Though today was a rest day from rowing, I didn’t recline or take a nap like this guy appears to be doing.
Today’s EliteHRV score was very sympathetic which in the case of heart rate variability isn’t good. So I took the day off from rowing. I was slightly active, moving furniture, assembling a piece of exercise equipment and other miscellaneous chores/tasks. But none of it compared to any kind of rowing.
Today’e EliteHRV Morning readiness score.
Heart rate graph of last nights sleep. It was a good night’s sleep, but the sleep logging app says I’m still low on sleep. The way the sleep app puts it, I’m at 75% of what it calculates to be my “3-Day Sleep Target”
Though last night’s sleep was quite a bit more than the night before, last night’s RHR was higher at 53 (vs 51 for night before) and last night’s average sleeping HR was higher at 59 (vs 54 for night before).
Even though I took it easy yesterday, today’s HRV score was lower/worse than yesterday’s. Puzzling.
Though the HRV score yesterday was excellent and I took it easy, today’s HRV score was worse than yesterday’s! I’m missing something here… unless this morning’s lower HRV score was due to last night’s sleep? (See caption of image below)
Perhaps the poor HRV score this morning was due to only getting 5 hours 45 minutes sleep last night, instead of closer to 8 hours?
Because of the poor HRV reading this morning, I only did easy rowing. The goal for today’s rowing was to total at least 1,000 calories, for the Big Burn Challenge (see image below)
Today’s goal of burning at least 1,000 calories while rowing easy was achieved with two pieces: A 10K followed by a 7,700 meter piece. There was a screen recording made of the 7,700 meter piece, for those of you who’d like to row along with it. It is located at this link: Indoor Rowing 7700 meters 01072019
It is now almost 6 hours since today’s easy rowing was finished. When I do “easy rowing,” it is only done by feel. It seemed that 2:20 felt easy, so I aimed for 2:20 and did each of today’s pieces near that pace. But I’m surprised that now, 6 hours later, I’m feeling slight soreness from the rowing! This isn’t “normal”. Is it because I’m “getting old”? or is it because I’m fighting off some kind of bug?
Perhaps the HRV reading tomorrow morning will shed some light on the answer to that question?
10K finish screen
10K report
10K graphs7700 meter finish screen7700 meter report7700 meters graphs
Today’s two main training signals, amount of sleep and EliteHRV morning readiness reading were both “GO” for it being okay to row as hard and long as I wanted. But my body/and or mind felt reluctant. Where exactly is the dividing line between mind and body? Each hugely influences the other…
HRV app said “Go for it!”
Amount of sleep was 7 hours, which was well within the fully rested target zone with 30 minutes to spare, based on recent sleep…
But when I sat down to row, I couldn’t seem to find the accelerator pedal. So I took it easy, sampled a few YouTube videos on the topic of using HRV with training and watched two of those videos in their entirety.
The second of those two videos was titled “Heart Rate Variability Training & Grouse Grind // Vlog 001” and it sort of fit with what I was wrestling with, which was whether to push myself to row vigorously or to take it easy. I decided to not take the advice of the EliteHRV app and to do just a little bit of easy rowing. The guy in the video also did not take the advice of his HRV app, only in his case the app told him to take it easy and rest. Instead, he climbed a mountain. The next day, his HRV score had greatly improved. So it makes you wonder about HRV – there’s more to the picture than just the HRV reading, it seems. I’m curious how my HRV reading will react to my having taken it easy today?
There were no screen recordings made of any of today’s rowing pieces. It doesn’t work well, to make a screen recording of a rowing session while watching YouTube videos…
Here’s a summary list of today’s lackadaisical rowing:
All totaled, today’s calorie count came to a lot less than 1,000 calories.
Today’s Readiness was taking with a grain of salt as I mentioned in yesterday’s post… but the grain of salt was later dispensed with after I received more knowledge about the app from a reliable expert on the matter.
There was no indoor rowing goal at the start of the day, except to do some rowing before eating anything. The goal of burning more than 1,000 calories rowing today was decided upon after rowing a 60 minute session, warming down, looking at the total calorie count and noticing it was less than 1,000. One of the current Concept 2 challenges is called “The Big Burn”. The object of that challenge is to burn at least 20,000 calories on a C2 machine this January.
