Today’s main piece of indoor rowing was a trial run at a 6K for ranking. I might try it again tomorrow. The original goal was to do it in a time that would move me up to near the top in the 6K rankings for my age group. The guy who was in first place had done the 6K in a time that I didn’t want to try for. The guy who was in second place had done it in a time I thought might be doable, so I rowed at that pace for the first 3,000 meters.
After the first 3,000 meters, I started thinking something to the effect, “how bad do I want this?” and decided to slow down. After I slowed, I looked at the rankings and thought that I should still be able to easily do it in a time that would beat the guy who was in third place, so I picked up the pace a little and aimed for that.
The result was that I placed 3rd (for the time being) in this season’s rankings for the 6K in my age and weight group.
If I try it again tomorrow, I’ll aim for what today’s average pace was and then see what’s left when there are only 500 meters left and see if I can beat that.
The 6K was done online with a guy who was in located in Germany. His name is Wolfram and he had originally scheduled an online 10K. Nobody else noticed and signed up to row with him in that online 10K.
I’d scheduled my online 6K to start 5 minutes after his 10K start time. It’s really nice, to have company when rowing and that might be why he didn’t row the 10K alone and instead joined me in the 6K.
For the first 1,000 meters or so, he paced me at the 1:58.8/500m that I was doing. After that first 1K, he picked up his speed to very impressive paces that I can’t even maintain for 2K and he finished with a sprint at about 1:40/500m. He varied his pace a bit and for brief times his pace was slower than mine. He might have been doing a rowing version of what runners call “fartlek”, which is a Swedish word that means “speed play.”
After the 6K was finished, he said “You saved my evening!” and that’s why I came to the conclusion, noted above, that he wanted some company when he rowed online… even if it was a much slower person such as myself.
I used the beta version of RowPro 5 for the Mac to do today’s rowing and noticed that it failed to label my 6K results as “Verified”. One of the reasons I use RowPro is to make sure my ranked results are verified. But… I’m only in third place and who knows how long that will last so… oh well.
Happy rowing and speed play, if you are so inclined.