Each person had their own preferred pace for this session and none tried to match or race the others.
Today’s rowing session was fortuitously done online again. A guy in New Zealand scheduled the session for what turned out to be a good time for me to row. There were 4 others besides myself, in the countries of New Zealand, Great Britain and USA.
None of the five rowed at the same pace and none of them were racing the others. It was a session where each person rowed to the beat of his own drummer.
But even though nobody’s avatar closely paced mine, it was still very worthwhile to be in the company of others in a rowing session. And I’ve heard many others say that if given the choice they would rather row online with other people than alone. It’s a positive social element.
The Avatar with whom I rowed today wasn’t one of James Cameron’s blue ladies from another galaxy.
Today’s rowing session was 30 minutes done via internet with one other person, Terence P., who was a couple thousand miles away on the east side of the United States.
A few minutes before the session started, Terence typed that he intended to row a pace of about 1:59/500m. I wasn’t feeling energetic and simply answered that I’d be slower.
He pressed for me to specify what my target pace would be and … though I had originally intended to row at a pace of about 2:15 if I had to do it alone … I revised those intentions and replied, “About 2:04 probably.”
He replied that if I would row at 2:02 then he would row with me at that speed. It dawned on me that we were bargaining over the price of how much effort I would invest for 30 minutes, to have a living, breathing person energizing a pace boat alongside.
Pace boats definitely have value. That’s one reason people row via the internet – to have virtual company in the form of the avatars of other people. It’s a lot of incentive to have company, even if they aren’t actually in the same room with you. What you see on your screen is the same thing everyone else sees and everyone is aware of that. You are aware of and watch them and they are aware of and watch you. You are an influence on each other.
So I agreed to the price and said “I’m game.” We’d struck a bargain for the side-by-side company of each other’s avatars on the terms of doing 30 minutes at a pace of 2:02.
Avatars in RowPro come in many colors but so far I haven’t seen any with blue skin.
Houston, we have a problem. We enjoyed the company of each other’s avatars for about 20 minutes until the other guy lost connection with the RowPro server. (The RowPro servers are hosted in Houston, Texas.)
I felt okay at the time Terence lost connection, so I kept my word and maintained the pace of 2:02. When the time counted down to about 1:50 remaining I picked up the speed a little for the last 500 meters. If Terence had been there, he would have appreciated that.
Today’s session report
In addition to the main session of 30 minutes, there was a 100 meter test, a warm up and a warm down. All total, today’s distance was 11,141 meters.
Some people like to hold a pose while they do mindful meditation. But Meredith and Sami practiced mindful meditation while rowing across the ocean for 45 days.
Today and for the past two days, daily distance & effort has been low. That’s because I’m meditating on what was mentioned in a recent post- seriously considering the experiment of spending 18 hours rowing in one 24 hour period. Rowing slowly is appropriate to those thoughts of slow-rowing for such a long time.
If she’s thinking “I’d rather be rowing,” then I agree.
In that same post I also reported that Diane offered her thoughtful opinion, “You’re crazy!” .. to want to do such a thing. Not too long ago, I would have agreed with Diane and said something similar about it being crazy. But now… after trying it for six hours a day for a couple of days, I think that 18 hours might possibly be an intensely exceptional ethereal rowing experience.
After reading about what Meredith and Sami did and after watching their interviews and talks which I found on youtube, in which they talked and answered questions about their 45 days of ocean rowing… I had many epiphanic ..or would it be epiphany-esque? – thoughts relating to what they did, in light of my past 12 years experience using the indoor rowing machine.
My first reaction to hearing that they each rowed for 18 hours and sometimes longer during each 24 hour period, was “That’s impossible!” But then I thought about everything else he said and it made sense and I thought instead, “That’s possible!”
I’ve done several marathons on the Concept 2 indoor rowing machine. My best marathon effort was far from being any kind of a record. It was done as a race and finished in a little more than 3 hours.
I know that nobody, no matter how fast they can row a marathon and no matter what their age, health and fitness, could row for 18 hours a day at the pace at which I’d rowed a marathon in about 3 hours and keep it up for 45 days straight.
