Today’s main feature was to do an easy practice of the July 2017 CTC challenge. This is the 5th time I’ve done it this month, but only the first one counted. Second one failed. Third and fourth were experiments with the setup to find the best arrangement within RowPro 5 for the Mac’s “advanced custom setup studio.” Today was practice, which consisted of doing most of the intervals at about 1:59 to 2:00 minutes/500 meters and getting off the machine, to walk around during each of the Stop rests between intervals.
There was a 2K warmup first and then an easy 4K afterwards.
OTW rowing fiasco: The above two photos are from a British news article about the 2012 Boat Race which was spoiled and turned into a fiasco by a couple of unfortunate happenings, one of which involved a member of the Oxford Crew collapsing. In my opinion, Oxford would have won that race if those two incidents hadn’t happened, but God only knows for sure.
After my fiasco yesterday during the second attempt at the July 2017 CTC challenge, I decided to have what I think of as a “steadying session”. A steadying session is whatever I choose for that purpose but it’s main characteristics will exclude sudden sprints followed by sudden stops.
If I’ve been sprinting or working very hard for a relatively long time, I’ve found over the years that it’s best to keep moving at a moderate to easy pace immediately afterwards.
The crew member who collapsed during the 2012 Boat Race appears to be wearing an oxygen mask. You can see the entire article and the rest of the photos at THIS LINK
So today’s choice was to row 15K, do the first few K as warmup, gradually step up the pace throughout most of the rest of the distance, cap it with a bit of a sprint and then use the last 2 or 3K to warm down.
I also intended to modify the setup within RowPro 5 for the Mac, for the CTC challenge “advanced custom setup” of the variable intervals set up for the July 2017 challeng, so that the rests are Stops instead of Recovery. Because I discovered that if the rests are labeled as Recovery then RowPro 5 for the Mac not only records the distance rowed, if any, during recovery rests, but it lumps all the recovery distance in together with the grand total of distance for the active intervals, instead of separately totally active and rest distance, like the more refined and finished versions of RowPro for Windows do. For the CTC challenge, the total distance of only the active portion is needed for challenge entry… and it would be good to have a session report which displays only the distance of the active portion, for “proof” to other challenge participants.
I’ve been told that if the rest times between active intervals are labeled as “Stop” then RowPro 5 for the Mac ignores and does not add up any distance rowed during the rest times.
During today’s rowing session, I neither listened to music nor to a lecture and simply focused on the rowing with most of my mind while letting the rest of the mind wander without getting too far away.
The plan to row a single 15,000 meter session today was discarded, however, after I finished modifying the variable intervals programming within RowPro 5 for the Mac for the July 2017 CTC challenge.
Instead, I decided to slowly and easily row the new variable intervals setup, which had all the rest intervals changed from R (recovery) to S (stop), to see if it would give a total distance result of the Active intervals only, without adding the distance done while resting to the same total.
So I rowed that whole thing and found the same thing as yesterday – it added the distance rowed during the rest intervals to the total for the active intervals. I fiddled around with it a bit more and so as to avoid boring you with the details, I’ll skip the details and tell you that I discovered that once a custom interval setup in RowPro 5 for the Mac is edited and the edited version is downloaded into RowPro 5 for the Mac… the only way to be sure to get the newly edited result into RowPro 5 for the Mac is to close/shut down/exit RowPro 5 for the Mac and then again open/start/enter RowPro 5 for the Mac.
I rowed the whole, edited version again and found that it worked as someone had told me. That someone was Annette Wammen, of Denmark. She said that it would not add any distance done while the S (stop) time was counting down in the Stop intervals.
Altogether, the total distance rowed today added up to 13,832 meters.
