Today was the designated Pete Plan rest day. I originally intended to fully comply and do no rowing whatsoever. But I noticed two online sessions scheduled, each only 10 minutes’ duration. The person who scheduled them was an unfamiliar name, Annabel F.
Nobody else had joined yet. So I decided to join those sessions and keep her company rather than leave her the lonely possibility of rowing solo, which might cause her to change her mind, cancel the sessions and miss out having the online RowPro experience.
Between the time I joined and scheduled start time, others joined. Two more women and three more guys. They were all in Europe, except for one besides me who was in the US. So Annabel had more than enough company and I modified my decision to keep her company by rowing the same pace and instead decided I’d only match her pace if she was in very last place by a wide margin and otherwise I would row very slow and make sure that I was in last place by a wide margin behind everyone else. This is a rest day, after all and technically I wasn’t supposed to do any rowing whatsoever.
Annabel was indeed new, to not only online rowing but also to indoor rowing itself. She said she’d only been rowing for a few months.
What happened in both 10 minute sessions was that another of the three women in the session kept pace with the newbie and I watched a documentary film and made sure nobody other than me finished in last place. Did the same thing in the following session.
The only glitch while rowing was that during the first session HR went irregular and PM3 HR display was blank for the first 8 splits. It shows as 85 for those first 8 splits on the session report, but I think that’s because the HR logging algorithm in RowPro 5 for the Mac just uses any valid HR it manages to pick up and then until it gets the next valid HR it keeps it as the “end HR” for each split, no matter how much time has passed between the two HR readings.
During the 9th split of the first 10 minutes the PM3 finally stopped being blank and displayed HR but it was way too high, at around 130 BPM. It gradually settled down, split by split, until it was finally acting normally again in the 18th of 30 splits for that first 10 minutes.
During the second 10 minute piece, HR was totally normal. The glitch may have been related to drinking several cups of strong, black coffee just before rowing. It is nothing unusual because I’ve seen that happen once in a while for a long time. More than a decade. And I’ve noticed coffee is one of the things that can trigger it. But I like coffee and… silly as it may sound … it just doesn’t seem like real coffee without caffeine.
Happy trails to you…