My recent venture into the Concept2.com forum has been very worthwhile and in the short time since first posting a question there, I already feel that I have some new friends who are fanatics in a healthy way about indoor rowing.
But when one of the guys posed the question, “What is your training plan?” I drew my usual blank on that topic because I’ve never had one, for either the decades of running nor since beginning indoor rowing in 2004. One of them pointed me to an ongoing training thread where he and several others are sharing their daily experiences and it looks like very good reading. Another mentioned several different plan approaches, including but not limited to the Pete Plan and Wolverine plan.
So I’m getting the idea that regular rowing and some kind of structured plan are well worth considering. There is one plan, “the high volume aerobic pace system” which Bob S. suggested might be a good name for what I’m currently doing and it sounds like a good description of how I’ve been replacing long daily runs with rowing.
Today, with no training plan except perhaps the one that Bob suggested (the high volume aerobic pace system), I decided to schedule an online 10K a couple hours in advance and see if there were any others interested.
One other guy, Jesper T in Denmark, joined the 10K. Jesper is a very fast rower who can do a 10K at a pace faster than I recently did a 2K, so I decided to just row mellow and slow. But during the first couple of splits, I noticed that whatever my instantaneous pace was, Jesper’s seemed to be about 10 seconds or a little more than 10 seconds faster per 500 meters. So I decided to pick up my pace a bit, to keep the difference to less than 10 seconds per 500m. And Jesper picked up his pace and I continued to try to keep the difference to less than 10 seconds/500m and it resulted in me rowing a lot faster than “mellow and slow”.
Jesper reached the 10K finish line about 725 meters ahead of me, with a final sprint which I more or less matched by a speed less than 10 seconds/500m slower than his sprint.
After he finished, I thought “that was fun!” and slowed way down for a few hundred meters, as a warm down.
After reaching the finish line, I noticed that I was very close to a season best 10K time and would have made a new SB if only I had kept up the pace and waited to do all warming down until after the 10K.
So that foray into the 10K today makes me want to do another 10K tomorrow and get a season best time. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting results.
Here’s today’s data from RowPro:
Happy trails to you.