Here are the relevant screenshots for today’s rowing:
When it becomes hard to breathe, everything slow down, no matter how much coffee…
Today, for the first time, I managed to set up a variable intervals session with RowPro 5 for the Mac. It involved quite a few attempts to set it up and save the session and a couple restarts of the Mac computer. The final approach that worked was to only enter two lines of the session into the “custom row studio” and then save it, download it into the custom rows, highlight it in custom rows and edit it to add two more lines. Kept repeating that process until all 14 lines were in the custom variable interval setup. As I’ve said more than once before, RowPro 5 for the Mac is a “beta” version and still has a few problems to be ironed out.
Then I tried rowing it. I thought I’d try a different approach from the first attempt (at this c2ctc.com challenge for July 2017 ) and go slower on all the intervals except the very last one, with a target pace of 1:52 for all but the last interval. If I succeeded, it would be faster than the first attempt in which I started out too fast for the first few intervals and had to slow down more than I should have after those first few intervals.
That approach worked well until heart rate became too erratic to display. When that happens, the HR display and HR graph goes to zero. It also becomes somewhat harder to breathe. The mind was willing but the body just barely made it through the middle interval of 1,000 meters and I was feeling a bit lightheaded at the end. There was a 4 minute rest after the 1,000 meters but it wasn’t enough time and I had to give up during the next interval of 750 meters because I couldn’t maintain the target pace of 1:52 due to the fact that it was too hard to breathe.
That’s the first time that’s happened. Usually, it’s my mind that complains first, and tries to get my body to slow down. This time, my body couldn’t get enough air and my mind had to decide to quit trying to go fast.
There are still about 8 days left in the month, so maybe I’ll try again in about a week. And abstain from coffee that day.
I categorized this workout as “boring,” because it’s not fun when things don’t work like they should. A better adjective for today’s workout might be “annoying”.
How much coffee is too much?
I think the catalyst for the irregular heart rate was too much coffee. I had 5 or 6 cups of coffee this morning, instead of the usual one single cup which I’d limited myself to for a while with success.
Here are the most pertinent screen shots for today’s rowing:
Heart rate was erratic from the 6th split to the finish. When it was regular enough to display during that time, it was way too high for the moderate effort.
In fact, you can make a funny face without rowing at all!
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of 12,000 meters with a gradually increasing pace until reaching 7,000 meters, then a step up in pace to 200+ watts for 1,800 meters, a sprint for 250 meters and finally the last 3K was warm down.
While rowing, I watched an entertaining youtube video with the long and wordy title of “Popular Shuffle Dance Music Mix 2017 Best Electro Melbourne Bounce Party Shuffle…” by Dj Daniel Sky, which featured lively, energetic music and video clips of guys and girls (mostly girls) shuffle dancing. None of the video clips of people dancing are longer than about 30 seconds to one minute, so I assume it is a high energy activity that isn’t usually sustained for a very long time.
It was good music to listen to for rowing and easy on the eyes for viewing while multitasking to keep a portion of focus on rowing Watts level.
Though any music at all is often more annoying and distracting than helpful, energetic music tends to be helpful, as long as it’s not playing during the final part of a race, when I don’t want to listen to anything at all because the final race effort requires 100% of what focus I can muster.
For part of the time during today’s rowing, I felt like I was rowing as hard as the young fellow in the above photo appears to be working. That image was found somewhere on a British website called the Newham Recorder, in relation to a rowing event for charity which was done in 2014.
The rowing session today was an interval session arranged to fit the specification of the July 2017 challenge on the c2ctc.com website.
The specifications were: ”
Row the following intervals pyramid (with 1 min rest for each 250m rowed):
Row 250 metres, rest for 1 minute
Row 500m, rest for 2 minutes
Row 750m, 3 minutes rest
Row 1000m, rest 4 mins
Row 750m, 3 minutes rest
Row 500m, rest for 2 minutes
Row 250m and finish
Standing start for the opening 250m. Other six can be rolling starts.
There are no other restrictions.
Record your total time for 4000 metres of rowing. ”
It was fun. I made the final rest after the final 250 meters a longer one, so it served as a warm down.