This morning a friend explained how to easily check to see whether or not the EliteHRV app had detected any “signal artifacts” during its morning reading. If it has detected any artifacts, the reliability of its reading is in question, according to his analysis. Checking simply involves clicking/touching a few particular places on the app, but I had been unaware of that.
The happy news was that there were no artifacts and the morning readiness reading today is worthwhile as a training signal.
Another important training signal, quantity of sleep, was also “GO” for training today, at more than 8 hours sleep.
Resting heart rate was a little high at 55 BPM. That was not a drastic difference from normal and was probably due to the virus that tried to get a foothold the previous day. So I took the RHR as a “GO” training signal also.
There is another possible training signal that I don’t know what to think of yet, so I guess I’ll just have to keep watch on it from day to day to form an opinion. It is a relatively new data feature of the sleep logging app I use (SleepWatch): Average heart rate during sleep. It seems to me that average sleeping heart rate would be influenced by things like how much a person ate before bedtime, how much time passed after eating and before going to bed and room temperature, to name a few things that come to mind. I don’t know if it is as relevant as RHR or relevant at all, as any kind of a training guide or signal.
There is a screen recording of the main piece, a 60 minute rowing session today. For those of you who’d like to row along with it, the link for the screen recording can be found here: Indoor Rowing 60 minutes 01052019
Screenshots for the 60 minute piece are below. It was done at about RPE Level 5. The other two shorter shorter pieces were done at RPE Level 1 and I won’t bother posting anything about them. But they are visible to anyone who has a Concept 2 logbook account and who is logged in to the online logbook.
I didn’t get a very early start today and my legs felt a bit tired, so I put off rowing until after noon. For the sake of getting more critical repair and replacement work on my mitochondria, especially the heart mitochondria, I also put off eating until after rowing was finished. So the time before breaking fast was more than 20 hours, which was a solid 8 hours of special benefit to the mitochondria. Happily, both heart rate & rhythm behaved perfectly.
Today’s rowing was a half marathon done at RPE Level 5, followed by an RPE Level 1 ten-minute warm down.
My “traffic lights” for whether its okay to do anything more than very easy rowing are three. Two of those are numbers: The EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading/analysis of heart rate variability and the total time of actual sleep. If EliteHRV says its okay to train harder today, then as far as that criteria is concerned I can row as hard as I want, for as long a distance or time as is possible. But my occasional irregular heart rate is casting a shadow of doubt on the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading because according to the analysis so far of one who has expertise in the analysis of data – the reading may be skewed to result in being inaccurate, by the way EliteHRV deals with “artifacts” which in my case would be paroxysmal Afib.
So now I’m leaning more to another couple of “traffic lights” as “GO,” “CAUTION” or “STOP” signals for long and/or hard rowing: The amount of sleep I got the night before and, perhaps even more importantly, how I feel after waking in the morning.
This morning, all three of my “traffic lights” were “GO”. (1) EliteHRV, which is the one in doubt, said it would be okay to train hard. (2) I logged plenty of sleep and, even more importantly, (3) I felt good and slightly in the happy zone of emotions this morning. 🙂
EliteHRV Morning Readiness today
Last night’s sleep was 7 hours 25 minutes and I felt very good – happy- about waking and getting out of bed.
So today’s rowing was a half marathon scheduled online about 45 minutes in advance. At about 10 minutes before the appointed time, I checked in and was all alone. So I figured I would either row the HM solo online or cancel it and row it offline. While waiting for the scheduled time to arrive, I started typing text messages and sort of forgot about the online rowing session. When I next lifted my head to look at the computer monitor, there were two other guys who had joined and checked in and they were asking me if I was going to start the session or not because it was a few minutes past the starting time.
So I apologized for keeping them waiting and we started. One of them rowed for about 30 minutes and then disengaged from the online session. The other one rowed 10,000 meters in about 40 minutes and then he checked out also. So I rowed a bit more than the last half of the distance alone.