So logic told me that they must have been rowing at a much gentler effort in order to continue rowing at that pace 18 hours a day for 45 days. They were kind of like human versions of sea turtles, with the top of their shell upside down in the ocean and their legs up in the air, pushing the oars to keep their shell “swimming” with each oar stroke.
One thing Sami said which proved that they had rowed at a gentler pace than the fastest pace at which I’d ever rowed a marathon was: he burned about 7,000 calories every 18 hours. He compared the energy he needed for each 18 hours to being the equivalent energy expenditure of running two marathons. Of course, a world-class athlete can run a marathon in less than 3 hours and therefore two of those marathons would take less than 6 hours and possibly less than 5 hours.
So the energy per hour that he expended while ocean-rowing for 45 days was quite a bit less than the energy per hour he would expend while running a marathon.
When I rowed my fastest marathon it was about 3 hours and 3 minutes and it burned 2,572 calories. If I had rowed faster, I would have burned more calories. For someone like Sami who’s a world-class triathlete, he would probably burn about 3,500 calories running a marathon race. Two such marathons would, indeed, add up to 7,000 calories. But that is too fast a pace to sustain for 18 hours. The longer the time, the slower the pace must be.
My average calories per hour for my fastest marathon was about 840 calories/hour. Do the math: if anyone could maintain that pace for 18 hours of indoor rowing, that person would burn over 15,000 calories every 18 hours. Eating 15,000 calories of food to refuel every 18 hours would be quite a chore in itself.
Sami said that to eat 7,000 calories every 18 hours, was to eat a LOT of food. But the volume of food he had to eat was kept to an efficient minimum because of the fact that his diet was formulated to give him about 75% to 85% of his calories from FAT, which takes up very little space compared to anything else people can eat for caloric intake.
This led me to conclude that his daily calorie expenditure while rowing was about 390 calories/hour. Using that information and experimenting on the Concept 2 rowing machine by selecting the calorie display and adjusting effort for a readout of 390 calories per hour in order to see what the matching would be resulted in a pace of about 3 minutes 57seconds per 500 meters.
That would result in about 7,595 meters per hour, which is ordinarily a very slow pace for most men or women to row on the Concept 2 for 60 minutes (see the Concept 2 Pace Calculator image below)
In fact, 3:57/500 meters is a pace that even Diane is comfortable at for almost any distance she has rowed.
But for anyone – the longer the duration, the more any level of effort no matter how small manifests itself in the form of physical sensations and mental experience.
Which leads to the next thoughts recalling my experience to date with indoor rowing.
I find myself wondering … what would it feel like?
While rowing today, I watched a documentary of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, which is a tough rowing race of about 3,000 miles. This is not an image from that race, but it has something in common with what I saw of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge documentary – stormy ocean.
Today’s rowing started out to be a timed 30 minute session with a target pace of 2:04 or better, for the sake of ranking it among Concept 2 World Rankings for this season.
But the first attempt was interrupted after about 5 minutes.
The second attempt was also interrupted, almost immediately.
For the third start of a 3o minute session, I decided to watch a video instead and take it easy instead of trying for a fast 30 minutes. So I watched a youtube documentary of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, which also refers to itself as “The world’s toughest row.” Many competitors had to drop out and many of them capsized at least once and had other problems during the race which lasted for about 6 weeks.
It’s just as well that I didn’t make the third start a hard row for the purpose of ranking … because RowPro kinda crashed. Semi-crashed. The program itself kept running, but for some reason it was unable to save the data. So all I could do was make a manual log entry to Concept 2. Such an entry, if entered among the world rankings, is classified as not verified.
Finish screen for today’s session, at the end of which RowPro announced that it had semi-crashed and was unable to save the session.Total rowing distance today was 7,203 meters.
Yesterday’s breakfast of black coffee, toast and protein drink during a break from yesterday’s 6 hour rowing took more time than today’s 30 minute online session.
Today I slept in. Consequently, I rose a couple hours later than the previous two days. So I decided to skip the 50K session today rather than start it so late in the morning and instead did a 30 minute online session.
After rowing for most of six hours today, the afterglow seemed to closely resemble the feeling one has after doing a day’s worth of manual labor.