The above photo is the indoor rowing setup for a New Zealand rower. It doesn’t have anything to do with Watts as a unit of rowing power, but the rower’s name is Carl Watts and he posted this photo for public viewing in a rowing forum under the topic of Rowing Setup – What do you have?
The title of today’s post is spelled correctly. It wasn’t supposed to be the question, “What’s Indoor Rowing?” – it’s just a focus on the units used to measure and regulate today’s rowing. The unit today, like yesterday, was Watts. You can find reading material of the driest sort on watts at this Wikipedia link . There’s a fitness testing model, using a rowing machine and watts at this ergrowing.com page . There are many web pages addressing the subject of watts as a unit of power to measure rowing effort, and you can search for more but the last one I’ll provide a link to is on this fitwerx.com page where a person who was a rower in college wonders aloud about “who has the most power, rowers or cyclists?”
Today’s plan was to row 15,000 meters and to row the first 5K at a slow enough pace so that it would last between 25 and 30 minutes which was the duration of a chess lecture I wanted to watch while warming up. After the first 5K, I increased the rowing effort to 100 watts for the 6th 1,000 meters, then 110 watts, 120 watts, etc until raising the effort to 180 watts when the distance had counted down to 2,000 meters remaining. When the distance remaining counted down to 1,000 meters, I increased effort to to a set of “power 10” strokes and then eased off to warm down for the remaining few hundred meters.
The entire workout was mentally absorbing because I was concentrating on chess during the first 5K and then concentrating on keeping rowing effort within a few watts of target level during each subsequent 1K.
Highlighting the moment on the graph where the set of 10 power strokes happened.
As mentioned yesterday, I saw a cardiologist and he was the opposite of enthusiastic at my thoughts on quitting coffee. I don’t know if he’s right on the most important and relevant points. And I’m not sure what are the most important and relevant considerations with regard to coffee consumption.
Don’t get me wrong about the cardiologist’s attitude toward coffee – he was VERY enthusiastic about thoughts on drinking coffee. He made no comment and didn’t even acknowledge when I listed the first of my reasons for considering quitting coffee, which was that caffeine causes blood vessels to constrict.
Like Diane pointed out … a lot of things can cause constriction or dilation of blood vessels. When we go outside on a very cold day, the blood vessels nearest the surface of the skin constrict the most, to help keep the most important inner parts of the body warm.
But caffeine causes all the blood vessels to constrict. Maybe its an insignificantly small amount of constriction, I don’t know and the heart doctor didn’t venture toward any relevant data or …. as I said earlier … or even acknowledge it.
So after sleeping on it I decided this morning to resume drinking coffee, but to a very diminished degree. So this morning I made coffee and had one single, precisely measured, 5 ounce cup of coffee. I savored it and made it last as long as a large mug of coffee.
Afterwards, all traces of mental fog and suggestions of an impending headache that I’d been having for the past 7 days of abstention totally vanished.
I felt like myself again! I turned that thought over in my mind and considered that I was probably more “purely” myself, without any additives…. if I could recover from the lack of additives, namely coffee and all its population of exotic molecules.
Then the thought came, probably from the science fiction area of my mind which formed during my teenage years of visiting the library and checking out many sci-fi books… the thought that perhaps coffee is more than a mere beverage. Perhaps it is an alien substance that takes over a person’s mind and thereby snatches his body.
If coffee is a body snatcher, it certainly tastes better than I would have imagined body snatchers to taste.
TODAY’S INDOOR ROWING – yes, I did do some indoor rowing today. Decided to do a version of the same 11K as yesterday, to see if my heart would go whacky again and lose its rhythm in an unprofessional, amateur heart manner.
The plan was to start out the first 1,000 meters at about 90 watts effort and then increase the effort by about 10 watts every subsequent 1,000 meters.
The heart rate started out by being bashful and not revealing itself. Which is what happens when its too erratic for the heart strap detector to make sense of it. After a few hundred meters it revealed itself in the 80’s. Then vanished. Then returned, etc.
