Today’s training plan session was supposed to be a “steady distance recovery”, from 8K to 15K, at rating of from 22 to 25. I chose 8K at r22. DF was 135. No warmup or warm down. Straps were loose as usual.
There were three targets: HR, rating and pace. Highest priority was to keep HR anywhere below 75% HRmax and that required little effort. (Pun intended.)
Second highest priority was to keep rating as near as possible to 22 and it is what got most of the portion of attention given to rowing.
Lowest priority was pace. The pace target was to average about 2:18, but most of the time I paid no attention to it, while my mind wandered in various directions and visited parallel universes. Toward the end of the session I noticed that pace was quite a bit faster than 2:18 and seemed to want to stay in that area, so I brought the average pace down by using legs only and not quite letting my legs straighten 100% with each drive. You can see on the chart that it brought the pace down quite a bit, to do that.
RowPro 5 for the Mac (beta version) note: disregard the pace of 1:39 displayed in the session report for the last split. That is incorrect because the algorithm seems to be using 300 meters instead of the correct value of 200 meters for that last split.
Apple watch note: As I said in an earlier post regarding the apple watch workout app when it is in rower mode, the data isn’t really useful for serious rowers because there is virtually no data except elapsed time from the time you start it until you stop it on the workout app. It also gives an estimate of calories burned, based on an algorithm using HR, body weight and I don’t know what else. The calories burned are usually in the ball park and might be useful for someone who needs that figure for purposes of dieting. It also continuously records HR until the workout is stopped, instead of only sampling it once every 10 minutes when the HR app is not being accessed.
Don’t get me wrong – I like the app and very much appreciate that a rower category is included among choices of workout types. The reason I use it, is so that the “activity” app on the watch will give me credit for doing some kind of a workout and say nice things to me about it. Anyway – – the note regarding it today is that I did use it to record the workout activity but forgot to start it until I’d been rowing for a while. When I remembered, I didn’t have to totally stop rowing, to initiate the logging of a rowing workout. All I had to do was take one hand off the C2 handle and keep rowing while holding the watch near my mouth and say “Hey Siri, start a rowing workout.” Three seconds later (there’s a ready-set-go type of 3 second countdown when it starts recording a workout) it was recording the rowing workout and continuously displaying HR.
After the 8K I forgot to stop the rowing workout on the watch. About 15 minutes later I stopped its recording and it had registered 325 Calories and an elapsed time of 49 minutes. That calorie figure looks about right, for the portion of rowing and then the non-rowing afterwards which included standing, sitting, walking and changing clothes.
Happy trails to you.