased the pace to around 1:45 and I looked, to watch as the meters counted down to 0 but … it only counted down to something in the 30s. The rational part of my mind was off in space somewhere and the part of brain connected to what I was seeing was just in a sort of automatic mode. That same part of my brain was mildly surprised that it hadn’t counted down to zero yet and I pulled harder, increasing the pace to about 1:40 and holding it at 1:40 while staring at the countdown, to see it go to zero. It should have decreased by about 10 per stroke, but it was only decreasing by about 2 per stroke. Then the rational part of my mind came back to join the audience looking out through my eyes at the monitor and I remembered that it was a timed session, not a distance session and that what I was looking at was seconds, not meters counting down.
So I thought… I don’t want to keep pulling at 1:40 for another twenty seconds, and eased back to a warm down effort level for the last few seconds.
You can see a picture of it in the session graph.
This blog post is categorized as both boring and fun, because the easy 30 minute sessions were boring but the hard 30 minutes was fun (and mentally absorbing). It is also categorized as both easy and hard, because of those same different effort levels.
Finish screen for the 3rd of today’s three 30 minute online sessions.Report for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.RowPro software graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Concept 2 online logbook graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Warm down graphsSummary listing of all of today’s rowing results.
The above image was one of the first results when I searched using the terms “various indoor rowing” and it is from a Hong Kong Indoor Rowing website.
Today’s indoor rowing was a few sessions offline and two sessions online. The effort level varied from easy to hard.
First there was a 10 minute warmup, then a 30 minute online session. Then there was a hard 4 minute session for entry in the rankings. After that, there was a 10 minute warmdown and then a “just row” mode warm down.
Finish screen for the online 30 minute sessionreport for online 30 minutesOnline 30 minute graphsFinish screen for the 4 minute session, which was entered into World RankingsReport for the 4 minute session4 minute session graphsThis is a summary listing of all indoor rowing I did today. The other 3 session reports aren’t worth bothering to post.
The above image was among the very first results when a search for today’s blog post image was done using the search terms “sunday indoor rowing”. It is a photo on a Dublin (Ireland) High School website and the page includes the three words used in the search.
Today’s rowing should have been interesting and requiring a degree of mental focus, but instead it was boring and got almost no mental focus. It was a 10,000 meter distance that was scheduled online almost 3 hours before start time. But nobody who rows online noticed it or was able to join it at the scheduled time.
So I rowed it alone. Rowing alone doesn’t have to be boring, but other things on my mind, plus the subject matter of a documentary I chose to view while rowing… all seemed to have a summary effect of suppressing enjoyment of the rowing.
On the positive side, the distance was accomplished and heart rate was elevated slightly for almost an hour, which is a health benefit.
10K finish screenThis report is accurate with no software glitches. The unusually long Time recorded for Split # 11 is because the documentary I was viewing stalled. I had to troubleshoot the Apple TV and finally had to shut it down and restart it, to get the documentary to resume playing.You can see the interruption very clearly on the top graph, where the 11th split is listed.
This image was among the top results when I searched the net for images using the terms “saturday indoor rowing”. It was attributed to a website called Iron Company Fitness but when I followed the link to that site, I couldn’t find the article that corresponded to the picture above… so I don’t know the story behind the photo. It seems to tell a story of a couple guys who did some hard rowing…
Today I spotted an online session scheduled at a time that would work out for me to join. It was a 6K and I didn’t have enough time in advance to warm up, so I just started out slowly and then picked up the pace a bit after 1,000 meters.
The other guy said he felt low energy and “blah” but he rowed quite a bit faster than I did and inspired me to row faster than I would have alone.
After today’s online 6K session, we did quite a bit of “chatting” in the chat room and then I forgot to take a screen shot of the finish view. The above screen shot is the finish view of today’s 20 minute warm down.Session report for today’s online 6KRowpro graphs for online 6KConcept 2 graphs for online 6KConcept 2 logbook graphs for the 20 minute warmdown
Today’s indoor rowing was scheduled online, one hour in advance of start time. But there was nobody else who joined in.
It was done at a leisurely pace that most younger rowers would find boring. I watched a documentary during the session, so a leisurely rowing pace was best, so as to have maximum mental focus available for the documentary.
The above photo was found on a site called WoodenBoat Forum where the subject seems to be the building of wooden boats.
Today’s activity was more indoor rowing. It was done online, in the hopes of making up for the lack of water by having some company. But I didn’t schedule it enough in advance (only 30 minutes) for anyone to notice it and join.
Other than that, it was fine and the distance was done without incident or interruption.
The above photo has absolutely nothing to do with the indoor rowing session that I did today. It was the second image that Bing presented when I searched the web for images using the search terms, “raise the heart rate a little bit for a little while with indoor rowing” . The Microsoft (Bing) search engine found it on a website called The Lakeside Collection, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any kind of rowing.
That’s all today’s indoor rowing was about (what the title says). So I started out at a high enough effort level to raise HR above 133 for a while, then eased back. I was watching a documentary video which lasted about 90 minutes. After the documentary was over, I quit rowing. A grandiose total of 887 calories was burned… but who’s counting?