While it was doing that, I could feel it skipping or whatever it would be best to call it when it is not acting perfect and either doing extra beats or lacking beats when it should have them. It felt like a klutzy, awkward heart. But it sounds best and everyone probably knows what it means if I say it was skipping. Skipping a beat here, skipping a beat there, etc.
While it was doing that, I realized that I was also thinking about Diane. Then I started to wonder if that was the reason my heart was skipping. Sometimes Diane makes my heart skip… her smile, her voice… looking at a photo of her and having memories come flooding into my mind from years ago… doing that can make my heart skip.
Then I started thinking about making the title of this blog post something like, Diane Makes My Heart Skip.
And I was going to do that, exploring thinking about her some more and paying attention the the skipping of my heart and looking for correlations between the thoughts I had and the skipping heart… but after about 1,000 meters, it settled down and skipped only once more, somewhere around 3,000 meters.
From 3,000 meters on, it was steady and reacted perfectly as the wattage was increased every 1,000 meters.
I continued to increase wattage by 10 watts every 1K, until reaching the final 1,000 meters and then I picked up the pace quite a bit and did 10 “power strokes” and used the remaining few hundred meters as a warm down.
After the heart steadied, I had the thoughts about how I felt “like myself again!” with the help of only one small cup of coffee… and the idea of coffee being an alien body snatcher came to mind.
I thought about other things too, but those weren’t thoughts of any note for a blog post. Rowing, like walking, has an influence to stimulate thoughts.
From what I’ve learned about this book, its full of rowing-related humor. The author is not a doctor but he loves rowing.
Today I kept an appointment with a doctor, before doing any rowing. It was my first visit to him and he’s a cardiologist. I thought he’d do an ECG or even have me do a stress test, but … we just chatted. I showed him the results of the 6K piece done yesterday and he said something to the effect that if his brother was doing like I’m doing, he’d tell him to not waste his time with a treadmill test.
He didn’t do an ECG, probably because I told him that my primary doctor had done one. He did, however, request a copy of that ECG so he could look it over.
We talked about coffee also. I told him I’d stopped drinking it a few days ago and he spoke very enthusiastically about coffee and its benefits and said he thought coffee would be perfectly okay for me.
All in all, it wasn’t a day that matched expectations. I’m not sure that I want to resume drinking coffee in the amounts I had been. I’m curious how I’ll feel, if I continue without coffee for a while longer.
I tried to talk with the doctor about levels of exertion and how hard it would be okay to work at rowing. He recommended moderation without being specific and said he thought it would be okay if I raced once a week.
From my perspective and experience, that is still puzzling. I consider the doctor’s appointment today to be a wash. But since he seemed to think I’m perfectly healthy, heart sounds good etc, I decided to allow myself to work a bit harder and race as much as once a week. How long a race? Another point not discussed. But… he’s not a rower, so he wouldn’t have first hand experience of what it’s like to push yourself as hard as you think you can until the last 500 meters of any distance and then try to row even harder, using anything you have left, for the last 500 meters.
Today’s rowing plan was to do 11K and increase the effort level gradually, to gradually bring HR up into the range of 133 to 145 bpm. Heart zone training. But the heart didn’t cooperate after a little more than halfway through. It started varying disproportionately to the effort and going to zero and making a general mess of the chart during the last half, as you can see in the bottom-most chart below.
He’s happy with the results of his race! I was happy with the results of today’s 6K, but didn’t do any shouting, etc. I just savored the “rower’s afterglow”…
Considering I haven’t been training for anything at all, I was happy with the do-over 6K results today. It didn’t change my standing in the Concept 2 Indoor Rowing World Rankings – I’m still in 3rd place (so far) this season- but there was an improvement in time.
The above photo was found on the website for the Mission Bay Aquatic Center in San Diego, CA. If you live in the San Diego area and want to see what they have to offer, you can visit their website through THIS LINK .
