Hints of the early light of dawn were glowing through the window blinds when I woke this morning. The hint of a glimmer of pre-sunrise glow didn’t cause me to wake.
A finger of a more mundane reason flicked the wake-up switch in my brain. Let’s name it a call of nature. Definitely mundane.
Precisely a few minutes later, I returned to bed with hope of getting another 90 minutes of sleep.
Precisely less than ten minutes after returning to bed, I was wide awake after thinking about the day and realizing that I had some chauffeuring to do in a few hours. The chauffeuring appointment would limit or eliminate the possibility of a morning workout was another realization.
Yen for sleep vanished as I checked the mental dashboard and realized everything would remain in balance if I got out of bed immediately and began the day’s workout right away.
So that’s what I did. Almost. I went directly to the SkiErg right away. But I was thirsty and my water bottle was empty. So I detoured to the water cooler. Filling the water bottle emptied the water cooler. So I went to the garage to get five jugs of purified water. Then I noticed a spider. So I went to get the vacuum cleaner and dispose of the spider. Before turning on the vacuum cleaner, I realized I could save the spider’s life by capturing it in a jar. So I did that. Then turned back to refilling the water cooler. After refilling the cooler I finally went to the SkiErg and set it for 250 Calories. 250 Calories was okay yesterday, so I thought I’d try it again today.
The SkiErg session started slowly and sleepily in spite of the fact that I was wide awake. For the first 150 Calories on the SkiErg, it seemed luxuriously enjoyable to keep the stroke exaggeratedly slow, with each stroke’s drive time lasting about a second or even longer than a second.
The SkiErg pace very gradually quickened during those first 150 Calories. Once the remaining Calories counted down to 100, it felt like the most natural and logical thing to do to indulge in some moderate intervals of 10 calories per interval. So that’s what I did and there was a satisfying harvest of endorphins.
The SkiErg session whetted my appetite for labor-derived endorphins, so I set the rowing machine up for a 10,000 meter piece. On the other monitor, I played a screen recording of the 10,000 meter session I’d rowed and uploaded to YouTube on December 27, 2017. It is one of the more popular of the screen recordings I’ve uploaded to YouTube for people to row along with and has been viewed 254 times so far. I’m guessing it is popular because it includes 8 intervals and intervals make most rowing sessions a lot more interesting.
So I got a natural emotional lift and boost to the spirits so to speak from this morning’s workout. I’ve been enjoying it all day, until late in the day/early evening when I heard some extremely weird news from a close relative who shall not be named here. It was borderline insanity type of news and it had the opposite effect of this morning’s workout. It put a heavy damper on my spirits. A black cloud. But I’m in the process of dealing with it and shooing the black cloud away because black clouds are pollution of the worst sort and I prefer joy and light.
Screenshots of today’s workouts follow. If you look at them closely, the spikes in the heart rate graphs during the rowing session can be disregarded because HR seemed to be normal and that kind of thing – if it happens on the rowing machine but not on the SkiErg and the heart is otherwise behaving normally with regard to rate range – I attribute to the more analog heart rate signal on the rowing machine. (The SkiErg uses a more digital blue tooth signal instead of an analog signal for transmitting heart rate and on any given day, the SkiErg has far fewer, if any heart rate spikes.)
Happy rowing to you!
Photo credit: by Masa Sakano and found on his site on Flikr.