Month: October 2017

Yesterday evening, I took Zyrtec with dinner.  Not because I’ve been having any allergies, but because it seems to enhance staying asleep.  I’d had several days in a row of waking up too early and had been accumulating excess sleep debt.

The Zyrtec worked and instead of sleeping from 4 to 6 hours, I slept almost 10 hours.  All caught up on sleep, with some to spare.  But I felt sluggish and slow, as an after-effect of Zyrtec, which I rarely take and therefore am not used to.

Today’s indoor rowing session was 30 minutes done online with a few other guys.  My goal was the same as for the past few days:  to adjust the effort throughout the session, so as to keep heart rate near the target heart rate of 130.  If you read the recent blog post about choosing that HR target, you know that I used a modification of Dr. Philip Maffetone’s “The 180 Formula,” to arrive at the aerobic target of 130.  Upper boundary is 140 and lower boundary is probably around 114 to 120.

When it came time to row, it seemed that I had to row with greater effort at a significantly faster pace, to raise heart rate to the 130 BPM target zone.  Afterwards, I used the RowPro 5 for the Mac analysis feature, to compare today’s 30 minutes to yesterday’s.  The results of the analysis are the last two screenshots below.

Happy rowing to you, at whatever heart rate.

Today’s main indoor rowing was a 30 minute online session done with a target heart rate.  The target was the same as it had been in the 30 minute session on September 29th. But the average pace was faster by -1.4 seconds/500 meters.  The session burned 8 calories more than Sept 29th to go at that faster pace.  The increase in power was +3.2 watts.

I guess that’s good improvement.  But since it’s from one day to the next and I’m no expert, it might not even be statistically significant.  Therefore, I will “ask” RowPro.  RowPro has a feature which can be used to compare two rowing sessions that are similar (either both the same distance or time duration.)

Okay, here’s what RowPro says and it doesn’t seem much more enlightening that what is in the above two paragraphs. But it is confirmation that there was improvement since two days ago.

But even if it isn’t especially enlightening, at least you saw a demonstration, immediately above this paragraph, of the kind of results you can expect when RowPro 5 for the Mac compares two similar sessions.

Happy rowing and pleasant surprises in session comparisons, to you.