Today’s indoor rowing session was setup as an 11K distance. It was done to the accompaniment of a beeping interval timer which was set for endlessly repeating intervals of 4 minutes alternating with 1 minute. I used the 1 minute intervals as the time during which to increase the pace, but you could do it the other way around if you wanted to spend 4 minutes working and 1 minute resting.
Today I happened to be able to have a few minutes conversation with a surgeon. Those few minutes were relating to exercise. What she said was especially notable in the context of this blog because she said that the single best thing a person can do to help avoid or (if it may be the case) fight off cancer is to exercise.
She said that she herself didn’t start exercising until she was 40, but that now she exercises every day. Her preference is CrossFit, early in the mornings… something not practical for us. But she did mention the rowing machine and said that though she “hates it,” it is the very best thing for elevating a person’s heart rate. She recommends intervals for that purpose. Intervals can be arranged so that they dole out work in small but regular doses throughout an exercise session.
She is a cancer surgeon and sees that scourge up close and personal, hundreds of times a year. So she has that much more motivation than most people who rarely or seldom think about it, to live in a way which will best help her to avoid it herself.
She also said that all the cancer doctors she knows exercise,because they know the high value of exercise to help ward off cancer. She referred to another doctor we have met, an oncologist, who “rides a bike 50 miles at a time” as her personal choice of regular exercise for the sake of elevating her heart rate and getting her to the point of breathing hard for a while each day.
She said that exercising at a level that either elevates heart rate or causes a person to breathe harder and feel like they are working (some people call that approach the perceived effort approach) … is important and that she recommends 30 minutes daily of working out.
So… with all that and more in mind, I decided to make intervals a more frequent part of rowing. The intervals of choice today were 1 minute on and three minutes off – one minute of sprinting sorta fast and 3 minutes of taking it easy.
The session was setup as a half marathon but there wasn’t enough time to do the whole distance. It was a fine workout.
The heart was much more well-behaved in today’s warmdown, than in yesterday’s. Today, it purred along at around 100 BPM while I was rowing with more effort than during yesterday’s warmdown when it wouldn’t drop below 140 BPM.
Yesterday, the heart’s little brain got confused and wouldn’t slow down. Today, the same kind of rowing session was done, but at a significantly slower pace and the heart behaved itself.
Instead of aiming for yesterday’s original target pace of 2:00/500m or faster. today’s pace was targeted at just a bit faster than 2:10/500m. Not as much fun as something faster than 2:00, but a lot more fun than yesterday’s stuck-in-high BPM problem.
You might guess that the above is a view of the finish screen of today’s rowing session. But it’s not. Its a view of the finish screen of today’s warm down. The problem that happened today is discernible if you can zoom in on the heart rate graph – HR wouldn’t slow down, no matter how easy I went during the second half of today’s rowing session or during the warm down…. it stayed above 140.
Today’s indoor rowing session was supposed to be fun but it turned out not to be and I think the reason it was spoiled was because I skipped doing a thorough warmup.
The session was setup to be two intervals of 15 minutes each, according to the requirement for this month’s challenge on the c2ctc.com website. The rules are: “Row two unrestricted reps of 15 minutes with 3 minutes rest between each rep. Start each 15 minute row from a standing start. No rolling starts. Record the distance rowed for the slowest of your 15 minute rows. So you can’t do one easy and one hard. You need best effort for both. ”
The problem that happened was that after the 3 minutes rest, heart rate wouldn’t slow down and remained above 140. Another contributing factor in addition to me not having warmed up sufficiently might be that after the first 15 minutes, I totally stopped rowing, got off the erg and walked around the house for most of the 3 minutes rest time. The heart is supposed to have its very own little brain and I probably should have kept rowing at an easy pace, to avoid confusing that little brain.
So… the results for today’s session won’t be entered on c2ctc.com. I can get a faster result for the slowest 15 minutes of the two, if I do them both again but slower and thereby don’t confuse the heart’s brain into doing a repeat of what it did today. You can see what it did today, graphically, on the graphs among today’s screenshots.
Finish screen view of today’s two 15 minute intervals. Notice that HR didn’t slow down even though the second of the two intervals was extremely slow.Report for today’s two 15 minute intervals.RowPro graphs for today’s two 15 minute intervals. The vertical red lines are occurred when HR became too irregular for the heart strap to measure it.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s two 15 minute intervals.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another 10K done at an average pace of 2:18/500 meters. But this time, there were 8 intervals thrown in the mix. It was a nice change of pace and felt a lot more invigorating, than the recent 10Ks done at 2:20 to 2:18 pace.
Today’s indoor rowing session was a 10K done with the goal of 133 Watts average while rowing a constant pace. That power level of 133 Watts translates to about 2 minutes 18 seconds per 500 meters – which sounds familiar…
There have been no bothersome heart irregularities following yesterday’s 2K time trial fail and today there was only one single blip of irregularity, which can be seen where there’s a vertical line in the HR graphs.
