28 Minutes in a Group of Eight

Today’s rowing session was a couple minutes short of 30 minutes. There was a scheduled online session setup for the time of day I like to row and it was for 28 minutes, which was close enough to 30 minutes to satisfy me.

There were 8 people in the rowing session. Each person seemed to be doing his or her own thing, so it supplied plenty of the desired type of virtual company that I like when rowing online.

Some were doing intervals with active rest, others were doing intervals with motionless rest. No two of them were alike in what they did. As for me, the plan was to row at a low rating of 20 or less for the first 10 minutes, at a higher rating of around 28 the rest of the time and to fit in a very brief spurt of 10 “power strokes” starting when the time remaining counted down to one minute. It worked out as planned.

If you’d like to either view or row along with the screen recording of today’s session it is available at this link: May 22nd, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Only Gabriel and Me

Today’s online rowing session was scheduled in advance for 06:00 AM local time but nobody else signed up for it. All went well and HR was relatively normal and peaceful.

After the session was finished, I exited the session to the “General chat room” for Oarbits. Besides me, there was only one other person showing there and his name was Gabriel. I’ve never chatted or rowed with him, but I’ve seen him a lot, on many different days, in the “General chat” area with a green pennant next to his name.

If you’d like to either view or row along with the screen recording of today’s session it is available at this link: May 21st, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Quick Row Restart Needed

Today’s rowing session was scheduled online by someone else. A total of four people registered for it but only three showed up. There was a problem at the start so we all had to withdraw from the scheduled session and join a different 30 minute online session before everyone had a clear indication of a good connection to the online server.

It can be seen in the HR graph above that heart rate wasn’t acting the way I’d have liked it to, but at least it didn’t go too high and force me to row slower like it has done in some other recent sessions.

If you’d like to either view or row along with the screen recording of today’s session it is available at this link: May 20th, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Confusion on the Stairway

Today’s title is referring to the blog post of May 17th, “Stairway to Heaven.” The HR graph today was a lot more confused than yesterday’s and a bit more confused than on the 17th.

I had to back way off from the planned effort level and as a result had a lot slower average pace than either of the previous two days.

Other than that, everything was wonderful.

If you’d like to either view or row along with the screen recording of today’s session it is available at this link: May 19th, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Relatively Plain

Compared to yesterday’s stairway climbing HR graph, today’s was relatively plain and level.

The graph remained overall level, even with a tiny sprint near the end.

If you’d like to view or row along, a screen recording of today’s session is available at this link: May 18th, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Stairway to Heaven

The rowing session today was a 30 minute piece.

The title is from some thoughts while watching the HR graph climb.

“…‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.”

When HR reached 193 and time remaining decremented to 53 seconds, a songbird seemed to sing that I’d climbed high enough so I started back down the stairway.

If you’d like to view or row along, a screen recording of today’s session is available at this link: Monday, May 17th, 2021 online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Knowing While Rowing

Today’s main workout was 30 minutes rowing online without any other virtual company.

But I was not alone.

While rowing alone you can watch a video or listen to music. I’ve done plenty of those.

Today I became and remained aware of the fact that God loves me. That’s a lot to think about: Endless forests of thoughts, countless streams of thought flowing into an infinite ocean.

God loves you. Think about it.

If you would like to view or row along, a screen recording of today’s session is available at this link: Today’s online rowing session.

Data for any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

John You’re A Machine!

It’s been a while because I haven’t felt like writing. But as mentioned in the most recent previous post, I’ve continued rowing. Not every day. Almost every day.

Lately I’ve been doing online rowing almost daily. I’ve discovered it helps to motivate. By scheduling rowing as soon as possible each day it gets done early and then there’s a bit more of that little feeling of accomplishment.

Therefore, I either schedule an early morning rowing session or join one that someone else has scheduled.

Today’s online rowing session had been scheduled by someone else. It was especially fun simply because quite a few others turned out for it.

Today’s title is what it is, because after today’s session was complete one of the others said “John you’re a machine!” I guess that was sort of a joke because I finished first though I had rowed at the slowest pace. The reason I finished first is because the others made periodic stops for rest as part of their particular training, but I wasn’t doing their training program so I just kept rowing all the time.

So it was a bit like that fabled race between the tortoise and the hare. I was the tortoise and everyone else was a hare.

If you would like to view or row-along with it, a screen recording of today’s online session is available at this link: Click Here

Any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!

Emulating Smooth Was Raggedy Jagged

Beauty is as near as the blush of early dawn light before the sun makes its appearance.

Today my rowing inspiration was from one of my training partners who recently made her workout graphs much more interesting by using a heart strap to add heart rate to her charts.

Compared to my heart rate graphs recently, hers are beautiful smooth lines. You can see one of her beautiful HR graphs immediately below this paragraph.

Notice how smooth is the graph of her heart rate. It mainly varies and makes dips only when her pace briefly dips while she slows for sips of cocoa (that is my surmise).

After gazing at her heart graph for a bit and admiring its smooth line I decided to make this morning’s rowing an emulation of sorts, to try to plot a smooth HR graph of my own. To do that I maintained a steady pace with only small adjustments for the sake of keeping HR in the vicinity of just over 100 BPM. You can see the raggedy, jagged and non-beautiful heart rate graph that resulted for my workout chart, immediately below this paragraph.

Notice how very smooth is the blue line graphing pace for my session today. My pace line looks even smoother than that of my training partner, because I did not make any pauses with their resulting dips. Heart rate seemed like it was ready to gallop, though, if I would just give it sufficient excuse, so I had to continually make incremental pace adjustments in reaction to heart rate suddenly starting to climb or plunge.

Any workout sessions for any day can be seen in detail via this: link to the online logbook. To see a session’s data and interactive graph click the “+” sign in “Action” column for that session.

Happy rowing to you!