Today’s rowing was done first thing in the morning, before eating anything. I chose to do it that way, because from some of what I’ve read and heard in lectures on the topic of the body’s critically important mitochondria, there is some particularly important and even critical “repair and replacement” work that the mitochondria only does if a person has been fasting for at least 12 hours. Fasting at least 12 hours from evening meal to next day’s first meal seems, in my experience, to be very helpful for “repairing,” “resetting,” or some such thing with regard to my heart and its rhythm. That particular benefit of fasting is enhanced if a person is also active physically during the period of fasting.
By the time I started this morning’s rowing, I’d already been fasting almost 14 hours and by the time I finished rowing and ate something, more than 16 hours had passed. So – the heart’s mitochondria got the benefit of extra-special “attention and repair” during the last 4 of those 16 hours.
Finish screen for today’s online half marathon.
Report for today’s half marathon.As you can see in this RowPro graph, heart rate sputtered a bit and had several brief periods of irregularity, before it smoothed out and behaved very well.
Concept2 online logbook chart for today’s half marathon.
Today’s EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading allowed for any distance or effort level.
Today’s rowing was mainly for the purpose of catching up on more of the “lost meters” this season. Last season my daily average meters was more than 10K. So far this season the daily average is a little over 5K, so I have a lot of catching up to do between now and the end of the season (April 30th).
More than enough sleep (8 hours 40 minutes) last night contributed to today’s favorable EliteHRV reading.
We got a late start this morning, so there wasn’t as much time for rowing as hoped. The two main indicators I use to tell me if its okay to row hard and/or long distance were both favorable. Those indicators are the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading and whether I got sufficient sleep. The one that I currently give the most weight to is the EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading.
Since both indicators were “GO FOR IT!” I rowed 24,000 meters. None of it was hard rowing but the distance was sufficient that I feel relaxed for sleep this evening.
The four sessions rowed today were, in chronological order: (1st) 2K distance for warmup, (2nd) 10K online with two other guys, at an easy “overdistance” pace (which in this case meant a pace that would raise HR to no more than 55% to 70% of maximum). After the online 10K, there was a (3rd) 10 minute warm down which was 2,000 meters. Later in the afternoon, I decided to do (4th) another 10K and the plan was to do 2 or 3 intervals of 500 meters each and a final interval of 1,000 meters, with the pace of each interval at about 2:00/500m.
A view of the Concept2 online logbook showing the listing of today’s 4 rowing sessions.
But the heart acted up in its strange fashion and became too irregular to register a heart rate for a lot of the time. When it was registering a heart rate, HR was way too high and once got as high as 230 on the RowPro readout from the Polar heart strap. The Apple watch activity tracker, a separate heart rate logging device, showed high heart rate also. So, after a couple of 500 meter intervals at about the target pace of 2:00/500m, I slowed down for the remainder of the 10K. The main goal of completing the distance was achieved. Immediately below this paragraph is a screenshot of data for stroke number 888 through 918 of the strange-hearted 10K.
Strokes 903 through 913 are the highest heart rate I’ve ever seen displayed when my heart acts strangely.
For those of you who like to row-along with some of the rowing session screen recordings, the only session that was recorded and uploaded to YouTube of today’s four sessions was the warm up. It can be found here: Indoor Rowing Just A Warmup 01032019
Below are images of: The finish screen for today’s first 10K, the report and graphs for that first, easiest 10K and then the report and graph for the second 10K, during which heart was being strange.
The above photo shows a view of the back of my wind-swept head when I was standing on the bow of a whale watching catamaran recently. That photo is a screenshot taken from a video of the whale-watching. That video is on YouTube at this link: Gray Whales Rub Against Boat (Seen From UNDERWATER VIEWING PODS)
The whale watching was enjoyable, but it would have been a lot more fun if we had been rowing instead of just idly standing and sitting on the boat.
Today’s EliteHRV readiness score indicated that it was okay to row a lot of meters at virtually any pace.Last night’s 7 hours 15 minutes of sleep contributed to this morning’s good HRV readiness reading.