For today’s 6K effort I aimed for a slower pace than yesterday’s and saved whatever was left for a harder push during the final 500 meters.
My comment yesterday about there being a possible glitch with RowPro 5 for the Mac MIGHT not be true. I will have to investigate further. For today’s 6K, I didn’t use RowPro 5 for the Mac. Instead, I booted up the Windows 7 machine … updated Windows (Windows always needs to be updated, if it hasn’t been used for a while and it had been over a month since it had been used) … and used RowPro for Windows.
After uploading today’s 6K to the Concept2.com online logbook and then entering it into the Concept 2 Indoor Rowing World Rankings… I checked to see if the Windows version of RowPro had tagged the session as being verified. It had not!
So I searched the FAQs for any relevant information on that problem and found that it has to be verified by first getting a verification code for the session from the erg’s PM. It used to be automatic, but since their website was redone, some things are different. So I looked into the PM, pressed the special button and the verification code appeared. Then I entered the 16 digit verification code into the right place on the Concept 2 log entry and … voila! It is now an officially verified 6K in the 2017 World Rankings.
The whole piece felt very good, even though a part of the subconscious mind started to grumble about the effort level a few times during the session. But the discomfort was all in my mind and it worked out well enough that I already want to do another one and see if I can improve the results. Second place is tantalizingly near!
Session screen shots follow.
Finish screen after the 6K.Session report for the happy after-glow 6K.Another graph for today’s 6KFinish screen for the warm down. I did a warmup, but it was only 750 meters at a super slow pace, so I’m not bothering to show anything for the warmup.Warm down session report.
There are quite a few people in this photo of an indoor rowing competition. But indoor rowing is a small world, compared to other sports and many people have never even heard of it. Online rowing with a Concept2 indoor rowing machine is an even smaller world and its not always easy to find anyone who wants to row with you online, when you are wanting to do so.
Today’s main piece of indoor rowing was a trial run at a 6K for ranking. I might try it again tomorrow. The original goal was to do it in a time that would move me up to near the top in the 6K rankings for my age group. The guy who was in first place had done the 6K in a time that I didn’t want to try for. The guy who was in second place had done it in a time I thought might be doable, so I rowed at that pace for the first 3,000 meters.
After the first 3,000 meters, I started thinking something to the effect, “how bad do I want this?” and decided to slow down. After I slowed, I looked at the rankings and thought that I should still be able to easily do it in a time that would beat the guy who was in third place, so I picked up the pace a little and aimed for that.
The result was that I placed 3rd (for the time being) in this season’s rankings for the 6K in my age and weight group.
If I try it again tomorrow, I’ll aim for what today’s average pace was and then see what’s left when there are only 500 meters left and see if I can beat that.
The 6K was done online with a guy who was in located in Germany. His name is Wolfram and he had originally scheduled an online 10K. Nobody else noticed and signed up to row with him in that online 10K.
I’d scheduled my online 6K to start 5 minutes after his 10K start time. It’s really nice, to have company when rowing and that might be why he didn’t row the 10K alone and instead joined me in the 6K.
For the first 1,000 meters or so, he paced me at the 1:58.8/500m that I was doing. After that first 1K, he picked up his speed to very impressive paces that I can’t even maintain for 2K and he finished with a sprint at about 1:40/500m. He varied his pace a bit and for brief times his pace was slower than mine. He might have been doing a rowing version of what runners call “fartlek”, which is a Swedish word that means “speed play.”
After the 6K was finished, he said “You saved my evening!” and that’s why I came to the conclusion, noted above, that he wanted some company when he rowed online… even if it was a much slower person such as myself.
I used the beta version of RowPro 5 for the Mac to do today’s rowing and noticed that it failed to label my 6K results as “Verified”. One of the reasons I use RowPro is to make sure my ranked results are verified. But… I’m only in third place and who knows how long that will last so… oh well.
Happy rowing and speed play, if you are so inclined.
