Author: dad

Sometimes I think of my heart as being like a horse.  Having a mind of its own and relatively simple minded, but it wants to get along with me as well as it can.

Today the horse was wild and crazy or agitated.  A possible reason for its agitated behavior might be because of a chemical unbalance due to having taken a dose of a supplement called “NOS”.

The bottle was a gift to me, years ago, and is supposed to help produce a natural and helpful amount of Nitric Oxide.  I haven’t taken any for quite a while and had forgotten about it until I spotted it on a shelf today and decided to take a dose to see if it would help me to row faster while not seeming to work any harder.

After taking the NOS, heart rate went crazy irregular and its rate went way too high.  It hadn’t bothered me that way before.  I looked at the expiration date on the bottle and it was sometime in 2010.  Did it change into something else, in the years since 2010?

I couldn’t undo the fact that I’d swallowed them about 45 minutes earlier, so I  tried some rowing as therapy to calm the horse.

Three short sessions had more appeal than one longer session so I rowed three 5Ks. The first 5000 meters didn’t seem to help (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the first 5K).  Neither did the second one (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the second 5K).

But somewhere early in the third 5K – after about 1200 meters- the horse finally calmed down and returned to its normal regular and steady behavior  with a normal BPM.  It still seemed to be a bit agitated, because it seemed to speed up a bit too quickly when I would increase the effort level and when I GREATLY decreased effort level, it didn’t seem to slow as much as it normally would, but it felt quiet and calm in my chest instead of feeling “fluttery” and “agitated” like it had felt before and so it was almost “perfect” and resulted in a perfect line graph with no vertical lines disrupting it.

Third time was the charm, for calming the horse.

In the graphs below which show vertical lines in the heart rate graph, those vertical lines happened each time heart rate was too irregular for a reading to be calculated and displayed. You can clearly see that the vertical lines disappeared from the heart rate graphs during the last 3800 meters of the third 5K session.

The three 5K sessions were recorded and uploaded to YouTube as screen recordings and will be active either late tonight or early tomorrow at these links: “Indoor Rowing 5K 1 of 3“, “Indoor rowing 5K 2 of 3” and “Indoor Rowing 5K 3 of 3“.

Happy rowing to you and your calm horse.

Since I took five junk-food loaded days off from indoor rowing, I’m still playing catch-up and therefore rowed another half marathon today.  It was another 1200+ calories toward the Big Burn challenge which is one of several that Concept 2 has to choose from during this month of January 2018.

The half marathon was done with a target pace of about 2:22 and included 16 intervals of about 30 seconds each.

A recording of the session is called “Indoor Rowing Half Marathon with 16 Intervals” and is in the process of uploading to YouTube.  If you click on that link for the video today, it won’t be active yet because it will not be done uploading before I go to bed tonight and probably won’t be “active” until sometime tomorrow (January 16, 2018)

Happy rowing to you.

So I went for five days without any rowing, due to lack of a rowing machine while traveling.  And during those five days, all routines were disrupted.  Too much sitting.  Daily junk food, including 5 large bags of very salty potato chips.  Coffee all day, instead of only in the mornings.

Perhaps as a result, my heart started acting weird and getting irregular again, in the last hours of the 5th day.

So today I did a half marathon, for the purpose of helping the heart to flush itself out and return to normal.  That’s the working theory, at least.  It seemed to work because heart rate was irregular before the HM started and was not regular enough for the heart strap to be able to display it.  After rowing for less than 200 meters at a very easy pace, heart rate became regular enough to be measured and displayed, but was about 130, which was way too high for the effort.  When its acting normally, it will start out 20 or 30 BPM slower at that effort – somewhere a little above 100.  But as I kept rowing, it settled down and acted more and more normally.  It’s feeling and acting normal now, after the half marathon.

The HM was done at an easy pace, with intervals starting about every 1,241 meters.  The intervals were varied paces and lasted from about 30 seconds to around a minute each.  Most of them were about 30 seconds.

The half marathon rowing session is posted to YouTube and is called “Indoor Rowing Recalibrating Heart With A Half Marathon”

Happy half marathon rowing to you.

Today was the first day with any rowing since January 8th.  There wasn’t enough time for a normal session, but fifteen minutes was better than nothing.

Today’s rowing session was also recorded and posted to YouTube with the title “Indoor Rowing 15 Minute Quick Session”

I did a few intervals during the 15 minutes, with the last interval starting with 4 minutes remaining in the session, and tapering down all the way to the finish.

Happy and hopefully longer rowing sessions for you.