The inspiration from the website fatchancerow.org continued today, so I did about the same thing as yesterday – another 50K on the erg. And likewise as yesterday, I took several breaks during those 50,000 meters. The longest break was for making coffee and having a protein drink & toast for breakfast.
The feeling afterward was the same as yesterday. Nothing “extreme” like I would feel after doing a marathon of 42,195 meters at a much faster pace. Instead, the feeling afterward was as though I’d spent a day doing manual labor such as working in a field, chopping firewood for 6 hours, loading or unloading a boxcar with sacks of cement, etc. A feeling of oxymoronic pleasant soreness.
Diane would perhaps simply call it “moronic,” since she has expressed her opinion that she thinks I’m crazy, to want to row for that many hours in a day. But she only expressed that opinion regarding my craziness when I told her that ideally, someday, I’d like to try rowing on the erg for 18 hours in one day, like Meredith and Sami did each and every day for 45 days.
Diane thinks I’m crazy, to want to try rowing 18 hours a day for even one day.
I don’t think one day of that is crazy, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I couldn’t find an appropriate image of Fat Chance Row to use, but did find this inspiring painting of two people riding a boat in a stormy sea.
After watching more interviews of Meredith and Sami (the married couple mentioned yesterday who have the website fatchancerow.org ) I got a little inspired by what Sami said about how much time they each spent rowing daily and how many calories the daily rowing required.
He said that the effort expended by each of them in rowing every day for about 18 hours was the equivalent to the energy expended to run two marathons daily. He expanded on it to say that his calorie requirement daily for the 45 days of rowing was about 7,000 calories.
That got me to thinking about things like how rowing marathons in the past which burned 3,000+ calories in a little over 3 hours. Two of them at the same effort as one of those would be 6+ hours for a total of more than 6,000 and less than 7,000 calories.
But… I could row at a much slower pace than those 3+ hour marathons, to burn 7,000 calories in 18 hours.
So today I pre-set RowPro for the maximum distance it would allow for one continuous set distance: 50,000 meters. (I wanted to set it for 100,000 meters, but RowPro’s programmers seem to believe that nobody should do more than 50K in one session on the erg.) The goal was totally controlled by me and it was to do that 50K at an easy pace, no matter how slow and to get off the erg, walk around and take breaks whenever the fancy struck me.
50,000 meters is about 8K more than a marathon. I wanted to see what it felt like and consider the possibility of perhaps sometime in the not too distant future trying the experience of rowing on the Concept 2 erg for 18 hours during a 24 hour period as a way to get a tiny, tiny effort-focused sample of some of the experience Meredith and Sami had every day for 45 days.
I felt okay afterward. No pains today like there have been when I’ve done a marathon with an effort that would elevate heart rate. But even though it was a longer distance than a marathon, because I did it at such an easy pace, it burned about 500 to 700 calories less than when I’ve done a marathon at a pace that was “pushing it”.
The calories per hour rate for today’s 50K amounted to about 383 calories/hour. If that average pace was done for 18 hours, it would total up to about 6900 calories. So… today’s 50K with its breaks included was done at about the effort needed to row the Concept 2 and burn 7,000 calories in 18 hours. It’s something to think about and I may be crazy enough to try it sometime.
A website well worth visiting. The above is a screen shot of part of their home page. They rowed about 18 hours a day for 45 days and tell about it on their website.
Today’s rowing session was about an hour. The goal was to do the preset distance of 13,500 meters and to keep heart rate in the painted-on-screen target zone … except when taking a break. It was primarily a do-the-distance session.
While rowing, I watched a few youtube videos featuring interviews with one or the other of the two people pictured above. Their website is called fatchancerow.org and it focuses on their amazing journey, unsupported, rowing as a team across 2,750 miles of Pacific Ocean.
Each of them spent about 18 hours daily rowing. They each had 6 hours off to sleep, eat, etc. They tell about it on their website and in interviews they each did which are featured on youtube.
What I did today was about 1/18th of what each of them did during their trip.
What Meredith and Sami (listed in alphabetical order) did was inspiring… especially considering that they left their divorce papers, which they took along in a water-proof bag just in case, untouched during and since the trip.
I wonder what it would be like…. to row on the Concept 2 for 18 hours for just one single day? The wheels of thought are turning…