Today’s rowing consisted of 8 sessions. If you count the warm ups and warm downs as sessions unto themselves, it consisted of a total of twelve pieces. Here is a listing of today’s rowing (see image below):
A screen recording was made of only one of the sessions, a 500 meter piece plus its warmup/down. That screen recording can be found on YouTube at this location: Indoor Rowing 500 meters with warmup/down 01022019
The various sessions were mostly easy, with an RPE rating of 2 or 3, with the exception of the above screen-recorded 500 meter piece, which was done at an RPE level of what felt like 9.
We made a brief holiday trip to visit some of our children. I did virtually no rowing while we were away from home. But we did get to take a little trip in a charter boat and see some whales up close. One of the whales came up out of the water briefly.
It’s been about two weeks since I’ve sat and rowed on a Concept 2 rowing machine. A few hours of the time during which there was no rowing was occupied with a trip on a chartered boat, to watch whales. The whales occasionally came up out of the water, to watch us watching them. Here is the best video I got of the whales coming up out of the water: A gray whale surfacing briefly
I didn’t take any HRV readings for about two weeks. Today’s was the second day in a row of EliteHRV readings, after we returned home so the HRV baseline is just getting started again.
Today’s EliteHRV morning readiness reading indicated caution (see above screenshot) but I was more than cautious and didn’t do any rowing today.
The only indoor rowing I did during the past two weeks was done in my street clothes. I didn’t want to get sweaty, so I took it easy while trying out a strange rowing machine called “Matrix”. It was quieter than a C2, but I’ll take a C2 over a Matrix any day. It felt weird/strange.
The only other machine I tried while on the trip was a Stairmaster step machine. The above screen shows the results of what I did, which burned 150 calories.
Now, for those of you who are wanna-be sleep-researchers, here’s the exciting recent record of heart rate during sleep periods for Dec 27th through the most recent night’s sleep:
7 hours 55 minutes total sleep.7 hours 45 minutes total sleep.4 hours 50 minutes total sleep.8 hours 40 minutes total sleep.8 hours 5 minutes total sleep.9 hours 25 minutes total sleep.
This jigsaw puzzle was completed (finally!) with the motivation that after it was completed and removed from the room, its space would be occupied with a Concept 2 ski erg. If you are wondering how big the puzzle is – its huge, compared to the average size jigsaw puzzle.
The above snapshot is of a finished jigsaw puzzle which occupied a table and took of a relatively large amount of space in the room where the Concept 2 rowing erg is located. It was an extremely challenging puzzle and so it sat, unfinished for quite a while… perhaps extending a long time into the future.
But I had been reading about doing other activities to cross train instead of only rowing and so I told my better half that I’d like to put a Concept 2 ski erg in the place where the jigsaw puzzle was located, whenever she eventually finished the puzzle.
That inspired her to attack the puzzle with analysis and a method involving sorting and even tracing a few outlines. She finished the puzzle, so hopefully we will soon occupy that table space with a ski erg.
No rowing today… and probably none for a few more days… But there was some sleeping done, as you can see in the chart below. I feel very rested… like perhaps I could easily row a season best time in a half marathon.
Almost 8 hours sleep last night. Heart rate was lowest in first half of the night, before an electric blanket was used. After the temperature was boosted with the electric blanket during the second half of the night, heart rate was a bit more elevated so I assume there is a cause and effect relationship.
This morning I drove to the nearest Starbucks to get coffee. A rainbow was showing its splendor while a barely perceptible drizzle misted the air during the walk from parking lot to Starbucks.
There was no rowing again today nor yesterday. Below are charts of heart rate during sleep last night and the night before last.
Last night’s sleep was good quality but the night before wasn’t as good, with Afib and high heart rate most of the night, which I unscientifically attribute to something(s) I ate when we visited a local Ethiopian restaurant.
Last night’s sleep was good – a little less than 7 hours and normal heart rate.Sleep for the night before last wasn’t so good – very high average sleeping heart rate at around 82 BPM, which (as mentioned above) I’m unscientifically crediting to restaurant food.
