The above photo of a novel method of rowing is for your amusement. Laughter is good for the soul and for anything that may be ailing you. 🙂 The photo was found on a website called Flickriver.
Although I could probably do 10K or more of gentle rowing today, it is going to be skipped again because there are still tinges of pain left from the cinder-block catalyzed back pain of yesterday.
Today’s rowing is classified as “Boring Workout” because there was no rowing. 🙂
This is a screenshot from a video on a rowing website called Rowing Machine Pro. The video demonstrates some stretches to do, to help alleviate back pain.
Yesterday I lifted some cinder blocks, to use as temporary modification for Diane’s desk. My back started to hurt a little bit yesterday and … when I sat on the rowing machine today, it started hurting a lot, before I even picked up the handle to start any rowing.
So today’s rowing was cancelled. Hopefully, everything will be better tomorrow. 🙂
Today’s indoor rowing was 10K that had been scheduled online, about an hour in advance of start time. I was hoping for company, because I didn’t feel like rowing. Nobody joined, so I rowed in a lackadaisical manner, while watching a couple videos.
There was no goal or HR target, except to finish the 10K, which was done, hooray.
Finish screen for today’s 10KReport for today’s 10KRowPro charts for today’s 10KConcept 2 online logbook graphs for today’s 10K
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of three online sessions of 30 minutes each, followed by a warm down. There was only one warm down session and it was after the third of the three 30 minute sessions. That 3rd of 3 was the only one that needed a warm down. The first two 30 minute sessions were done at a very easy pace.
Today’s title was chosen after I noticed a comment made in the online rowing chat room, by one of the other rowers. I didn’t immediately see the comment, because as soon as the session was over, I typed the words “gotta warm down immediately, bye all”, clicked “Send”, snapped a screenshot and clicked the “Finish” button to exit. I know from recent experience that when I get the heart rate up very much with a sprint of any sort, I have to keep rowing in an immediate warm down or the heart will get wacky and either start beating too fast or go into skipping mode.
So I warmed down immediately and everything has been fine with the ticker.
But later, when I looked at the screenshot that was snapped just before I clicked the Finish button to exit the online session, I noticed that another rower had noticed how I’d sprinted a bit, near the finish. His words, “monster finish john” made me feel good, so I will try to remember to thank him for it the next time we’re online in the same session.
I started the final sprint when I noticed that the countdown screen showed around “40” and my brain had forgotten that the countdown for this session was time, not meters. So I increased the pace to around 1:45 and I looked, to watch as the meters counted down to 0 but … it only counted down to something in the 30s. The rational part of my mind was off in space somewhere and the part of brain connected to what I was seeing was just in a sort of automatic mode. That same part of my brain was mildly surprised that it hadn’t counted down to zero yet and I pulled harder, increasing the pace to about 1:40 and holding it at 1:40 while staring at the countdown, to see it go to zero. It should have decreased by about 10 per stroke, but it was only decreasing by about 2 per stroke. Then the rational part of my mind came back to join the audience looking out through my eyes at the monitor and I remembered that it was a timed session, not a distance session and that what I was looking at was seconds, not meters counting down.
So I thought… I don’t want to keep pulling at 1:40 for another twenty seconds, and eased back to a warm down effort level for the last few seconds.
You can see a picture of it in the session graph.
This blog post is categorized as both boring and fun, because the easy 30 minute sessions were boring but the hard 30 minutes was fun (and mentally absorbing). It is also categorized as both easy and hard, because of those same different effort levels.
Finish screen for the 3rd of today’s three 30 minute online sessions.Report for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.RowPro software graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Concept 2 online logbook graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Warm down graphsSummary listing of all of today’s rowing results.
The above image was among the very first results when a search for today’s blog post image was done using the search terms “sunday indoor rowing”. It is a photo on a Dublin (Ireland) High School website and the page includes the three words used in the search.
Today’s rowing should have been interesting and requiring a degree of mental focus, but instead it was boring and got almost no mental focus. It was a 10,000 meter distance that was scheduled online almost 3 hours before start time. But nobody who rows online noticed it or was able to join it at the scheduled time.
So I rowed it alone. Rowing alone doesn’t have to be boring, but other things on my mind, plus the subject matter of a documentary I chose to view while rowing… all seemed to have a summary effect of suppressing enjoyment of the rowing.
On the positive side, the distance was accomplished and heart rate was elevated slightly for almost an hour, which is a health benefit.
10K finish screenThis report is accurate with no software glitches. The unusually long Time recorded for Split # 11 is because the documentary I was viewing stalled. I had to troubleshoot the Apple TV and finally had to shut it down and restart it, to get the documentary to resume playing.You can see the interruption very clearly on the top graph, where the 11th split is listed.
The above photo has absolutely nothing to do with the indoor rowing session that I did today. It was the second image that Bing presented when I searched the web for images using the search terms, “raise the heart rate a little bit for a little while with indoor rowing” . The Microsoft (Bing) search engine found it on a website called The Lakeside Collection, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any kind of rowing.
That’s all today’s indoor rowing was about (what the title says). So I started out at a high enough effort level to raise HR above 133 for a while, then eased back. I was watching a documentary video which lasted about 90 minutes. After the documentary was over, I quit rowing. A grandiose total of 887 calories was burned… but who’s counting?
Today’s session was prematurely cancelled due to lateness and lack of enthusiasm. Several things that needed repairs around the house were repaired, earlier, with the help of a handyman so that was good.
The topic of viewing while trying to work up enthusiasm for rowing was a live view of Hermosa Beach, California, which is where the above screenshot was obtained.
Today was going to be another 10K in the zone of a 2:08/500 meter pace. I had a boring documentary to watch which wouldn’t (and didn’t) demand much of my mental focus, so I’d be able to give plenty of attention to the rowing, to maintain that pace.
But after sometime between 8 to 10 minutes, things didn’t feel right, so I slacked off. The boring documentary remained boring and the rowing session, once slowed down, became boring also. But I finished it, so as to be able to log all the meters and keep the daily average of meters rowed up in the target area.
Today there was no rowing plan except to keep making one easy stroke after the other until the pre-set distances counted down… while watching three videos which featured wild birds -such as doves and quail- feeding and interacting with each other.
If I’d chosen a music video to watch, or even a movie, I could have given a lot more mental focus to rowing and that would have resulted in a higher effort level. But it took almost all my focus to pay attention to what those birds were doing… and occasionally respond to a text message.
Happy rowing -where ever your mental focus – to you.
