The main rowing session today was done with a group of 8 virtual people. Real people connected to each rower avatar, a little bit like people were connected to their avatars in the movie Avatar. The real rowers for each boat were located in North America and Europe.
There were nine people to start with but one of them had a technical problem and therefore there were only 8 active participants in the session.
It was done as a sort of game whose guidelines were that the turtle (the slowest rower) would begin rowing immediately at the start signal and everyone else would wait and start later. The turtle would pace himself so that he would cover a distance of 5,000 meters in 27 minutes. Each of the faster rowers individually decided what their pace would be and calculated how much time it would take them to row 5K. Each of the faster rowers would subtract their 5K time from 27 minutes and wait at the starting line for the amount of time equal to the difference. The goal was to give the turtle a head start and then catch up to him by the time he reached 5K in 27 minutes. That would leave 3 of the 30 minutes, which everyone would either use for a warm down or whatever they felt inclined to do. Everyone was free to modify what they did to suit their preferences.
The group of eight session was uploaded to YouTube as a screen recording and is available at this link: Indoor Rowing 5K Handicap 30 min 03192020
There were three other sessions today besides the session with a group of eight participants. All data and live, granular clickable graphs can be seen via this link to the online logbook. To see any session’s data and its interactive graph, click the corresponding “+” sign in the “Action” column for the relevant session.
Happy rowing to you!